Dirty Diary

I now have a new-found respect for chickens' ability to clear weeds and rid farmyards of stink bugs, and I am in awe of the “powerhouse fertiliser” aspect of their “poop”. Thus inspired, I may even toddle along to the XXth World Veterinary Poultry Association Congress when it's held in Edinburgh in September. But I still haven't found what I'm really looking for with regard to chickens, namely some recognition of their important political function.

Now this seems odd, because for at least the last quarter of a century they have played a vital role in political discourse in the West. Last week, we had just one more demonstration of it when a chicken so large it looked like it might have had a tabloid reporter inside it paraded up and down outside Downing Street taunting Theresa May for her refusal to participate in a televised leaders' debate.

Chickens have been similarly deployed against David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. In the 2015 general election, Labour's campaign expenditure even included the sum of £577.58 for the hire of chicken suits. And they still managed to lose.

As with many trends, this fine political tradition comes to us from the United States and appears to have started during the 1992 presidential election when a Bill Clinton-supporting Democrat called Derrick Parker thought it would be hilarious to dress up as a chicken and confront Clinton's opponent, George Bush, at a hustings. And guess what? It was. In fact it was so hilarious that wherever Bush went, someone turned up dressed as a chicken. In every state, people would actually volunteer to do it.

The character became known as Chicken George and Bush would apparently respond by always finding it in the crowd, and telling it fish jokes. Which ones, history doesn't record though there can't be many to choose from. Hopefully Theresa May knows a few.

Give pizza chance

JUST when you thought it was safe to go back into the pizzeria, a new row has broken out about toppings. The prime minister of New Zealand, you may remember, kicked it off when he posted a picture of his tinned spaghetti pizza, causing a universal retching sound that could have been heard on Gibraltar-sized asteroid 2014 J025 had it swung by Earth a couple of weeks earlier than it did.

Then the Canadians weighed in with a defence of pineapple as a topping – I'll spare you the details – and now we have the Peepza. It's a pizza topped with Peeps, an American marshmallow delicacy. They sell it in American Fizz. The marshmallow, not the pizza. Nobody sells that. But a man called Austin Braun has cooked one and photographed it and, well, you know the rest.

Expect more from the pizza wars when the internet reaches peak fish joke.

Money, money, moaning

WAS it a brave decision on the part of Creative Scotland to deny funds to a film about Creation Records on the grounds that the project wasn't Scottish enough – or was it one of those officious, not-enough-boxes-ticked decisions that makes you despair of the oft-derided arts body?

For the film's director, Nick Moran, it was not the first of those options. “The movie couldn't be more Scottish,” he said last week. “The script is written by Edinburgh's most famous writer, it's all about Scotland's most successful record entrepreneur who gave the world two of Scotland's most successful bands, and it stars Ewen Bremner.”

In case you're struggling to decode all that, the script is by Irvine Welsh and the “entrepreneur” in question is Alan McGee, the Glaswegian boss of Creation Records. The two bands referred to are Primal Scream (probably) and The Jesus And Mary Chain (maybe), though fans of 1980s Aberdeen quartet The Jasmine Minks may argue otherwise. Ewen Bremner, of course, is the Scottish actor who played Spud in Trainspotting and is scheduled to play McGee, who famously signed Oasis to Creation Records after seeing them play at Glasgow's King Tut's Wah Wah Hut.

On the other hand, Moran is English. So are the four producers attached to the project. Welsh, meanwhile, has lived in Chicago since 2009 and before that was resident in Dublin. He does come back to Scotland for the odd Hibs game, though clearly that isn't good enough for Creative Scotland.

Faced with such bureaucratic obduracy, perhaps he should just pay for the film himself. He could probably afford to: he told the Daily Telegraph in 2015 that his flat in Chicago is worth £2 million, that he's no stranger to £500,000 royalty cheques and has a real estate portfolio which includes a place in Miami, a “nice” flat in Edinburgh and “a few rental properties”.

Or maybe he and Nick Moran should enlist the help of former Hollywood A-lister Richard Gere, who claims he can't get films made because they're not Chinese enough – or rather he isn't. A tireless critic of the Chinese occupation of Tibet since his 1993 Oscar speech denouncing the “horrendous human rights situation” both there and in China, Gere called for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and told the Hollywood Reporter last week that because of the increasing Chinese influence in Tinsel Town, he was now losing jobs. So it's win-win – Moran and Welsh need money, Gere has some and needs work. Besides, the 67-year-old vegan Buddhist would make a great Bobby Gillespie.

Pearls of wizened folks

DESPITE a suspicion – generally borne out by evidence – that it's old people who are to blame for Brexit, the Tory majority at Westminster, the continuing popularity of Mrs Brown's Boys and queues in post offices, some bright spark at the BBC World Service has come up with #GrannyWisdom, a programme in which YouTube stars and vloggers sit down for a cuppa with their grandmothers and learn about life. One such is Hannah Witton, who spoke to Granny Fanny (as she calls her grandmother). “One piece of advice? Go for it. Have fun,” said Fanny. Fair enough, though I could have got that out of a cracker.

Of course it is possible that all YouTube stars and vloggers have cool grannies who grow their own weed, live on canal boats, don't read the Daily Mail or vote Ukip and therefore do dispense cool wisdom. But I doubt it. In the event that I'm right, hopefully this will be the end of the series. If not, I dread to think what #CabbieWisdom or #WhiteVanManWisdom or #GuyDressedInChickenSuitWisdom will throw up.