The European Union Is Run By Mr Peter Mandelson And His Team Of Willing Piss Ants

An ill-advised experiment with a Hopi ear candle has left me almost deaf, and reliant on subtitles when watching television. This is unfortunate, as the BBC's subtitling department seems to be in the midst of a dispute between two factions. One group, the Dadaists, favour subtitles which comprise ambiguous nonsense, while the other, the Burroughsians, employ the "cut-up" techniques of the drug addict and author, Mr William Burroughs. Occasionally - and I apologise in advance for the obscenity - a kind of sense emerges from this accidental poetry. Last night, on Newsnight, in a film about Mr Peter Mandelson's work at the European Union, the word "participants" was rendered as "piss ants".