Saturday night at eight o’clock discovered me not at the films but at the Cinema Museum, a surprise gem near the Oval cricket ground in South London, situated in a previous workhouse which was briefly home to the young Charlie Chaplin after his mom fell on tough times.

Truth be informed, I south of the river. As Dave, from the Winchester Club, alerted Arthur Daley: ‘Great deal of extremely wicked people’ in Sarf Lunnon.

Coincidentally, the celebration was a one-man show by my old mate George Layton, actor, director, scriptwriter, author, whose finest hour - a minimum of to my mind - was playing Des, the dodgy automobile mechanic in Minder.

George read from his collection of brief stories embeded in the 1950s, when he was growing up in post-war Bradford. They’re perfectly written, warm, amusing, evocative, a piece of history, a working-class version of Richmal Crompton’s Just William experiences.

The storylines are based upon the trials and adversities of a young boy being brought up by a single mother - an unconventional family life at that time, regretfully only too typical today. The Fib And Other Stories has remained in print because 1975 and discovered its way on to the school curriculum, where it remains today.

I can’t assist wondering, though, how often these marvelous texts are used in class nowadays, in between teachers packing their pupils’ little heads with fashionable far-Left propaganda about ‘white advantage’, manifest destiny and, obviously, climate modification.

The kids in the monochrome school photograph which formed the background to George’s reading were definitely white, but no one could have described them as privileged. Those were the days when ‘austerity’ implied living from hand to mouth, not having to choose a standard 50in flat screen TV, instead of a 65in OLED Ultra design, and only having the ability to afford an iPhone 14 instead of the newest all-singing, all-dancing AI version.

Child poverty was real, bread-and-dripping, holes-in-your-shoes things, not dining on Deliveroo and reluctantly wearing last season’s Nike trainers.

Until the digital/social media revolution, kids acquired their knowledge primarily from books, writes Littlejohn

In the 1950s, kids experienced authentic hardship, not the hardship of aspiration and creativity which blights this generation, through no fault of their own. Today, kids live via their smart phones, instead of strolling complimentary and experiencing life to the complete.

Until the digital/social media transformation, children got their understanding primarily from books. Yes, TV played a huge role, as did the movies, but no place near the supremacy of TikTok and other apps offering pleasure principle in byte-sized portions.

And how can squinting at the most recent CGI generated smash hit on a cellular phone a few inches broad ever compare to the sort of old-school, cinema, Technicolor and Cinemascope, best-out-of-Hollywood experience commemorated at the Cinema Museum?

It can’t. Just as the best pictures are stated to be on the radio, even much better pictures can be discovered in the printed word.

Among the most depressing things I have actually checked out recently was the author Anthony Horowitz complaining the fact that his 300-page books are far too long to engage the shorter attention periods of today’s kids.

Not surprising that kid, and certainly adult, literacy levels have actually plunged amazingly. All this has added to the shocking revelation that white, working class students - young boys in particular - are being left. Even Labour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has actually been forced to admit they have actually been ‘betrayed’ by the contemporary schools system.

They suffer from a lack of adult participation and ensuing scarceness of goal. The white, working class young boy in George Layton’s stories definitely didn’t suffer any parental disregard from his domineering mum. Nor did he do not have imagination or aspiration.

Education was the method out of hardship. It produced eloquent wordsmiths like George, in post-war Bradford - and our own dear Keith Waterhouse, late of this parish, who matured in poverty in nearby pre-war Leeds.

Literacy is the best gift we can bestow on any child. My grandmas taught me to check out before I went to school, setting me on the early roadway to a fulfilling profession at the wordface rather than the relative drudgery of the office.

George Layton is thinking about taking his one-man show on the roadway, to little provincial theatres. I have actually got a much better concept.

If the Education Secretary wishes to reverse the betrayal of white, working class kids she could start by getting the phone and inviting George to visit schools, checking out from his narratives.

I honestly believe that if they might be encouraged to look up from their mobiles for an hour, they ’d be enthralled and motivated by the adventures of a young boy not that various to them, in spite of the range in decades.

You never ever understand, there may even be another Charlie Chaplin amongst them.

When they’re not tasering one-legged 92-year-old males or nicking people for posting hurty words on the internet, the police are significantly taking sidelines to supplement their income.

Some are working as painters and decorators, others as scaffolders nand shipment chauffeurs. More intriguingly, sidelines likewise include a DJ (PC Hammer, anybody?) and a reiki trainer, whatever that is.

My favourites are beekeeper and kickboxing coach, although the copper running a tea store needs to take the biscuit.

It’s also reported that some officers are working as grocery store checkout assistants. I don’t suppose there’s any danger of them nicking a few shoplifters.

Mind how you go.

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Couple in their 70s who bought a child from a stranger are selfish in the severe

First the frogs, now the octopuses The illegal migrant armada crossing the Channel daily may turn out to be the least of our problems. We now find out that a fleet of foreign octopuses from the Med is devouring crab stocks off the coast of Devon and Cornwall and threatening to put regional anglers out of organization.

It’s bad enough French trawlers hoovering up our fish without migrant molluscs assisting themselves to what’s left.

We’re likewise told that parakeets from India and Pakistan are an ‘unstoppable intrusive species’ having left into the wild and are colonising cities as far afield as Plymouth and Aberdeen. No doubt we’ll be putting them up in the nearby Holiday Inn in the past long.

Which’s before I get to the buzzard that’s been dive-bombing kids in a school playground in Romford, Essex. Where the hell did that come from?

We have actually got enough trouble with home-grown Stuka-style pigeons without importing kamikaze buzzards.

Take Labour’s ‘aspiration’ to spend a worthless three percent of GDP on defence by the year 2525 with a shovel-load of Maldon’s finest. The method Rachel From Complaints is taxing the economy to death, there won’t be any GDP left in a few years’ time. And three per cent of things all is still stuff all.

AN NHS surgeon who compared Islamist terrorists to the Nazis has actually been struck off. If he ’d said the very same about those people who wish to leave the European yuman rites convention, Surkeir would have made him Attorney general of the United States.

Having recently claimed that the initial ancient Britons were black, the woke revisionists now allege the Vikings were Muslims. Don’t these individuals ever take a day off?