We knew this day would have to come

And so it has finally happened: a fixture as seemingly irreplaceable, as immovable, and as unequalled as Sir Alex Ferguson has given his notice.

For months he's blown smoke on ideas of retirement. Just four days ago, in his programme notes for the Chelsea game, Fergie dismissed the idea of going anywhere, anytime soon, although he did seed a clue or two:

"This team of champions is not going away - we are here for the long ride. We will get better and if we apply ourselves in our normal fashion I see our 20th league title as nothing but the start of another decade of success."

But he added, crucially: "Whether I will be here to oversee another decade of success remains to be seen, but I certainly don't have any plans at the moment to walk away from what I believe will be something special and worth being around to see."

Walk away. Not walk upstairs, which is what he will do in a new, post-managerial role as a member of the club board. “The decision to retire is one that I have thought a great deal about and one that I have not taken lightly. It is the right time," Fergie declared in the club's official press release.

"It was important to me to leave an organisation in the strongest possible shape and I believe I have done so," he added. "The quality of this league winning squad, and the balance of ages within it, bodes well for continued success at the highest level whilst the structure of the youth set-up will ensure that the long-term future of the club remains a bright one."

Just how comfortable SAF will be up there in the Old Trafford director's box also remains to be seen. Not having him sat in the home dugout, chewing like a somewhat twitchy, ruddy-faced camel, will be odd enough for us, let alone for the irascible Scot himself. His new, lofty eyrie will certainly not be the environment to start waving his watch at refs or administering the Govan hairdryer to players or officials.

There's no point mincing words about Ferguson: he has, at times, been an unbearable bully. To his players and even players of other teams; to managers he doesn't like or to those who commit offence to managers he does; to journalists who've dared cross him and, of course, to officials and the authorities with the temerity to police him.

One can't deny that the bullying and discipline has, like that of a drill sergeant, produced results. Likewise The Sun newspaper was at its sharpest, its funniest, its most relevant and most read when under the shouty editorship of Kelvin Mackenzie (an under-estimatedly clever newspaper editor, not that you could mention such an opinion anywhere on Merseyside). Fergie may not have produced sensationalist newspapers, but in his application of the same tough love he produced two sensational generations of footballers.

This in-your-face swagger has also made Manchester United the club to envy and admire in equal measure. The United chequebook has lavished money on apparently untouchable signings like Paul Ince, Steve Bruce, Roy Keane, Eric Cantona, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Cristiano Ronaldo, Rio Ferdinand, Wayne Rooney - all for record amounts to leave us grinding our teeth (complain as you might about the Russian and Middle Eastern money sloshing about elsewhere, Manchester United set the bar high for eye-watering acquisitions).

And here is where we reluctantly, perhaps, cross the red line with Sir Alex. For all his bullying, for all his arrogance, for all the disingenuity, you have to admire him. He is retiring at the end of a staggering 27 years in charge of Manchester United. Compare that with Blackburn Rovers and Nottingham Forest who've managed to have four managers each in just this season alone. More importantly, compare Ferguson's record with that of the Manchester United's peer group: in the time Ferguson has been in charge at Old Trafford, Real Madrid have had 24 managers, Chelsea have had 18, AC Milan have had 13 and Inter Milan 19, and Manchester City, Juventus and Bayern Munich 13 each.

Manchester United's consistent success over the last three decades isn't just down to Ferguson, of course. He has been the integral element of a perfect storm that brought him together with Premier League money and the club's scale to develop young talent that have been blended perfectly with the acquired.

Those around the club have simply lacked all or some of these elements: Arsenal has had the manager, some of the money and some of the players, but the inability to maintain the investment. Manchester City and Chelsea have enjoyed the money via arriviste proprietorship, brought in the players as a result, but have yet to display anywhere near the consistency.

In Chelsea's case, in particular, the continuous managerial upheaval sets them apart from their great northern rival. It's interesting to note that in December 1989, Manchester United were hovering just outside the relegation zone of the old First Division. In today's terms, with the sort of proprietors that exist in the game, Ferguson could have easily found himself out of the door. United - to it's genuine credit - persevered. The club had the vision to recognise they were building something. And so they have continued in the same vein. Big names have come, big names have gone, youngsters have come through, and the club has successfully, and usually somewhat subtly, reinvented itself under Ferguson.

