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If like me you experience a little frisson of excitement on seeing this headline in the BBC newsfeed:

Tomorrow's World to return to BBC

you'll probably also have been as disappointed as I was to read that they don't really mean it...

The BBC is bringing back the Tomorrow's World brand to help audiences understand new technologies.

Presenter Maggie Philbin will be offering in-depth analysis on technology stories on TV, radio and the web under the Tomorrow's World banner.

Although the programme - which ran from 1965 to 2003 - will not return, elements such as the logo and title sequence will be revived.

So, not the programme itself, but a "brand" for the odd five minute package halfway through the news! Such a pity, because personally I reckon the BBC have a big share of the responsibility for the shortage of people taking science subjects at school and university in recent years.

I remember the arguments when it was withdrawn - that a magazine type programme didn't do science justice and formats more like invention competitions would be better. It's true in my opinion that for a good while before it finished it had somehow been more trivial than it had been when I was young and eagerly awaited Raymond Baxter's explanation of how we would all be wearing Barbarella style jump suits and eating only pills on a rotating space centre by the year 2000.

Still - I'm rather glad none of those particular predictions came true, but I am sure that the seeing a load of different types of technology on one programme prevented any one of them being too boring for television and put forward quite a good balance of the exciting things that science and technology people can get up to. It glamourized geeks and nerds.

Time for a proper resurrection, I'd say. I am sure there is many times the amount of exciting stuff going on that isn't getting even that half hour of mainstream prime time exposure.

The most common incidents I have to deal with as a warden in a hall of residence are fire alarms. We wardens go to bed at night - we all have day jobs - so we have a pager each that goes off to wake us in the event of a fire alarm.

Previously we had no discretion but to phone the fire brigade before we went to investigate the incident and organize the evacuees before the brigade arrived. Nowadays at the fire service's request we go and investigate first, so it's very much in our own interests to discourage frivolous fire alarms.

And one of the stories I tell was of one case where the brigade was so pissed off at having been called out to some drunken teenager breaking a fire alarm glass and running off that they not only called the police, but kept everyone outside, at 2 am on a freezing December Sunday right in front of an emptying student club night venue, for an hour while they wandered around checking every bedroom in the block for hazards and non-evacuees.

It seems this kind of just desserts is no longer to be tolerated by the fire service:

Firemen sacked after student call:

Three firemen have been sacked after students were kept out in the cold for almost three hours following an alarm.

The incident occurred in Glasgow in November when firemen from Cowcaddens' station responded to a late night call at student flats in Calgary Street.

The students said that although there was no fire, they were kept outside their accommodation from just after midnight until 0300 GMT.

Oh well!

Oh dear, another pontifical pronouncement condemns me to hell, it seems:

Vatican condemns Amnesty over abortion

By Malcolm Moore
Last Updated: 2:18am BST 14/06/2007

The Vatican has ordered all Catholic organisations and individuals to stop giving money to Amnesty International in protest at the human rights organisation's stance on abortion.

Amnesty, which previously had been neutral on the subject, said in April that countries that had laws making abortion illegal should drop them because tough anti-abortion penalties led to a high proportion of backstreet terminations. Mexico City has recently passed a law decriminalising abortion.

Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and one of the Vatican's most senior prelates, said in an interview with the National Catholic Register: "The inevitable consequence [of Amnesty's decision] will be the end of all financing from Catholic organisations and individual Catholics."

Well, not this Catholic, I can assure you. I have a feeling that on the day of judgement the fact that I tried to do my best by my fellow human beings by fighting the forces of oppression and torture via what seems to be the most respected international organization on that particular playing field will stand me in quite good stead. I don't support abortion, but nor do I support coercion. And, let's face it, the line Amnesty has taken on abortion deals mainly with the most traumatic situations, such as women who are put in that position by evil acts in the first place like rape (often institutionalized as a means of torture) - and on those even the most hard-core anti-abortionists' opinions tend to wobble and fragment a bit.

Indeed, my membership of Amnesty helps to assuage my conscience that I am also a member of a body, in the Roman Catholic Church that has, over centuries, been amongst the most egregious supra-national torturers, via crusades, conquistadores, forced conversions, bloody Mary, the Holy Office and, more recently, tacit at least support for some of the most oppressive regimes simply because they are Catholic regimes.

It was Charles Kennedy I think who stood up at a party conference one year as leader and suggested that if there was one organization all Liberal democrats should also be a member of it was Amnesty.  I agree, and I hope he still does, as a Catholic and a senior Liberal Democrat, whatever this meddling priest wants to tell us.