Peter Rhodes on folios, spy ships and a sense of fellowship with a snooker spoiler

For the eco-idiots who wreck snooker tournaments and deface works of art, there could be no juicier target than a First Folio. It is a valiant thing to put these priceless works on display. But as somebody once remarked, the better part of valour is discretion. Some discreet bulletproof glass, perhaps?

Mind you, I admit feeling a certain sense of fellowship with the snooker spoiler, Edred Whittingham, who declares that he won't be having children “because I can't guarantee that there will be a habitable planet for them to grow up into.” When I was a lad in the 1960s I was so shocked and depressed by a TV documentary that I wrote a pledge in my diary, promising not to bring offspring into a dying planet. Back then, if you believed everything you saw on telly, we were doomed to extinction by the long-term effects of the insecticide DDT. You don't hear much about that any more.

A Russian “spy ship” appears off British shores, allegedly eyeballing our undersea cables and offshore wind farms in order to wreck Britain's economy if the war in Ukraine suddenly escalates. I dare say the Russians routinely spy on us, as we spy on them. I am also pretty sure that they would do it with satellites and subs and we wouldn't even know they had been.

I referred recently to W1A, the brilliant satire on BBC management. It ended in 2017 and it's fascinating how many of its unlikely storylines have come true. For a start, there's the uncanny resemblance between the little colour-icons, proposed in W1A's ”brand mashup” to replace the initials BBC, and those little colour-icons identifying today's programmes. Then there's BBC Me, W1A's online platform for user-generated content – in other words, free footage from the punters. It's happening – see the My Garden threads in Gardener's World (BBC1).

As for the W1A crisis with a cross-dressing male footballer demanding to present Match of the Day in a little black dress, that hasn't happened. Yet.