Manchester United haven't always had it all their own way under Sir Alex Ferguson: when Jose Mourinho's Chelsea took the Premier League title off them twice in 2005 and 2006 the chatter began, then, that the end of the Scot's tenure at Old Trafford was in sight. Now it is. The club is as strong as it ever has been. The next manager - be it a Moyes or Mourinho - will have large shoes to fill...and a large mountain of expended chewing gum to sit in front of.

You were made for me, everybody tells me so

Over the last couple of weeks sports journalists have been trying their best to construct the richest analogy to cover the Will he? Won't he? Surely he will...? speculation surrounding Jose Mourinho's supposed or actual return to Chelsea.

Most - actually, all of them - have tried to position coach and club as star-crossed lovers, destined for each other regardless of the more rational arguments as to whether it will be a success second time around.

Whether Chelsea need Mourinho or Mourinho needs Chelsea is not completely clear. We all probably agree that Chelsea need a manager like Mourinho, but is 'sloppy seconds' really wise? What Chelsea do need, however, is someone who will deliver trophies , galvanise the fans and, if everyone can just play together nicely this time, provide consistent success over a longer period of time than the current standard length of service of nine months before Abramovich gives his white cat a stroke and presses the button in front of him marked 'Kill'.

The Mourinho/Chelsea, Chelsea/Mourinho thing may be correctly compared to a showbiz affair between the ill-matched (Rihanna and her charming beau Chris Brown come to mind, but according to The Sun they've just split up) but it is only a part of the wider drama playing out at Stamford Bridge, which does come across as a homo-erotic soap opera:

Roman wanted Carlo, but Carlo wouldn't leave the relationship he was in, so he got Jose instead. Then, after a massive argument caused by Jose showing off too much, Roman kicked Jose out and brought in Avram. Now Avram may have been old and slow and a tad dull, but didn't do too badly. However, he still had to go. In his place came an exotic Brazilian, Luiz Felipe, but that didn't work out at all, and they had to bring in Guus. However, Guus said he would only stay a short while, and so it was back it was back to the drawing board. 

Actually, it was back to Carlo again, who this time said yes, and everything went well, until it stopped going well, and even Carlo had to go. Then came André, who was a lot younger than all the others, but had boundless youthful energy. Except he didn't work out, and Roman had to ask Robbie to take over temporarily, then permanently, and then he was shown the door, to be replaced by an unemployed Spanish waiter with a very high opinion of himself, who will soon be packing his bags to make way for Jose to come back. 

Tonight there will be a further twist when young André comes back, now with his new family, to take revenge on Frank Lampard whom he says "never supported me" and to leave a horse's head or something like it on Roman's pillow.

Plot twists aside, the return of football's self-appointed Special One to Chelsea - despite the press having universally made up its mind that it's a done deal, that Jose is in love with Chelsea, and Chelsea is in love with Jose - is nowhere near clear-cut. 

Expensive release clauses at Real Madrid, the future working relationship with Michael Emenalo, Chelsea's technical director, the desire to play strong, physically imposing players rather than the diminutive but fleet-of-foot forwards currently running rings around defenders, are all possible hurdles to the Second Coming. The relationship between Roman and Jose has, according to those in the know, dramatically thawed, but for Mourinho to come back there will need to be some significant obeisance on both sides.

In the days of hippy free love, Stephen Stills wrote the immortal lines: "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with". In the case of Jose Mourinho, there can be no alternative squeeze. His avowed affection for the English game, not to mention the none-too-subtle eyelid flashing towards his former club in south-west London, might signify that he and Chelsea are so mutually drawn to each other that a reconciled second marriage can be the only outcome. After all, who else would be willing to get drawn into Roman's mayhem?

Which brings me back to press analogies. Let proffer my own: Mourinho and Chelsea are the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of football. Or...the Den and Angie of football; the JR and Sue Ellen of football; the Kat and Alfie of football; or the Liam and Noel of...well, you get the idea.

House call

There is probably a medical term for an aversion to medical dramas on television.

