ONE of the best shows I have ever seen at the Edinburgh Festival is Paul Merton's Silent Clowns, which opened again on Friday, celebrating the pioneers of film comedy. Not that I've seen this year's show yet. I've been too busy watching soaring repossessions, tumbling house prices and various knockabout clowns going about their daily work.
I've seen the show in previous Festivals, though, and loved the old reels of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, as well as those all-time greats Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.
Merton says great gags stay with us for life
, and certainly Chaplin's banana sketch, in which he jumps over the skin to disappear down a manhole he hasn't seen on the other side, strikes a chord with most of us.
Once the talkies came along, Oliver Hardy's famous catchphrase, "don't just sit there, do something" entered the English language. In response, Stan would embark on some harebrained scheme which made matters worse, resulting in his equally famous cry, "I'm sorry, Ollie."
Remind you of anything? Can't you just see the slightly shorter and rounder member of that team we laughingly call a Government reading the latest dire poll and turning to the tall skinny one and saying: "Don't just sit there, do something."
So, in an attempt to win the populist vote by holding out hopes of measures to help property, Chancellor Alistair Darling hinted he may in the future scrap stamp duty, thereby killing the housing market stone dead. You'd think the restriction of tax relief on property which triggered the Lawson boom would have taught him the folly of announcing any significant change to the housing market in advance of actually doing the deed.
Estate agents everywhere were apoplectic, after the few sales they had going through immediately collapsed. They could have borrowed another famous Laurel quote: "Upset? I'm housebroken!"
Meanwhile, tax experts poured scorn on any prospect of his finding the £7bn needed for such a move.
But to be fair to the Chancellor, short of a cut in interest rates, which is out of his hands and seems off the cards given current inflation, his options for doing anything other than watching house prices disappear down that manhole, followed, just like Chaplin, by himself and his Prime Minister, are limited.
It is true, when the Tories tried the same trick during the last housing slump, it had little impact. But their stamp duty holiday came much later in the cycle, by which time 1,500 families were losing their homes each week. Few first-time buyers were caught by the dreaded tax, and those who were paid much less than the £20,000 or £30,000 now due on family homes.
So, unlike many other commentators, I believe scrapping stamp duty altogether would pump life back into the market. But somehow I can't see it happening. Some adjustment to the current regime at the time of the Pre-Budget Report in the autumn seems a reasonable bet, given how far the Treasury has now stuck its neck out.
Delaying it won't be enough. But they could scrap it for first-time buyers, along the lines of the Tories' current proposals, and play with the other bands to ease the burden lower down the ladder while clawing back more from property millionaires.
We don't know what the SNP would do, largely because it is decided exclusively at Westminster. Shame really, because then I could have dragged out the old Ginger Rogers gag about how Ginger did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. Not that Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have that much in common with Fred and Ginger; more Jack Lemmon and Ginger I should have said. Apparently they did appear together on occasions. But not, I think, in the film of The Odd Couple.
Investment a bad betGAMBLING is a mug's game, we usually say, but investing in an unauthorised betting syndicate must be the zenith of stupidity. 147 Racing Limited and Top Bet Placement Services lured customers in with mailshots featuring snooker stars John Parrott and Peter Ebdon offering them the chance to "invest" in horse racing. You paid a £500 joining fee and then a further monthly fee of initially £97, rising to £477 by the end of the first year.
Those who signed up were promised their investment would increase tenfold each year. Needless to say, they were disappointed.
City watchdogs managed to shut them down and return £100,000 to punters.
A further £58,745 has been recovered by York Crown Court after director Gary Woodward was jailed for three years for lying about the value of his assets.
The Financial Services Authority now has the task of dividing its 'winnings' between those who well and truly backed a loser.
The full article contains 815 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
