Dirty Diary

Even better, none of the programming will be in Gaelic, making it more likely to appeal to the 99 per cent of the population who don't know their tòin from their uilinn and don't want to watch old Celtic Connections sessions on a loop on BBC Alba, currently Scotland's only other dedicated channel.

It's a boon, too, for Scotland's programme makers. But as one of them pointed out on the wireless last week, Amazon Prime's Top Gear re-boot The Grand Tour is reported to cost up to £4 million an episode. If that's the going rate for decent telly then budgets are going to be tighter than the polo-shirt stretched over Jeremy Clarkson's belly.

More worrying for the programme-makers, some of the funding will clearly need to go towards solving the problem of mumbling because once again the issue of viewers not being able to make out what actors are saying in heavily-trailed and doubtless very expensive TV dramas has raised its head. It started in 2014 with the BBC's Jamaica Inn adaptation, you may remember. More recent complaints centred on Tom Hardy's sotto voce performance in Taboo. Now it's what-if? historical re-write SS-GB that's in the firing line, in particular, star Sam Riley. Audiophiles are blaming the current generation of TVs, but BBC technicians have crisped up the dialogue for tonight's second episode, which looks like an admission of guilt to me.

So to avoid similar complaints when our wonderful new Scottish TV channel takes to the airwaves, a Mumbling Compliance Department is definitely required – properly resourced of course (toastie machine, dart board, lots of coloured marker pens) and with an office cat supplied so nobody can say it's toothless as all the other oversight organisations.

Stone the crows!

IF seeing Jeremy Clarkson's torso in a too-tight polo shirt makes you yearn for a Star Wars-style memory wipe so you can erase the experience from your life then you probably wouldn't want to win an 8ft high fibreglass model of his head to put in your front garden. But 15-year-old Zohaib Alam is made of sterner stuff and, courageous hombre that he is, entered a competition to win just such an item.

You had to tweet a picture of your lawn/monoblocked front yard and then just hope for the best. Or the worst, depending on how much you wanted an 8ft high fibreglass Clarkson scaring birds, children, pets and passing motorists outside your home, in Alam's case one of a row of red-brick dwellings in a quiet street in Swinton, Greater Manchester. That's quite near Salford, by the way, a district the flesh and blood and red wine Clarkson once dismissed as “a small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks on it” (as opposed to the hip, bustling metropolis in which he has his family home: Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds).

“It looks quite scary when you walk up every morning and look at it,” Alam admitted to the Manchester Evening News when they sent a reporter to ask WTF? “The truck had to block the road for 30 minutes just to unload … There were a few cars behind it and they were angry about it.”

Funny that.

Justice and pies

MANY a goalkeeper has been forced to eat humble pie for letting the ball slip between his legs, or after shanking a clearance into his own net. None I know of has ever had to do it because he willingly scoffed an actual pie while not even on the field of play. Poor Wayne Shaw has.

On Monday night, Shaw was on the bench for Sutton United, a team in the fifth tier of English football whose claim to fame is having once beaten the mighty Coventry City. Eight minutes from time in a game Sutton United were losing, Shaw ate a pie. It's hard to tell from the footage, but it looks like some kind of pasty, filled with that same hot, wet, grey, greasy matter familiar to anyone who has ever queued for “food” at a football match. Big deal.

But it's the fact there is footage which has caused the 46-year-old so much bother ever since: Sutton United were playing Premier League thoroughbreds Arsenal in the FA Cup at the time, the game was live on BBC One and the bookies were taking bets on whether 23-stone Shaw – known affectionately as the Roly Poly Goalie – would eat a pie on camera during the match.

They were only offering 8/1 but still a five-figure sum was paid out. The FA and the Gambling Commission are now investigating and Wayne Shaw has had to resign – for the sin of eating a pie live on television. “So Wayne Shaw, who slept on a sofa 3 nights a week at Sutton to maintain and run the place loses his job over #piegate. FFS!” tweeted Gary Lineker, summing up the feelings of most football fans. “Day by day football is losing its heart and its sense of humour.”

Still, help is at hand beyond celebrity endorsements from the only man to present Match Of The Day in his underwear: a petition has been launched on change.org calling for Shaw's re-instatement to the subs' bench. At the time of writing it had gathered over 7,000 signatures, far more than the usual Sutton United home gate.

Rehome a gnome

IT'S strange what people will steal. My local Spar used to always keep jars of instant coffee and packs of razor blades under lock and key because they were favourites with shoplifters due to the ease with which they could be sold or traded (I know this because I once asked). Steak is another item popular with thieves. Likewise pot plants and shrubs, manhole covers (for the iron) and catalytic converters (for the platinum, rhodium and palladium they contain). In 2014, Time magazine's online site published a list of some other odd favourites, such as Nutella, maple syrup, and pregnancy testing kits.

But police in New Zealand's North Island have found an even weirder addition to the thieves' hit list: garden gnomes, stolen (apparently) to pay for drugs. Police found 300 when they raided a methamphetamine lab, along with an ornamental pink flamingo.

“It seems to be the fashion at the moment,” said police sergeant Cam Donnison. “They are taking these items to hock off for methamphetamine. It's all meth-driven.”

How long then before an 8ft fibreglass likeness of Jeremy Clarkson's noggin crops up for sale in a pub car park somewhere?