Whatever it is, it has steadfastly kept me away from Casualty, Holby City, Grey's Anatomy and Chicago Hope, and were it not for Sherry Stringfield and Julianna Margulies I might never have glanced at E.R.

Even though Scrubs and M*A*S*H provided acceptable yuks amongst the yuck, hospital dramas contain just a little too much human frailty for my liking. Which raises questions about what drew me to House.

On paper - actually, in reality - I should have shied away from it. The premise of a crippled misanthrope with Conan Doyle allusions (yes, we get it - he lives at No. 221 and he pops pills) should have had me running for the hills. An English actor - Hugh Laurie - playing an American, replete with American accent to boot, should have had me screaming on my way to the hills.

But having caught one, and discovered that Laurie's blues-loving, dysfunction-seeking, manchild bad boy doctor was actually one of the funniest characters on TV, I soon managed to lose my hangups about both medical dramas and English actors trying to do American accents (don't worry, Americans trying to do English accents is an even faster accelerant to my temper), and have become hooked, like a Vicodin addict, on House.

Via iTunes I have been ploughing my way through the seasons, blissfully ignoring the fact that, structurally, every episode is the same (lead patient with hard to diagnose condition; quirky second patient; gratuitous references to Cuddy's cleavage; mention of Lupus in every diagnosis discussion; Wilson apparently the only other doctor on duty in the hospital;).

But though House made an international star of Laurie, not to mention the highest-earning actor in American television, his name can still draw a blank. But say "Dr. House", and there will be an instant flash of recognition. The same applies to Laurie's Blackadder co-star Rowan Atkinson: "Mr. Bean!" has replaced "Bobby Charlton!" and "Benny Hill!" as the standard term of appreciation of all things British for those with no grasp at all of the English language.

So, hats off to Hugh. Over eight seasons of House, Laurie has animated one of television's most memorable creations. And, if you notice the occasional flashes of his musical talents - House playing blues on the Princeton–Plainsboro's lecture theatre piano, or cranking out the Ritchie Blackmore on his Gibson Flying V - you may also notice that it is Laurie himself performing.

House undoubtedly provided Laurie with a platform for his 2011 debut album Let Them Talk, a genuinely loving homage to New Orleans blues and jazz, with contributions from the Crescent City's own celebrity doctor, Dr. John, as well as Tom Jones, who is not known for his medical skills but does have a deep voice, copious chest hair and the ability to collect women's underwear while performing on stage.

Quite rightly, Let Them Talk garnered good reviews, out of surprise, perhaps, for some reviewers, caught unawares that a mostly comic actor could also be a very accomplished musician (as WWDBD? noted in Criminal Records, the history of album-making actors isn't a happy one). And thus Laurie - now post-House - returns with a follow-up album, Didn't It Rain.

The formula hasn't been changed: it's another collection of entries from the blues and jazz songbooks, but with somewhat less emphasis on the Big Easy sound, and a little more flavour of the blues found further up the Mississippi, such as Jelly Roll Morton's I Hate A Man Like You, and covers of Dr. John's Wild Honey, Alan Price's Changes (once the tune accompanying a building society advert, if I recall) and Georgie Fame's Yeh, Yeh.

Conversely, the opening track, a cover of WC Handy's St. Louis Blues, is pure Dixieland trad, much the same, in fact, as Laurie's treatment of Changes. Kansas Joe McCoy's The Weed Smoker's Dream - last breathily aired by Jessica Rabbit… - is authentically faithful to the original.

If there's one real complaint about Didn't It Rain, however, it's that it doesn't feel like Laurie has stretched himself as much as you feel he could have done. When Laurie does let go of the safety of tradition, the impact is noticeably better. On Unchain My Heart he brings the 80s FM radio stodge Joe Cocker made of it to something closer to the stabbing soul of Ray Charles' version. Yeh, Yeh, on the other hand, feels like no more than a party piece added onto the album for good measure, but then with Laurie such an exceptional blues pianist, he's entitled to show off a little.

Produced again by Joe Henry (another roots auteur, the 'new' T-Bone Burnett and the man responsible for Billy Bragg's excellent Tooth And Nail), Didn’t It Rain is a tad undemanding. Maybe it's the material, maybe it's the treatment.

