David's Digest

John Sergeant does a one-man stand-up entertainment when he's not prancing around the dancefloor with Kristina Rihanoff, aka sex on legs. When I heard him at an NFU dinner he told how, after he retired from being the BBC's political correspondent, he had been invited to participate in a celebrity reality TV programme.

It sounded great, he said, in his gentle understated way. "They would fly me out to South Africa and they promised lots of time on golden beaches and they'd teach me to water ski. I was about to accept with enthusiasm but then I thought to ask the title of the programme. It was Celebrity Sharkbait. So I decided to gracefully decline."

That's the kind of self deprecating humour that has endeared the man to viewers and led them to vote for him despite his dreadful dancing. That and the fact that voting him off might mean they saw less of the gyrating and scantily clad Kristina, I suspect. Although I, of course, could make no further comment on that.

But noting the media furore over his dancing and the even bigger one over his resignation from the show it occurred to me how useful it would be to get that kind of publicity for farming. Could we, for instance, get Henry Plumb on the programme next time? He's got loads of anecdotes to entertain the viewers whether he can dance or not. Choose a partner with similar attributes to Kristina and he'd be well away. And I'm sure he could keep viewers on tenterhooks over whether or not he would stay the course.

Anyway, I leave the thought with the PR department of the NFU. I'm sure they'll take it seriously. Just don't make the mistake of getting Peter Kendall onto "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here".I don't think he'd enjoy kangaroo's testicles.