I had a mate who was an ambulance man, and he gave he gave it up eventually - he was such a good club entertainer. But while he was an ambulance man he worked that stretch of the M1 near Luton and consequently saw the results of traffic accidents every single working day.

I never knew a guy who so less full of bullshit.

One day we were chatting, and he put this strange idea to me. Why are people so nasty to people who can't do the job of entertaining very well? If they are crap, and people have a bad night - so what, nobody's dead. It really hardly matters at all.

Whereas, he said, he'd seen ambulance men who were so bad at their jobs that people had died as a result of them doing the wrong thing. Afterwards invariably the relatives came up and thanked the ambulance team for their efforts.

This week on mudcat, we've had people having a go at Ewan Maccoll, Alex Campbell - and now theres a thread saying nasty stuff about Big Tom, Daniel O'Donnel and his family, and Brendan Shine - all very popular entertainers who have given hours of pleasure to folk.

I can't understand it.