Let It Talk felt genuine, a sincere tribute to a genre Laurie clearly adores. The blues is a broad church, and there have been plenty of mainstream rock and pop acts who've produced their own blues covers albums wthout anywhere near the personal love of the form Laurie brings to bear. And, to his credit, he has avoided the obvious reference points of Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters, and stuck to his somewhat eclectic interest in the New Orleans branch of the blues line.

On this follow-up, the sincerity doesn't come across anywhere near as strongly and does feel like more of the same. Some tracks, too - while proficiently performed - are a little too perfectly formed, giving parts of Didn't It Rain the feeling of a West End musical soundtrack. These are, it must be said, niggles. Laurie's recording career has thus far proven to have cogency than many, if not most, albums made by stars in their ascendancy, even if - to British television audiences at least - Laurie's star has been ascendent for a very long time.

Sunday's child

In any record collection worth its salt there should be a range of music to suit every mood.

Things to listen to when heading out on a Saturday night, and things to listen to on your return. Albums for good times and bad. Break-up records and make-up records, music to get you in the mood, music to keep the relationship going.

Everyone should also have a Sunday morning record. Something to soothe you into the laziest day of the week. There are Steely Dan records that do the job nicely, tracks by the late Gil-Scott Heron and the very recently departed Richie Havens, and even the obvious choice of The Commodores' Easy Like Sunday Morning.

But for me, there is only one Sunday morning accompaniment: John Martyn's Solid Air, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Released in February 1973, Solid Air was Martyn's sixth album, and brought the New Malden, Surrey-born, Glasgow-raised singer-songwriter to a new level of creativity.

Today it is regarded as the ultimate chill-out album - arguably the genre's genesis - and hailed by Paul Weller, Beth Orton, Beck, The Cure's Robert Smith and many more for its woozy fusion of acoustic blues, folk, and jazz.

For the sore of head, or those in need of continued stimulation, Solid Air's title track blissfully sets the level, dreamily blending currents of warmth and cool over a spacey intro of Danny Thompson's fluid basslines, Martyn's Martin acoustic guitar and electric piano, before the singer himself semi-slurs the opening lines:

"You've been taking your time, you've been living on solid air/You've been walking the line, you've been living on solid air/Don't know what's going wrong inside/and I can tell you that it's hard to hide when you're living on solid air."

The song is is a tribute Nick Drake, Martyn's friend, whom he would later refer to as "someone who had problems in his nut", and who was, at the time causing Martyn great concern. A year later Drake would overdose on sleeping tablets.

"I loved his music," Martyn told Rock'n'Reel's Johnny Black in 2008, shortly before Martyn himself died of pneumonia complications. "[Nick] was a well-mannered, decent man, gleeful, never said a bad word about anybody," adding that the Drake's "dreadful depression" was a terrible thing to witness. "To watch him go down and you can do nothing for it. You can try but they won't have it. He's the one person I've known that's had that and it can actually kill you."

If Solid Air reflects Drake's decline, the album represented something of a zenith for Martyn, as well as the platform for his own battles. For much of his career, drugs and booze played a playful but destructive role.

In Thompson, he had a sparring partner, big brother and surrogate father rolled into one. Of all Martyn's collaborators, the bass player was his closest. Their fights were legendary (Martyn once woke up in a hotel room to discover he'd been nailed under a carpet by Thompson, who was sitting at the table above him eating breakfast).

But through the booze-drenched excess, Martyn and Thompson produced one of the most unusually symbiotic relationships ever created between two musicians.

Nowhere on Solid Air is this more evident than on Go Down Easy, which opens with one of the most beautiful opening lines ever committed to song: "You curl around me like a fern in the spring". Go Down Easy is classic chillout Martyn: his trademark vocal, acoustic guitar set to some exotic tuning, and Thompson's upright bass woven into the song's sparseness with uncanny instinct.

Some of Martyn's best live performances featured just himself and Thompson, demonstrating how much two musicians, with a single music instrument each, could fill a soundstage. A lot of this came from Martyn's experimentation with the Echoplex. This early tape-based delay device allowed him to create polyphonics from just an acoustic guitar by slapping its bottom string for rhythm while having the Echoplex repeat phrases played on the other five strings.

