John Walsh Column

Widdecombe's choice - should go down a bomb

Sorry, sorry, sorry. My profuse apologies. God, I'm sorry. Words cannot describe how prostrate, how wretched, how remorseful I am. Indeed, I am exhausted with saying sorry. For the last three weeks I have been taken to task by what seems like thousands of people demanding apologies for the most extraordinary things.

The other day I was talking on the radio about the history of book illustration (about which I am, of course, an internationally renowned expert and genius). I interviewed artists, agents, picture commissioning editors. Lots of exciting and controversial points were made about lithograph and woodcut technology. But do you know the only thing listeners responded to? They wrote to complain that I had repeatedly pronounced the word "ill-yew-stration" rather than "ill-uss-tration". Scores of phone calls to the Duty Officer jeered at "this fake-Edwardian affectation", as one apoplectic caller put it. "Ill-yew-stration, eh?" sneered another. "Aren't we grand? Ooh lah-di-dah, hark at Mr Toffee-Nose ..." Reeling from this onslaught, I then wrote a mild and appreciative piece about the new Department of National Heritage, in which I said Tony Banks, the Minister of Sport, was turning, a bit effortfully, into a yob to fit his new status. Being myself a globally respected connoisseur of the game, I said knowingly that Banks, in his beer-swilling, laddish way, "comes on like a prospective editor of When Saturday Comes", the soccer magazine. Hardly was the ink dry on the newsprint before the editor of When Saturday Comes was on the blower. Look here, he said, I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. I am not a yob. Our readers are not Rolling Rock-swilling hooligans. They are, au contraire, mostly fellows of All Souls, theology students, rocket scientists and designers of chess computers, with a smattering of trendy novelists among them. Apologise at once ... And of course he was right, and I do. To get away from all this apologising, I flew to Monte Carlo to write about the grand prix (I am also, it goes without saying, a transcontinentally acclaimed commentator on Formula One racing) for this paper. I reported on the sound, the sights, the people, the food, the sponsors, the Eurobabes, and finally the cars. I mentioned the striking lines of Frantzen's car, a ... what was it? A Renault? No name appeared on its handsome tin side. Back at the hotel I flicked through Chequered Flag magazine and there, in brackets, after Frantzen's name, was "(Sauber)". Unfortunately, I was looking at the placings for last year's grand prix. Two seconds after the resulting article was published, a distant rumble could be heard and several thousand letters of crushing and satirical intent came flooding in from car buffs all over the known world. Once again I stood revealed as the last word in ignorance, the essence of dim, Mr Sorry in person. It's a good job I took out the paragraph questioning the legality of the bald tyres on Schumacher's Ferrari ...

Ann Widdecombe, a woman clearly surprised to find large numbers of people prepared to like her for possibly the first time in her life, is going on Radio 4 in July. She will appear as a guest on A Good Read, the book programme devised by the late Edward Blishen. And what will she be choosing as her favourite piece of non-fiction? Why, Antonia Fraser's colourful narrative history The Gunpowder Plot. An interesting, if puzzling, choice. Why Ms Widdecombe should enjoy reading about a fanatical Catholic convert who plants an enormous bomb under a lot of corrupt and complacent politicians is anyone's guess.

Congratulations to Kathy Burke, who won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. She got it, of course, for her role as the mother in Gary Oldman's film, Nil by Mouth. But did it strike anyone else how poignant it was that the prize was presented by Hugh Grant, for whom the title of Ms Burke's film must hold an amusing resonance?

My spies in the nation's playgrounds report that nothing like it has been seen since the days of Cabbage Patch dolls. (Remember those odious, pudding-eyed little people that children could buy complete with individual birth certificate, national insurance number and medical records?) The new hot property in Toyland is infinitely worse. Stand by for the appearance in your home of a Tamagotchi, the "virtual pet" whose name translates revoltingly as "lovable egg". It takes the form of a key-ring with a screen on which you watch, with horror, as a little blob is born, grows, gets bigger and demands attention. From the moment the little beast is born, the Tamagotchi owner is responsible for its health and welfare. It bleeps when it needs attention or when it's hungry (you feed it by pressing buttons). You have to wash it and change it and clean it up. It interrupts whatever you're doing with demands that you play with it. It gradually develops features, arms, legs and hair, as a sign that you're looking after it properly. Sometimes it will decide to be naughty and shake its little alien head from side to side, like a Bombay taxi driver, when you're trying to feed it. Then you have to discipline it, despite the practical problems of administering a clip round the ear to an LCD screen. If it's well fed, four little black hearts appear on the screen. At night, you have to turn its light off at 9pm or it won't be able to sleep. And it bleeps you awake at nine in the morning like a toddler, demanding virtual Cheerios. And here's the really attractive proposition - if it's neglected, it dies, and a little screen angel flaps heavenwards. All the pets die, in fact, after 30 days; the trick is to see how long you can keep one going, fed, watered, happy and disciplined before it snuffs it. And you then hatch out another one, as if life and death were no more than an assembly line. It's a bit of a learning curve for today's 10-year-old, although it tells you more about the eternal verities than the Spice Girls video.

At present, you can't buy one (recommended retail price pounds 10; current price in the shops about pounds 14) in London. Launched last week, the emetic little things are flooding out of Hamley's and Toys R Us like a stampede of bolting shoplifters. Last Friday, an unadvertised consignment of 1,000 Tamagotchis sold out in three hours (one per customer, maximum). Japanese businessmen in London, I'm told, go mad for them, especially the comparatively rare white ones, after a Tokyo pop star was seen on television chatting in a parental kind of way to his white-encased blob. According to my sources here, both sentimentally disposed 11-year-old girls and gruff, burly, rugby-playing 15-year-old boys are alike fixated by these noisome homunculi. "They're terribly addictive," insists a woman friend. "I worry about mine all the time." Why? "I've developed a fixation that, if I neglect it, it'll do a poo in my handbag."