Heroes and villains

29 March 2024

Hero 
A woman in Cheshire who “rescued” what she thought was a baby hedgehog and took it into a wildlife hospital, only to be told it was a fluffy bobble from a hat. The unnamed good samaritan had put her seemingly sickly charge into a newspaper-lined box overnight, along with a small dish of food. “She was very embarrassed, she was very sweet, bless her,” says Janet Kotze, manager of the Lower Moss Wood Nature Reserve & Wildlife Hospital. “She took the box from me and left quite quickly.”

Villain
Shakespeare, according to academics at the University of Roehampton, who say the playwright’s “disproportionate representation” in theatre has propagated “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”. Well yes, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph, but that’s a bit like saying “Kylian Mbappé takes up too much space on the football scene or that Magnus Carlsen really needs to stop sucking up all the oxygen in the chess world”. Genius shouldn’t get trumped by diversity.

Villain
The Thames, for being so disgusting that the traditional Boat Race celebration of throwing the winning cox into the river may be consigned to history. With levels of E coli 10 times higher than the dirtiest waters the Environment Agency deems acceptable for bathing, the Oxford and Cambridge crews have been advised not to enter the water and to wash themselves down at the finish line.

Hero
Gary Fremantle, an IT expert, who saved the manuscript of a book by Dame Jaqueline Wilson that she thought she’d lost forever. Two visiting dogs pressed the delete buttons on her computer and the almost-completed The Magic Faraway Tree: a Christmas Adventure vanished from the screen. After desperate efforts to retrieve it, she called Freemantle, having heard about him from a friend. “His hair was down to his shoulders. He didn’t really look as if he knew what he was doing,” she says. “Well God bless Gary – within half an hour he had got it back for me.” The book has been dedicated to him.

Villain
Susan Hall, the hapless Tory candidate for London mayor, who released a campaign video depicting the city as “a crime capital of the world”, which included footage taken from New York’s Penn Station. We shouldn’t be surprised, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. Hall is just the latest in “a long series of Tory mayoral hopefuls of whom the only question that can ever be asked is, “Oh wow – where on earth did they find that one?”