A neighbour bought this silly cuckoo clock.

Decorated with badly-carved animals, it chimes at five to and twenty-five past the hour, loses seven minutes a day and finishes its routine with a comic rasping sound.

I think she paid £70 for it. But you can’t put a value on this kind of comedy.

Bea Arthur, who starred in the US television sitcom The Golden Girls has died of cancer at the age of 86.

As well as winning an Emmy for The Golden Girls and an earlier sitcom Maude, Bea Arthur won a Tony for the musical Mame.

In Britain The Golden Girls was something of a gay cult in the late 1980′s, when it was shown by Channel 4 and, in October 1988, the cast appeared on the Royal Variety Show at the request of the Queen Mother.

‘An ancestor of Monty Python’s famous Dead Parrot comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century…

[The ancient gags] have been published into a multimedia online e-book, which features video of veteran comic Jim Bowen bringing the old jokes back to life in front of a 21st Century audience.’

BBC

One of the old jokes:

‘Someone needled a well-known wit: “I had your wife, without paying a penny”. He replied: “It’s my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?”‘

A sequence from the rarely-seen 1960′s British comedy Smashing Time, starring Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham.

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