Dear Alice,

What do you do when (due to the powers-that-be being mad enough to use infant schools as polling stations) you have not done your column in time for Friday?

Alice

Peter Snow: Now that is EXACTLY what Labour would NOT have been expecting!!!!!!!!!! If you will kindly note the little chess pegs here, EACH ONE represents a column that Alice did ON TIME during the last two years. But NOW, with the ROT setting in, notice how the little chess pegs IN THE FUTURE will probably look like THIS (JUMPING DEMONICALLY UP AND DOWN TO ENCOURAGE THE COMPUTERISED PEGS TO FLEE TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GRAPH). I don't think it's POSSIBLE to OVERSTATE the IMPORTANCE of making obvious statements in really EXCITED TONES just so any dozy watchers have ZERO (that is, NIL) chance of FALLING ASLEEP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dimbleburger: Thanks Peter, and I will now do a little jig with my feet just to prove that, ice-cool as I seem, I am actually very excited about all this/past my bedtime/overdosed on Pro-Plus caffeine tablets. Jeremy, who have you got for us to discuss this fascinating new development?

Paxperson: (LEANING OVER ALMOST HORIZONTALLY, IN ORDER TO PROVE HOW COMPLETELY BORED HE IS) Right, well here I have a has-been politician desperate to improve his after-dinner speech fees, an editor who has written nice things about Newsnight in various publications and someone you have absolutely no chance of ever having seen or heard of to whom I owe money. What do you all make of that?

Politician: I think this conclusively proves that first past the post is dead/ sometime over the next four years -- say, three at the outside -- Gordon Brown will be taking over/there's no business like show business.

Paxperson: I never heard anything so idiotic. What about the rest of you people not earning as much as me?

Editor: An amusing thing once happened to me in Orpington.

Mystery Person: I went past the exit on the motorway once. Shocking bad signing.

Dimbleburger: Sorry to interrupt but we have to interrupt in order to show the audience a picture of Tony Blair's five cars going down a road! Archie, what can you tell us?

Archie: I can tell you that the pictures you're getting show Tony Blair's five cars going down a road.

Dimbleburger: And are you getting an upbeat feeling or a grim feeling from the way the Prime Minister's car is hugging the road?

Archie: A bit too early to say, though the headlights -- from where I'm standing -- look a bit dim and depressed to me.

Dimbleburger: Sorry to interrupt -- fascinating stuff, Archie -- but we're getting an incredibly predictable result from a grimy northern town hall. Blonde floozie with fetching northern accent, are you there?

Blonde floozie with fetching northern accent: I am, David, and the acting returning just-finished-his-fag-and-his-hands-are-shaking officer is just about to give us the results from Todley-in-the-mire-west. That's him in the bizarre outfit in the centre of the dusty school hall stage.

Acting Returning Officer: Here are the results of the general election of May 5th in this year of 2005 in the constituency of Todley-in-the-mire-west, near Doncaster, north-north-east of Staffordshire, in the upper right quadrant of England, the British Isles, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, earth, the solar system, ninth star to the right and keep on till morning. (GOES ON FOR NINETY-FIVE HOURS.)

Dimbleburger (IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS, UNAWARE THAT HIS MIKE IS STILL ON): Eh? Yes? Oh righto then.

(EVERYBODY FALLS ASLEEP)