Missing Maggie

In the old days, we learnt, the Foreign Office’s mandarins were prone to the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’ — the mistaken assumption that, just because they thought with the nice sophistication of chaps who’d been to Winchester, so the thugs they were negotiating with did, too. That’s why top-notch foreign secretaries like Margaret Beckett and David Miliband were brought in: to get rid of all that clever, educated nonsense and replace it with something more forward-looking and modern and relevant. Apparently, the first thing Miliband did on taking office was to send out a pack to all our embassies containing a booklet of stickers of uplifting messages (‘Well done!’ ‘Good job!’ ‘You’re a star!’) with which to encourage staff. What a pity General Gordon didn’t have such resources available at Khartoum. It might have made all the difference.

Skippy: Australia’s First Superstar (BBC4, Tuesday) was more unfeasibly fascinating than a documentary about a rubbishy late-Sixties kids TV series about an implausibly intelligent marsupial has any right to be.

Unlike dolphins — the series was, of course, an Aussie rip-off of Flipper — kangaroos are quite incredibly thick. Even dumber than sheep, according to a kangaroo expert on the programme, and certainly quite incapable of being trained. To get round this problem, Skippy was kept in a hessian sack until she was needed. Then, dazed and confused, she (you can tell because only females have pouches) would be released in front of the camera, and encouraged to look in the right direction by members of the crew noisily banging pots and pans off-camera. Often Skippy would bounce off never to be seen again, so lots of extra Skippies had to be kept in sacks just in case.