On Solid Air, this technique transforms bluesman Skip James' Devil Got My Woman into I'd Rather Be The Devil, whose pure blues roots are completely obscured by a studio wigout of jazz bass lines, energetic drumming from Fairport Convention's Dave Mattacks, and Martyn vibing his guitar through the rudimentary but profoundly effective box.

Solid Air isn't, however, just a splifftastic woozefest: May You Never, written as moral support for a male friend who'd found himself involved in a pub punch-up is a gently bucolic folk number, later covered by Eric Clapton on his Slowhand album.

Jellyroll Blues is just that, a sped-up traditional blues, with the bottleneck slide technique of a Beale Street busker replaced by Martyn's remarkable finger-picking style (he was - out of all other things written about him - a truly brilliant guitar player).

Over The Hill, the album's sophomore track, is a delightfully jaunty traditional number, lifted by Richard Thompson's mandolin, and expressing the joys of returning home, being inspired by Martyn seeing his house on the horizon as he neared the coast on a train journey from London to Hastings.

Over The Hill does, however, reveal some of the dark side that was emerging in Martyn's life. "Can't get enough of sweet cocaine/Get enough of Mary Jane/Going back to where I came from/Going rolling back home again/Over the hill", let slip some of the temptations Martyn was falling prey to, and how Hastings became a brittle bolthole.

Homelife was a curious muse in Martyn's career. His 'classic' period - from 1971's Bless The Weather, through Solid Air, Inside Out, Sunday's Child, One World and Grace And Danger in 1980 were strongly influenced by the ups and downs of his marriage to Beverley (the latter album his particularly raw-to-the-bone divorce album), and by his children.

Martyn was never afraid of wearing his heart on his sleeve. There were times when his heart was his sleeve: "Very few people are trying to reach the heart these days," he told the NME in 1973. "I feel strongly that there's a great dearth of the heart everywhere right now."

Beverley Martyn would later say, after they'd separated, that John put so much emotion into his music that there was scant left for her. "Music, makes my heart go, makes me tick," John once said himself. "The money doesn't really matter. If it didn't come in I would still go on playing, singing away. That's me."

And thus he did. When he died in January 2009, Martyn - on a third marriage and minus his right leg (amputated below the knee following a burst cyst), just one of many afflictions he'd dealt with in his life, including being shot twice - was still writing and recording. 

His final sessions appeared posthumously as the album Heaven And Earth. The voice had slowed to a whisky-stewed soup but the spacious jazz of his hero Pharoah Sanders, which liberally found its way onto Solid Air, was still present, along with his penchant for refreshingly emotional transparency.

Solid Air was released in another extraordinary year for music. Just a month before, Pink Floyd had released Dark Side Of The Moon (recently revisited by WWDBD? in Over The Moon), and the year also gave forth The Who's Quadrophenia, Bowie's Aladdin Sane, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John, and debuts from Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells), Steely Dan (Countdown To Ecstasy) and Bruce Springsteen (Greetings From Asbury Park), and Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On.

In and amongst these behemoths of the age, Solid Air can easily be lost. John Martyn is, today, still admired by many in the know but unknown to the masses. A tragedy.

Despite outliving most people's expectations for his life expectancy - and certainly surviving long past those of immediate friends and collaborators like Drake and Free's Paul Kossoff, Martyn left behind a vast discography.

Some of it is so-so (his '80s 'electric' period went a little too far), but in classics like Solid Air, he covered - over just 35 short minutes - the most mellifluous of records. Or, to quote Beth Orton: "Solid Air is the musical equivalent of a reassuring hug." Yep, says it all.

Cliché corner

The dying weeks of any football season are delightfully riven with cliché. In all leagues and at all levels, managers, players and pundits trot out any of the following nonsense:

• We’re at the business end of the season
• Every game is a cup final
• We’re in a mini league all of our own
• We’re too good to go down
• There are no easy games at this end of the season
• We’re going to take each game as it comes
• We’ll fight on until the very last second of the very last game
• We’re going to give 110%/200%/1000% until it’s out of our hands
• It’s out of our hands now
• We may be down, but we’re not out
• We gave it all, but sometimes that’s not enough.

