“Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.” Can you still say that in Jack And The Beanstalk, or is there a politically correct alternative featuring another ethnic majority?

I’ll find that out next Sunday when I tune in to the virtual pantomime being streamed by Hamilton Academical, the proceeds of which are going to three local charities.

The man behind it – “Oh no he isn’t!” – is the club’s CEO Colin McGowan. Accies may be languishing on the field but it would be difficult to find one trying to get closer to its community, although I have to say this is hardly reciprocated. The average crowd is less than 3,000 – and that includes the two or three usual visits from both Celtic and Rangers, the teams that most locals seem to prefer to support rather than their own.

The three charities to benefit are Blameless – based at the Accies ground, dealing with young people affected by alcohol or addiction – Go Kids Performing Arts Academy, and the Accies’ own community trust.

I can also reveal – hold the back pages – that there will be cameo performances by Celtic captain Scott Brown (I fear for the Giant) and Rangers’ skipper James Tavernier. Tav has scored 16 goals this season, just three less than the entire Accies squad, which was cruel of me to mention, but they did beat my Kilmarnock last weekend. Oh, and there’s also a brief one from George Galloway, although as it’s not Dick Whittington he won’t be playing the cat. Ticket price is £10 and it all kicks off at 3pm next Sunday. Find it at https://www.pantolive2020.co.uk/events.

Memorial for Stuart

MY lifelong friend Stuart Christie died in August. I spoke at his funeral, in one of those Covid-abbreviated ones. It was moving and memorable but inspiring, as was the wake afterwards. Stuart was funny, learned, self-deprecating and the truest pal you could have. He was also the most implacable opponent of tyranny and fascism. I committed to the idea that there should be a lasting memorial of some sort to him. Together with his daughter Branwen, my chums Duncan Campbell (who put solidity to it) and Pauline Melville, there is going to be a memorial room and library at the MayDay Rooms in Fleet Street in London. We’ll be crowdfunding for it shortly.

Cheesy negotiations

LET’S talk cheese. The chairman of Tesco has warned that if there is no EU trade deal the price of Brie, zut alors, could rise by as much as 40 per cent and we will be forced to switch to Cheddar. The London School of Economics has gone further, estimating that some speciality cheeses such as halloumi and Roquefort could be 55% more expensive.

What hardship, eh? Brie, like alcopops for those that don’t like the taste of alcohol, is for those with no taste for cheese. Cheddar is infinitely superior, particularly extra mature, and there is a range of indigenous cheeses at least the measure of Roquefort, like Stilton and Dunsyre Blue.

I am no kind of turophile (I looked it up). I was probably past puberty when I found out that cheese didn’t just come in tinfoil-wrapped triangles. I will happily experiment with other local cheeses too, if there is no deal, although I am stockpiling Parmesan just in case.

It’s the same with fish. None of us eat as much of it as we should and come January 1, if we’re out on our uppers, it will be a patriotic duty for each of us to eat at least twice as much, and of a greater variety than the two staples, cod and haddock, to keep our fishing communities alive and boats at sea. I bought fish at the supermarket the other week and looked at the label – it had come from Vietnam! When? Possibly when Ho Chi Minh was around for all I know.

Let them eat Cheddar

MORE than 50 years ago, when Harold Wilson’s Labour Party (younger readers may refer to a historical almanac to discover exactly what that entity is) was in power, a campaign was launched called I’m Backing Britain. It kicked off when five secretaries in Surbiton offered to work a half-hour longer for free to save the country, then in another of our regular post-war doldrums.

It descended into farce, of course, not helped by a Bruce Forsyth record and the discovery that the T-shirts with the Union Jack logo and the slogan were made in Portugal because they were cheaper and of better quality than anything we could come up with.

In that summer of 1968, while there were student protests flaring all over the world and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy died by assassins’ bullets, filming began on Carry On Up The Khyber, another dose of unfunny and marginally racist stupidity.

But it may well have provided the perfect coda to the campaign, when the raising of a flag with the I’m Backing Britain slogan was greeted with the words: “Of course, they’re all raving mad you know.”

Today is meant to be the day when the final, final deadline is reached on whether there will be a trade deal or not. There has been so much brinkmanship these last months my hunch is that this one will pass and the two parties will move to another cliff edge for the next one, right up to Hogmanay and the plunge. If not, we need another campaign and slogan. How about: Let Them Eat Cheddar.

Funny, not funny

IS there an English sense of humour? Scottish? Regional?

Certainly, English comedians didn’t go down well on the stage of the old Glasgow Empire. It was where they went to die. Des O’Connor did a fair impression of that – when his act was going down in total silence he pretended to faint and was dragged off stage, the soles of his shoes saying goodbye through the safety curtain.

Mike and Bernie Winters were supposedly a comedy act and when Mike went on stage alone there was the same numbing silence. But when Bernie walked out it was broken by a voice from the stalls shouting, “Oh for f***’s sake, there’s two of them!”

My wife was English and at Christmastime my in-laws, and there were many of them, would gather round the TV to roar at Carry On films. I didn’t get it. Many years back one of them gave me a present – the complete ‘Allo ‘Allo collection. There are 85 episodes! It remains in its cellophane, unopened on a bookshelf.

I have, of course, seen bits of ‘Allo ‘Allo but laughing over a fat man with a music hall French accent, making hoary one-liners and saying “you stupid woman” repeatedly makes me titter not. A cod Gestapo officer rephrasing the Hokey Cokey with “ahh Himmler, Himmler, Himmler” when the real-life model was the main architect of the Holocaust isn’t challenging or avant garde, it’s downright disgusting.

On Thursday evening, I was flicking through old Carry Ons, looking for the one funny one I can remember (or perhaps imagined?) with Barbara Windsor lying face down on a hospital gurney with a daffodil as a rectal thermometer, when news of her death came through. She went on to campaign for Alzheimer’s support even as she was suffering from it. Quite a woman.

I hope there are some daffodils at her funeral.