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James Randi to debunk magic of FA Cup

SKEPTIC investigator James Randi has set out to disprove the magic of the FA Cup.

The James Randi Foundation has offered a million pounds to anyone able to demonstrate a sense of wide-eyed wonder in the world’s oldest  beer promotional tool.

He now wants to resolve whether the tournament has a supernatural element or is merely a series of athletic events involving England’s second best footballers until the quarter finals.

Randi said: “I and my colleagues will attend every fourth round match to look for any event that falls outside the realm of the mundane, such as nobody being vile.

“We will also scrutinise any commentator’s claims of magic to see if there’s a rational explanation for a ball being positioned in a particular part of the pitch by 11 men with relatively poor employers.

“Yesterday’s evidence involved a bucktoothed racist handballing his team to victory against a club whose chief executive adores Margaret Thatcher.”

The field of sporting scepticism has been growing in popularity following Richard Dawkins’ latest book The Wimbledon Delusion and Simon Singh’s Who Gives a Monkey’s Fuck About the Ryder Cup?

Randi added: “Science is still unable to explain Adrian Chiles, but I suspect he will turn out to be nothing more than a weather balloon.”

 

'Splash!' drowns 12

TOM Daley’s Saturday night diving show has kicked-off with the deaths of 12 of its celebrity contestants.

The producers of Splash! paid tribute to the dead but pledged to continue throwing famous people off a diving platform just to see what happens.

Last week’s dead included Marty Bishop, member of short-lived late 90s boyband 12345 R GR8! and Susan Traheme who appeared briefly as ‘bad girl’ Stephanie Shears in the short-lived Channel 5 soap opera Venereal Close.

Also drowned was 1970s children’s presenter Bill McKay, whose Border TV show Up With the Cock provided young viewers with a fascinating look at life on a farm.

But many of the celebrities dragged from the water remain unidentified. An ITV spokesman said: “We think one of them might have been on Tomorrow’s World.”

Critics accused the producers of exploiting semi-famous people who were entirely the wrong shape to collapse into a swimming pool.

But ITV said Helen Lederer, who survived but has three broken vertebrae in her neck, wanted to continue as long as they promised not to strap her to her wheelchair.

The spokesman added: “It was one of our darkest days so after a lot of soul searching we have decided to use a deeper pool and have the contestants coached by Andi Peters.”

 

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