You will have already heard many, if not most, in the last couple of weeks, as seasons effectively end for the already relegated or promoted. But with Wigan, Newcastle, Villa, Sunderland, Norwich and Southampton all barn-dancing around the one remaining relegation spot, and Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal scrapping it out for Champions League football next season, "we're in a mini league" is bound to come up this weekend.

The London triumvirate will be giving it the mathematically impossible 110% over a gruelling couple of weeks that will see Chelsea meet Manchester United on Sunday and Spurs on Wednesday, Tottenham enjoy a somewhat easier run with home fixtures against Southampton and Sunderland, plus a tough away game at Stoke, and Arsenal - with one less game to play than the other two - visit relegated QPR on Saturday, host drop-avoiding Wigan, and then go to struggling Newcastle on the final day of the season. Clearly, every game a cup final. To be taken each game at a time.

That the fight for third and fourth place should be between these three sides says plenty about how the balance of power in football waxes and wanes. It was once said that the Premier League title is lost in London, but that was before Chelsea - under Jose Mourinho (remember him?) - wrested the title away from Manchester two seasons in a row.

But with Manchester United steaming away with the title this season - indeed, winning it a month early and with the points of five wins to spare - the battle for European berths should be drawing all the attention.

Three points separate Chelsea and Spurs this morning, with Arsenal - on a good run - in the middle. With Chelsea now secured as a Europa League finalist, Manager of the Month, Rafa Benitez (awarded for performance and not for lasting the month) has his work cut out. Consistency - or lack of - has been Chelsea's undoing this season.

Forget any complaints about fixture pileups and competing in seven competitions, as they were preparing for at the outset, Chelsea's inability to put a decent run together, the result of defensive vulnerability and ineffectiveness up front, plus the arrogance of an interim first team coach hell-bent on rotating his squad, has held them back in a season where they should have more to show for themselves than being finalists in a competition they weren't even in when this term kicked off.

Spurs, for me (and this will be painful to write) have been the surprise package of the season. I, along with many others, felt certain that Andre Villas-Boas was walking into another bear trap in taking the manager's job at Tottenham. It seemed too obvious that The Cocky One was so desperate to prove he had it in him to manage at the highest club level, despite what happened at Chelsea, that he was prepared to go through it all again.

Things have turned out differently and, actually, I'm pleased. Although Spurs currently lie fifth - they've been consistently top four all season, and have lost only three of their last 22 games. In Bale they have a gem, but in total, they appear to have a squad in perfect  harmony with their young coach. Perhaps it really is all about chemistry?

And then there's Arsenal. Such is the crumpled, Sid James of a face on Arsene Wenger that it's not always easy to tell his emotional state. But there have been times this season when I have genuinely felt sorry for the Frenchman. There have been pitch-side television shots of him looking genuinely sad, wordlessly expressing a plea of "why isn't this working?".

In interviews he has always put on the bravest of faces, a touch of Gallic indifference holding things together when clearly, beneath it all, has been a raging furnace of pain. The sympathy does go only so far: just have Chelsea have been victims of their own dysfunction, Arsenal have suffered from their own inertia to fix things.

Selling Van Persie may have been football's version of self-amputation, but to strain the metaphor, Arsenal are hardly Sir Ranulph Fiennes stranded at the South Pole with just a penknife, frostbite and no alternative. There have been plenty of strikers Arsenal could have bought. But they haven't. And so stubbornness - for it has no other name - will probably be the word that defines the Gunners' 2012-13 season.

That said, given all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that has gone on most of the season in and around north-east London, today Arsenal are in fourth spot. And they're not Liverpool. Credit really should be due somewhere.

Who's next to get dragged out of Pandora's Box?

For those in the know, it came as little surprise; for those who’d suspected it, it still came as a shock; and for those who simply didn’t have a clue, a little slice of childhood evaporated in a fizzing, toxic acid bath as the revelations about Jimmy Savile kept coming, and kept coming, last autumn.

