Herald on Sunday diary: dope tests, mascot trials and radiation sickos ... or how about something Myles better?

According to the latest figures for the first three months of this year from UKAD, the anti-doping authority, there were just 16 Scottish players tested in competition. If the concentration was on the Premiership, which it almost certainly was, then that spanned at least 60 games involving more than 1,440 players (counting in one substitution per team) which, by my rudimentary maths, means the chance of even being tested was about one in 100, never mind getting caught.

Of course the testing programme is meant to cover all four divisions, or 42 teams, but I doubt if the testers turn up on a wet Wednesday in Brechin, so I’ve kept the analysis to our top league, otherwise there would be considerably more chance of being hit by lightning than caught out.

By contrast, in England a player in the Premier League can expect to be tested four times over the season, in the Championship marginally less. The four English leagues comprise 92 teams, with Scottish numbers at just under half that. For the quarter in England there were 217 in-competition tests, so a Scottish equivalent should have been around 100 ... six times the actual number.

The drug authorities stress another key to catching out cheats is out-of-competition testing. In Scotland there were just 18, in England 405. But don’t imagine that the testers turn up at the door without warning at ungodly hours, as they do in athletics and tennis for instance. No, ours are done at training sessions and there is anecdotal evidence that testers’ targets are sometimes leaked in advance.

Overall there were 622 tests carried out and paid for by the English FA in the quarter, 4,436 in the year, whereas in Scotland, for the SFA, the comparable totals were 34, and just 160. So the FA’s testing is more than 10 times the rate of ours.

I’ve heard a range of excuses from the SFA, such as it’s too expensive, drugs don’t improve footballers’ performance and, equally risible, there’s no evidence of cheating. No excrement Sherlock!

I asked UKAD if they believed that the SFA was carrying out adequate testing. Interpreting a rather circuitous response from the organisation, it’s the case that there is a basic public interest and intelligence-led programme, but the FA provides additional funds for a premium service, whereas it is clear the SFA does not, and this accounts for the yawning disparity.

Mascot or mas-not

The place is hoachin’ with World Cups. Today, at the O2 in London, the Fifa eWorld Cup concludes with the football game winner netting just over £200,000. Of course, Scotland isn’t represented. We stand a better chance – or at least did at the time of writing – at the World Cup of Football Mascots where, in the semi-final, Partick Thistle’s Kingsley was holding a slender lead over Super Pepino, from Spain’s Leganés. The contestants don’t actually compete on a field, but in the ether. It’s done by votes.

It seems like football clubs are competing to come up with the most naff and excruciating mascot. In the other semi-final is West Bromwich’s Boiler Man who is, yes, a combi with legs. It’s a sponsorship deal. On Friday Wigan unveiled their new, half-baked one, Crusty the Pie. Not that we’ve got anything to be superior about. Forfar’s is a giant bridie.

Very crafty

People think Boris Johnson is an eccentric buffoon who thinks with his mouth, but he’s a lot more sophisticated and devious than that, with the rumpled suits, tousled hair, stuttering delivery and arm waving just part of the act. Take his bizarre, and apparently rambling, answer to a radio interviewer recently when he was asked how he relaxed. He made models of London buses, he replied, from old crates and wine boxes, with painted-on happy people. The assumption was that he was making it up, that he was caught out and was just uttering the first thing that came into his head. But perhaps not.

Prior to this anyone going to Google and entering “Boris bus” would have been inundated with items about how he promised £350 million to the NHS after Brexit, photographed as he stood in front of a red bus with that slogan “we send the EU £350m a week” on the side. And his failed attempt to reintroduce the Routemaster bus to London.

But after his “confession”, lo and behold, most of the unfavourable stuff had been pushed well down the pecking order by Boris’s alleged hobby. It’s called SOE, or search engine optimisation, and it’s just the kind of wheeze Dominic Cummings, architect of Vote Leave, would have come up with. He hadn’t officially started as Boris’s senior adviser then, but there is the phone and email.

A million Myles

I’ve been binge-watching Keeping Faith, the second series of which is on BBC1. Forget the plot, it’s unmissable simply for the actor who plays the lead, Faith, Eve Myles. Her performance is electric, mesmerising, utterly convincing, with the complete emotional range, from joy – although there’s not a lot of it – to sadness, anger and boredom, there’s even a dash of fisticuffs from her as well. Myles is a boxing fan, and displays great technique, but she gave up participating when she broke a knuckle punching a wet sandbag, rather than an errant husband. I can’t remember seeing such a brave and bravura turn from an actress in, well, ever.

Credit, too, to the producer, director and co-writer Pip Broughton for the casting, everyone in the show is top notch. She comes from a theatre background and in the series uses lots of close-ups of the characters’ faces and emotions, so there’s not much room for wooden acting. What is also unusual is that children in it aren’t just props, passed off to suit the plot, but central to Faith’s life, so family is at the heart, and heartache, of it. The show is scripted, but there are no rehearsals, with the actors pitched straight in to capture spontaneity.

I looked up the 41-year-old’s CV, she’s been in Doctor Who and Torchwood – but which actor hasn’t? – but in productions mainly down the cast order. Not anymore. A couple of caveats. The villain has had a head transplant between series. And Faith has dodgy taste in men.

X-ray specs

Until the mid-1970s it was common in shoe shops to test fittings by sticking your feet into an X-ray contraption called a fluoroscope, so you could look down the long tube to see if the skeletal bones in your feet had enough wiggle room. It wasn’t as if the dangers of radioactivity weren’t known, but after the sicknesses and cancers emerged in those who had witnessed, close-up, the atomic bomb tests in the 1950, use of the Pedoscope was banned. Today we may have warped feet but at least we don’t rattle.

It was Marie Curie and her husband Pierre who coined the word “radioactive”. Marie was quite cavalier about handling the sources, stuffing bottles of polonium and radium into her coats and jackets. If you want to see her papers – even her cookbooks – at France's Bibliotheque National you have to get into moon suit and sign a waiver before you can open the lead lined boxes storing them. In 1903 Pierre tied a chunk of radium to his arm and, noting the resultant burn, concluded he had discovered a cure for cancer.

Manufactures then stuffed their products with radioactive thorium and advertised the supposed health benefits. Radium bath salts claimed to treat insomnia. Pots and jugs lined with radon and uranium were prescribed for flatulence.

Of course, we don’t believe this nonsense nowadays. Well, not quite. Thousands of people each year, from around the world, travel to four former uranium mines in Montana to pay to sit in radioactive mine shafts, believing that being exposed to radon gas can cure their ailments, or at least mitigate pain. The theory is that exposure to low-dose radiation, while it damages cells, prompts compensatory processes that stimulate repair, decrease free radicals, and activate proteins that prevent inflammation. No, I don’t know what that means either.

In the centre of it all is Butte, Montana – with its wonderfully-named bar called Pisser’s – a town of 30,000 people built on a honeycomb of old copper mines, and probably the most radioactive populated place in world, with radon gas leaking into homes. Many of the old houses are built from bricks made from phosphate slag, large portions of the town are paved with it. No surprise the lung cancer rate is getting on for double the national average.