It's nearly time for the annual Comic Relief fund-raising day and there is an offshoot of the organisation called Sport Relief in which, as you might expect, athletes do daft things for charity.
Presumably someone somewhere realised that half the population in the UK doesn't give a toss about Great Bake-Off competitors hurling cake mix at each other, but will watch a footballer do just about anything - and so, Sport Relief was created, to extract money from blokes.
And this year, Sir Bradley Wiggins (or "Wiggo" as he likes to be known) is going to be participating, which is quite remarkable really, as he is not generally known for being light-hearted or game for a giggle.
And what will be the subject of the cycling supremo's contribution to comedy? Frank Spencer... a name to strike fear and loathing into the hearts of everyone over the age of abut 40 or so, who remembers the long-running tv series about the hapless, hopeless, idiot and his whining, why-the-heck-did-she-marry-him wife, Betty.
He was usually seen looking horrified, or simpering - left - in an annoying way, and twisting his arms in such a way as to suggest an urgent desire for the toilet.
Mmm, sounds fun, doesn't it. It was actually a comedy, although I don't remember ever finding it very funny. I do remember getting a day off school, though, when a sequence was filmed in the local shopping centre, and they wanted a bunch of kids to scream and laugh in the background. It started off at my local roller-skating rink, at Picketts Lock Sports Centre, then he burst out of the fire door and inexplicably found himself at the top of the footbridge, three and a half miles away.
And there he is, an idiot on roller skates, pretending to be out of control while skating down a hideous concrete footbridge flyover thing, long since demolished, thank god, as it was possibly one of the ugliest and least practical ways to get across the road.
You might notice that it has steps in it, so you couldn't get prams or pushchairs or wheelchairs or mobility scooters (not that we had them, when I was at school!) up or down it: but it did make for good comedic effect to see Frank Spencer jolting his way down it on roller skates. And we got a day off school.
Apparently the "plot", if you can call it that, of the Sport Relief effort revolves around the hapless, hopeless Frank Spencer having a chance encounter with Wiggo at the Olympic velodrome....
...and I would bet money that it will involve one of them sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle, or possibly Frank Spencer sitting backwards on a Derny bike while screaming "Betttttyyyy!" in a high pitched voice.
The actor who played this idiot is Michael Crawford, who went on (picture me pulling an uncomprehending face) to star in Phantom of the Opera and other serious stuff, although I would (again) bet money that every night, someone in the audience would shout out "Frank! Think of Betty!" or something like that.
Why uncomprehending? He's one of those unfortunate actors who was so utterly brilliant and totally convincing in the role of "total prat" that virtually no-one (including me) can ever take him seriously again, for the rest of his career, poor man.
I can hardly wait to see what hilarity he gets up to with Wiggo....
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