As we now know, Savile’s actions over the course of, possibly, his entire adulthood were beyond abhorrence  A sexual predator of unlimited guile and resource, who applied his own Jedi mind trick to fool the naïve, the compliant and the incompetent, and inventive menace to get what he wanted, when he wanted and where he wanted it.

The Savile revelations – and the subsequent police investigation, Operation Yewtree – have led to British light entertainment’s very own Pandora’s Box being opened up, and its allegedly sordid contents spilling out all over the place.

With alarming regularity, we read of new arrests, names withheld under the laws of sub-judice, but the merest clue as to the identity: "An 83-year-old man from Wilmslow, Cheshire, was arrested today in connection with the ongoing enquiry into sexual abuse by celebrities", is enough to set the Wikipedia-literate off in search of a Wilmslow-dwelling entertainer born in 1929.

That, then, turned out to be Stuart Hall, he of the infectious cackle while hosting It’s A Knockout in the 1970s and, since, one of the best football commentators you will ever hear. This week he admitted 14 charges of indecently assaulting girls – one as young as nine – between 1967 and 1985.

In the same week, Coronation Street actor Bill Roache – its longest-serving and therefore record-breaking star – was arrested and charged with two counts of sexual assault in 1967. Just two weeks ago, we learned that the apparently saintly Rolf Harris had been arrested by police as part of Operation Yewtree. With investigations taking place against DJ Dave Lee Travis, "comic" Jim Davidson and PR man Max Clifford – all involving allegations from the past - you’d be understandably tempted to think that an epidemic of abuse took place in and around the British entertainment industry in the 1960s and 1970s.

Britain isn't alone in the restrospective scandal department. Belgium was torn apart by revelations about its Catholic priests, revelations that inevitably spilled into other parts of the Catholic world. And just yesterday it emerged that the late German actor Horst Tappert - famous in many countries for the playing baggy-eyed detective Derrick - was a member of the SS, serving on the Eastern Front in 1943 as a member of the Totenkopf panzer division. German, Dutch and other national broadcasters have subsequently dropped repeats of Derrick.

Back in Britain, it is highly disconcerting to see stars of childhood teatime television falling like ninepins in the way they have. But without condoning their behavior – as far from my intention as it is possible to be – it does make you wonder how long it will be before Inspector Knacker turns his attention to the music industry.

For there, sexual depravity was not so much near the surface as floating on a dayglo-coloured lilo, drinking a large pink cocktail with an enormous umbrella poking out of it screaming “look at me and what I’m doing to this groupie”.

Read the biographies and autobiographies of Led Zeppelin, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Eric Clapton – even The Beatles, especially in their Hamburg apprenticeship – and there is enough reported evidence of sexual and narcotic misbehavior to bring an end to the liberty of many of those who survived that era. Remember, Almost Famous wasn't far off being a documentary.

How old was Mandy Smith when Bill Wyman first met her? And how old was Bill Wyman? The answer to the first question is 13, and the second, 48. According to Wyman, the police aren't interested. So, when a rock star deflowers an under-age groupie, it’s high-spirited, rock’n’roll high jinks, but when a household entertainer does much the same, he faces jail sentence for what's left of his natural life.

Inevitably, there has been some misplaced sympathy towards those accused. Historical affection for someone who was, once, a welcome visitor to the living room will do that. Fame and affection shouldn't, however, be the get-out-of-jail card that exonerates. There can be no defence of more innocent times, more liberal times or simply more tolerant times. There is no defence at all.

This is your captain snoring...

A thought occurred to me the other day, as I circled endlessly over Surrey in an Airbus: what if the pilot was fast asleep?

As you may have heard, London's Heathrow Airport is so congested, arriving planes are regularly kept in a circling 'holding pattern' over the Home Counties. This, we are reassured, is normal. Nothing to worry about, as Croydon passes beneath you for the umpteenth time, and several other planes circle above you like frustrated drivers looking for a supermarket car park space on a Saturday morning.

But if, in the tedium of waiting for air traffic control to grant a landing slot, the pilot and co-pilot up front haven't nodded off? As unlikely as that might be, the chances of your pilot and even co-pilot being asleep at the joystick are alarmingly high.

