Strictly balderdash

I KNOW it's a stretch, but you do have to feel a little bit sorry for Kezia Dugdale as she hunkers down for her first weekend in the I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here jungle. Not because she has to put up with Stanley Johnson quoting Ovid every five minutes or pretend she knows which one's Ant and which one's Dec or even because she had to crawl around inside Sickola Sturgeon – a tank full of fish guts – in the Bush Tucker Trial. No, it's because (so far) she's lacking a cheerleading team with the same kind of celebrity oomph as compatriot Susan Calman, currently fast on her way to National Treasure status courtesy of being this year's Ann Widdecombe, ie the one on Strictly who can't dance but who everyone votes for anyway just to annoy Craig Revel Horwood.

When the camera panned round the audience on last Saturday's episode of the tea-time show I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only going: “No [expletive deleted] way! Is that JK Rowling sitting next to Susan Calman's wife Leigh as they cheer her frankly awesome Paso Doble?” Or words to that effect.

No, of course I wasn't, because that really was the Harry Potter author, clearly a fan of the show and very much in the #TeamSusan camp. See what I mean by celebrity oomph? Rowling even baked a Strictly-themed cupcake for Calman and posted a picture of it on Twitter, and then posed for photographs after the show with Calman and another celebrity member of #TeamSusan, author Val McDermid. Who does #TeamKez have to compare with that lot? Certainly not new Scottish Labour leader (and Eng-er-land football fan) Richard Leonard. Or even Eng-er-land itself, which seems to have met news of Dugdale's arrival on the show with a shrug and a collective “Kezia who?”.

Automaton and on

I USED to laugh at the idea of people's jobs being taken by robots. It was partly because I never thought it would happen, but mostly because the idea of a gang of cyborgs in high-vis vests coming to fix a gas main in my street, scything through my broadband cable instead and then going to Greggs for steak bakes only to be told by another cyborg there's no hot ones left is quite funny.

Right now, however, the idea doesn't seem quite so fanciful. First came the rumour that no less a personage than the First Lady of the United States – or FLOTUS, to use the official acronym – has actually been replaced by a robot. That probably isn't true, but harder to dismiss is the claim by UK Chancellor Philip Hammond that driverless cars will soon be a fixture of our traffic jams and we'd better get used to the fact. And now, horror of horrors, comes the news that the presenters of the venerable Today programme are to be replaced by robots. It's just for a day – phew! – but even so it shows where we're headed, robot-wise.

The takeover will happen between Christmas and New Year, the time when guest editors are invited in to do the work of all the people who have gone on holiday because they aren't yet robots. The robot guest will edit a programme devoted to artificial intelligence, and its interview technique is to be based on that of broadcaster Mishal Husain. I suppose that at least is a blessing: imagine if they'd tuned into BBC Radio Scotland's Off The Ball and coded that form of witty banter into the poor machine's circuits.

Gently dowse it

I'VE always been fascinated by the idea of dowsing. Visiting Worcestershire once by mistake I found myself pressing my face up against the glass of the British Dowsing Society's headquarters, located up a quaint side street in the quaint spa town of Malvern. I didn't have the courage to enter – either that or they were at lunch, I forget which – but I did once hold a pair of dowsing rods, and as they turned this way and that they did seem to take on a shivery sort of magic.

Not everyone is convinced, though. The revelation that 10 out of the UK's 12 water companies routinely use what one newspaper called a “discredited medieval practice” to search for leaks has irritated customers and been lampooned by Sally Le Page, the science blogger who inadvertently uncovered it when her parents saw a technician from Severn Trent using a couple of bent tent pegs to try to find a leak. “Maybe it’s time to leave the magic and divination to Harry Potter,” she writes. Oh come on, let the dowsers have their fun while they can. One day soon it will be robots doing that job as well.

The grizzly truth

A THOUSAND years ago, back when England was emerging from the Dark Ages and Third Lanark and Queen's Park could still claim to be Glasgow football's Big Two, Scotland's last bear shuffled off to the boneyard.

A type of Eurasian brown bear, its kind had proved very popular with the Romans, who thought it the best and fiercest ursine competitor for the empire's gladiators. As a result a fair few of the beasts were shipped off to the Colosseum, which caused numbers to dwindle. Over-hunting did for the rest in the centuries after the Romans were relegated to history's second tier by the Visigoths. Or was it Third Lanark? I never can remember. Anyway, by 1000AD our Caledonian bears were extinct. Good news for 11th-century campers, bad news for conservationists.

Next year, however, the bears return to Scotland – or one does, courtesy of sculptor Andy Scott. He's the man behind Falkirk's £5 million Kelpies sculpture, a piece of public art consisting of two massive horse heads. For his next trick he's going to erect a 16ft sculpture of a bear outside Dunbar in East Lothian, close enough to the A1 for everyone to see it as they speed past in their driverless cars. One future passenger enjoying a ride might be art critic Jonathan Jones, who is already familiar with Scott's work. He described the Kelpies as (variously) “trash”, “brainless dreck” and “a kitsch exercise in art 'for the people'”.

I can't judge the artistic merit of the Kelpies or the upcoming bear sculpture, but the 'public art for the people' bit I can. As far as I can tell the good folk of Falkirk – try say that with a mouthful of Strictly-themed cupcake – love their horses' heads and it's quite likely the people of Dunbar will feel the same about their 16ft bear sculpture which, by the way, is actually a grizzly and is being raised in honour of Dunbar-born John Muir, who helped found America's National Parks.

In fact, I hope every town in Scotland will soon have its civic pride (and civic coffers) bolstered by an animal sculpture – and the trashier and dreckier (is that even a word?) the better. So how about a giant red squirrel for Creetown in Dumfries and Galloway, which is something of a stronghold for the endangered nut-eaters and which scored a squirrel-related hit a decade ago when squirrel cams were introduced to the town's Heritage Museum? Or maybe a massive Orkney vole for Kirkwall's outer suburbs? Or, with JK Rowling still in mind, how about an animal statue for Aberfeldy in honour of the Harry Potter author, who has a home a mile away in Killiechassie. She always said her favourite Hogwarts house was Hufflepuff so let's build a massive version of its mascot … a badger rampant. I think art joker David Shrigley should get that commission.