Safer roads, but not for frogs

Catseyes – the reflective glass beads that have guided motorists on lonely roads at night for the past 70 years are likely to be replaced over time by more efficient solar-powered studs.

A popular story (there are other versions) says Percy Shaw, their eccentric inventor, had the idea after driving in fog when a cat’s gaze caught in his headlights and saved him from a nasty accident.

He set up a factory manufacturing catseyes in Halifax, Yorkshire, making a small fortune from the venture that must have saved thousands of lives over the years.

But Shaw himself had simple tastes, choosing to live in a house near the factory, spending much of his later life in a curtainless, carpetless room furnished with nothing more than a chair and three television sets, allowing him to watch, all at the same time, what in the 1970s was the full quota of UK terrestrial channels – BBC1, BBC2 and ITV.

It’s just as well he never lived to experience satellite TV. Otherwise his living room would have been crowded with hundreds of TV sets. How would he have coped?

What I'm not clear about, is whether the new invention will be able to replacate the comforting, if irritating, thunk, thunk, thunk of the raised catseyes on your tyres when you stray over the white lines.

I'm wondering whether the same material could be used to make little back packs for frogs. There are a few roads where I encounter frogs every year, particularly when it's raining, but it's difficult to pick them up in the headlights. A reflective frog-coating would be a life-saver. On the other hand it would make frogs more vulnerable to predators, such as cats.

Cats, otherwise distracted chasing reflective frogs, would be unlikely to look towards oncoming vehicles so there might then be a need for a new invention to make them more reflective at night. Who'd be an inventor?

Postcript: A few days after embarking on this flight of fancy I came across this story: glow in the dark cats.

Give us a break BBC

One of the great joys of watching the BBC in the old days was viewing programmes without commercial breaks. Not any more. Today every programme break is filled with trailers for other programmes and other BBC channels.

Yesterday these trailers were considered more important than the scenes in the House of Commons as Prime Minister Blair left office.

These BBC advertisements cost licence payers' money to make and we don't need them. All the information is in our newspapers or online. If the BBC is not allowed to run advertisements by its charter, then it should not run in-house ads either. They are just as annoying as those for Daz and cheese spread which at least bring in revenues unlike those for BBC programmes.

Once there was just a revolving globe on our screens for a few seconds. I could handle that. I don't like all this twirly logo stuff either with red dancers and swimming hippos. Neither do I care much for the Lambie-Nairn BBC 2 logos. In fact Lambie-Nairn has a lot to answer for since the branding company has made a pretty penny from the licence payers, care of the BBC over the years.

The sad thing about its involvement, if you look at the site, is that it seems to have worked.

Maybe this is why the BBC has become branding-obsessed. I say bring back the world.

And another thing - why do we need three commentators these days for every Wimbledon match? Isn't that overkill? No wonder our third-rate tennis players do so badly; they can't wait to hang up their rackets and get on telly.