John Gibson: It’s beyond the pail for Oor Wullie

Michty me, marmalade consumption has slumped dramatically, from 36 per cent of families who spread it on their breakfast toast 40 years ago to a mere seven per cent today!

So say the retail analysts but I suspect this could be a fiendish plot to fuel a marmalade versus marmite war.

The nectar was long-produced in Dundee under the Golden Shred and Rose’s labels. Dundee’s Oor Wullie’s home town and Wullie invariably insisted on marmalade spread thick on his toast for brekkers. He’d wolf down buckets of the stuff.

No point in it

Bothers and sisters, I have a dream. Correction. I have a nightmare. And it’s recurring. There’s nothing you can take for it on the NHS either.

I keep waking in the middle of the night with Pointless presenters Alexander Armstrong and Richard Oman banging on my door with what Pointless BBC teatime quiz show losers get to take home, a compensatory Pointless trophy.

Where do you tell them to stick it? On the sideboard? Down the pan? The snag there is that it won’t flush away.

Brothers and sisters, the bad dream comes true when, in reality, endlessly the Beeb keep screening this substitute for Children’s Hour.

Afterwords . .

. . . While we’re all gabbing about the Olympics and marathons (bored out of our skulls with the Coe caboodle, to be truthful), it’s worth running a few lines on Emil Zatopek, a true Olympian, winner of four Olympic golds: “If you want to win something, run the 100 metres. If you want to experience something, run a marathon.”

Confession – I’ve asked Lord Coe to fix me up with tickets for the volleyball.