UR TV CAST

A few they made earlier Some that worked …Pocket calculator: In 1971, Clive Sinclair visited Texas Instruments in America and returned to Cambridge with a revolutionary circuit chip allowing computerised calculation in compact form. Shortly afterwards, he had invented the world’s first pocket calculator.Viagra: In 1991, scientists at the Pfizer laboratories in Kent stumbled on a discovery that brought hope to millions of men of a certain age. During research into a drug to treat angina, they found that their pills had an effect on the biochemical processes involved in male arousal. Viagra was born, and, with it, a new generation of awful headlines.Hovercraft: During the 1950s, the radio engineer Christopher Cockerell began experimenting with the idea of using a cushion of air to reduce a craft’s friction across water.

By 1960, he was demonstrating his first hovercraft to government experts and soon afterwards a prototype crossed the Channel. Sir Christopher went on to become one of Britain’s most prolific inventors, with 90 patents registered by the time he died in 1999.And some that didn’t …Winged golf ball: In 1968, the Sussex inventor Arthur Pendrick had the idea of a golf ball with flaps. Attached to the surface of the ball by magnets, the small wings were supposed to use centrifugal force to control the spin. The invention itself never took off.Gender-sensitive car number plates: A 2000 patent awarded to Duncan Butlin proposed colour-coded number plates differentiating drivers according to gender. Butlin’s premise was that “people can predict the behaviour of others if they know their sex”. He suggested that men have white number plates and women yellow, “because yellow is a prettier colour”.Spider ladders: Edward Doughney patented the Spider Ladder in 1994. Designed as an escape route for arachnids stuck in baths, the ladder had a thin latex rubber strip that could be attached near the taps It never achieved its commercial potential..

History is full of people whose sexual behaviour was atrocious, yet who performed great services for their country The great White House adulterer Bill Clinton, for example. The ecstatic reception given to Slick Willie at the Labour Party last week matched the opinion polls, which tell us the modern public attaches no importance to the sexual peccadilloes of our politicians. It shouldn’t, but it will – partly because it will reinforce a general prejudice that the Tories are terrible hypocrites.Just when Iain Duncan Smith was struggling to revive the Conservative Party’s credibility as the champion of family values, and to impugn the Government’s “moral neutrality”, we have been treated to a big, blue reminder of just how these people behaved when they were in power.Margaret Thatcher was obsessed by the thought that teenage pregnancies and sponging off the state went hand in hand. In her memoirs, she remembered becoming “convinced” that “we could only get to the roots of crime and much else besides by concentrating on strengthening the traditional family”. Her famous statement that “there is no such thing as society” was her way of encouraging people to fall back on their relatives.One method was to cut any welfare payments which might encourage young girls to become pregnant to secure an income from the state In this, John Major was her willing assistant. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he froze child benefit for two years, a harsh move which almost provoked the resignation of the Secretary of State for Social Security, John Moore. It also helped to finance the huge tax reductions for high earners announced in the budget of March 1988.In that same month, Edwina Currie, then a junior health minister, did her own spectacular bit towards improving the nation’s moral health.

“The strongest piece of advice I could give to any young woman is: don’t screw around and don’t smoke,” she pronounced.Her diaries for the period, published last week, make only a passing reference to this campaign to improve the sexual behaviour of young women – but in the entry for 20 March 1988 we learn that she was finally doing something about her own, by sending a note to John Major ending their illicit, four-year-long relationship.”So why did I start?” she laments. “Because I was unhappy with a husband forever slumped snoring in front of the television, not helpful or interested in what I was trying to do. I needed a friend.”Mrs Currie had complained before about her unsatisfactory husband. “Non-political spouses don’t understand our love affairs with politics …