The British airline pilots' association, BALPA, recently reported that 43% of its members have reported falling asleep during a flight and, worse, three-quarters have come awake to find their co-pilot zonked out next to them.

"A pilot falls asleep on the flight deck on a UK-registered airplane at least once in every 24 hours - and probably a lot more than that," according to Dr Rob Hunter, BALPA's head of flight safety.

Fingers inevitably point towards overworked flight crews as the airline industry maintains its relentless expansion on the back of the low-cost boom of the last two decades. While it has allowed more of us to visit more places more often than at any time in the history of leisure travel, the pilots taking us there are being stretched even further.

The airspace they are flying in is increasingly congested, their flying rosters ever-more overloaded, and the economic pressure on their employers' profit margins, even heavier as they manage to balance their engorged turnover with higher fuel costs and taxation.

It is not surprising, then, to learn of incidents such as that in 2011 of a captain returning from a toilet break who was unable to re-enter the heavily secured (post-9/11) flight deck because his co-pilot was unconscious. Disaster over London was avoided when the pilot used an emergency code to open the cockpit door.

BALPA says the severity of the problem is being masked by pilot reluctance to report such incidents, especially given the two-year jail sentence they would face if prosecuted. However, the situation won't be getting any better, anytime soon.

A proposed change in European law could see pilots asked to work even longer hours, more often, and more regularly overnight. EASA - the European Aviation Safety Agency - is widely expected this year to agree new limits on how long a pilot can work, relaxing current restrictions on night flying from 10 to 11 hours.

In Europe, pilots regularly fly numerous 'segments' in a day - the individual point-to-point journeys they and their aircraft take. But as anyone who pays attention to those 'Tiredness Can Kill' signs next to motorways will agree, driving long distances without a break is not ideal. Imagine, then, you've got 200 people sat behind you and you're having to process some of the most complex laws of physics at the same time as a flight deck full of more dials than a jeweler's.

Worse still is the way the body reacts at night. As anyone familiar with shift work or insomnia will understand, at around 4am the body is at its drowsiest, as this is the time of night when the body is normally - or should be - at the deepest part of its sleep cycle.

Pilots flying longhaul routes are required to take regular sleep breaks, but for those flying shorthaul routes in Europe this has never been an issue, seeing as few passenger aircraft undertake nighttime operations. However, this does not take into account 'saddle time' - the number of consecutive hours a pilot clocks up in a day's work since leaving the comfort of bed.

On top of flying longer hours, even the economics of being a pilot is, according to those close to the airline industry, becoming a factor in the sleep discussion.

Property prices, low salaries and the repayment of training fees have led to many younger, less experience pilots in the UK having to live further away from their base airports, requiring even longer commuter journeys before they've even looked at a weather map.

Britain's Civil Aviation Authority, for its part, rejects any claims from the pilots' association about safety: "We have no evidence of significant safety concerns with regard to crew and fatigue," says a spokesperson. But the increasing incidence of potentially dangerous "events" where tiredness may have been a factor points to a different reality.

One of the reasons air travel became popular in the first place is that it took the 'you' out of the equation of travelling long distances. It's a fairly safe bet that if you knew your plane had no pilot, and was being flown by nothing more than a souped-up PC, you wouldn't get on board (let's face it, "THIS APPLICATION HAS UNEXPECTEDLY QUIT" is not something you'd want to appear on the control panel of a passenger plane).

Technically, however, a commercial plane can fly itself, and for the most part it does. Much of any journey is carried out by autopilot (the non-inflatable kind), with the airplane programmed to follow strict air routes. Take-offs and landings are even governed, to a certain degree, by automated systems. But although passengers have just about accepted using driverless monorail carriages to get to and from airport terminals, a pilotless airliner is a Rubicon the airline industry is not yet prepared to cross.

And yet, as the military increasingly looks to pilotless aircraft as the future of fighting wars without anyone you actually like getting hurt, surely it won't be long before someone in the airline industry - and God knows Ryanair must be giving it full consideration - replace Mr. & Mrs. Chuck Yeager up front with a geek in a darkened room in Crawley with a glorified PlayStation controller.

It's a sobering thought as you strap yourself in for two weeks of burnt flesh and hangovers on the Costa del Sol.