The rats we love to hate

I was recently recreating the ambience of a visit to a public swimming pool in my own home (by filling the bath with cold water, adding a bottle of bleach, urinating into it, then jumping in), when I found myself thinking of the late Michael Todd Junior.

He was the inventor of Smell-o-vision in the 1930s, and once equipped an entire Chicago cinema with plastic tubes connected to bottles of synthetic odours, to accompany a film entitled Scent of Mystery (starring Denholm Elliott).

His system wasn't a success, because the first fragrance hadn't dispersed properly by the time the next one was released, resulting in massive olfactory confusion, but the aromatic success of my swimming pool experiment has made me wonder whether we could start including a scratch 'n' sniff card on this very page, containing odours relevant to the review.

For example, were I writing today about an old episode of The Good Life, we could include the stench of Richard Briers's stinking oxters, followed by the great smell of Felicity Kendal's Charlie (don't get too excited, it's a Seventies perfume).

I've often wondered if Andrew Lloyd Webber has secretly installed Smell-o-vision in his theatres, and is quietly wafting the bouquet of strong narcotics into the stalls.
Well, something must account for those dazed-looking biddies of a certain age who occasionally appear on the news saying, "This is my 57th consecutive visit to Joseph, I never miss a performance," and it's far easier to believe that they're unwittingly addicted to class-A drugs than to the acting and singing of Darren Day (although it's arguable that Mr Day is himself human Largactil).

"I don't think I deserve the title of Britain's number one love rat," he told us at the start of last night's Tabloid Tales (BBC1), and I'm inclined to agree with him, partly because "love rabbit" seems more appropriate, but mainly because of the implication of infidelity. Sure, his sex life has been as frenetic as a nun doing press-ups in a cucumber patch, but as this slickly presented edition of the red-top doc made clear, he's always been faithful to his one true love. Himself.

We all know that a celebrity is just a nonentity who got lucky, but Day apparently realised long ago that his allotted 15 minutes of fame could be extended indefinitely, in return for ritual humiliation in the newspapers.

That's surely why he's spent the past decade bedding and cheating on the likes of Tracy Shaw and Anna Friel, thereby ensuring maximum press notoriety ("We get two celebrities for the price of one," as the programme put it), and plenty of generous column inches all round (not least for Ms Shaw and Ms Friel).

Yet his supposedly lurid private life has always sat oddly with his cheesy West End stage persona ("He's the whole Stilton" commented one hack), and despite the serial infidelity and claims of a near-fatal drug-induced " haemorrhage" (aka nose bleed) in a hotel, his attempts to portray himself as a raunchy wild man of rock just didn't ring true.

The "love rat" image is simply his handle on fame, I suspect, and his idea of anarchic behaviour in a hotel probably goes no further than Meat Loaf leaving the hot tap running slightly longer than necessary.