Frivolous Academic ‘Cheese Butty’ Research Hit

The New Labour government’s Ministry for Wasting Time & Money has come under attack from the Tories – yet again - for commissioning academic research into such insane project studies as how to make the perfect cheese toastie sandwich – and - is sword-swallowing actually dangerous? – does torture really hurt to the point of an ‘Ouch’ factor? – or could a clan of meerkats write a Shakespeare play? - and whether a cartload of monkeys would be able – given sufficient time and money - to build an atomic weapon.

To wit: if you let a troop of monkeys loose in an Aldermaston nuclear laboratory will they eventually come up with a 20 megaton neutron bomb?

Doubtful, as they’ll probably try to eat the fissionable materials then all suffer from radiation poisoning as their hair falls off in clumps and they haemorrhage from every bodily orifice and finally bleed out.

The nuke-building exercise in question was jointly commissioned by the Ministry for Wasting Time & Money with the Israeli and US governments - in concert with Oxford University anoraks and boffins - to test the feasibility that if a troop of chimps could build an atomic bomb then so could the Iranians.

However it apparently took researchers three months and £2,000,000 to find this out – plus having to apologise profusely to Regent Park Zoo’s Primate Department for returning a van load of borrowed chimps in a snuffed state – all tucked up nicely in lead-lined body bags - and glowing in the dark.

Now the Lib-Dem and Tory political opposition parties are demanding changes in how public money is awarded for idiotic university research, and academics will henceforth have to show their research results will be of use to anyone – or their dog.

"Some trivial findings often come out of long-term work on much more serious stuff," claims Fellattia Sodomberg, of the University College Union. “Just look at the quantum breakthrough made by Professor Julius Camembert and his students at Cambridge this summer - the formula for the perfect toasted cheese sandwich – sought after since the time of the Pharaohs – and before."

Now known as the Camembert Formula – and nominated for the Nobel Prize for Snackies – it involves a mathematical equation based on the thicknesses and types of cheese and bread being used – plus toaster timings gauged down to nano-seconds of infra-red heat applied on the ultimate Acklroyde Dynamic heat scale.

The six month research project was jointly funded by the Ministry for Wasting Time & Money and the prestigious British Cheese Council, and carried out by Professor Camembert and his team at Cambridge University’s College of Numpty Dumpty Studies - a fitting sequel to his previous research into the perfect way to dunk a biscuit.

Further down the path of ‘asinine’ research surveys, in July this year, as part of a Department of Education ‘Literary Leap Forward’ experiment - several laptop computers were placed in the meerkat enclosure at Smegmadale Zoo to monitor the lexicological output of the resident Herpestidaes.

The aim was to test the "infinite primate theory", which states that if a curious meerkat hits buttons at random on a pc keyboard for an infinite amount of time, it will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of Shakespeare.

However the theory was slightly flawed in practice as after a month the meerkats had totally destroyed four of the machines, used them as a crapper, and mostly typed the words ‘fuck’ and ‘off’.

Conversely one dominant male had repeatedly rounded on other members of the clan if they came near his laptop, and while definitely not tapping out ‘Hamlet : Part Deux’ – or ‘Lady Macbeth Returns’ – did in fact manage a legible volume titled ‘Harry Potter gets a Parking Ticket’ and composed a startling white paper on how to solve the current financial crisis and heave Britain’s bogged-down arse out of the recession – which is currently being studied and adopted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Reuters stop press: A mystery nuclear explosion at the UK’s Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment last night - which has devastated Berkshire and a fifty mile radius of surrounding counties - including the western portion of the Greater London area - has now been blamed on a suicide hit squad of Jolly Jihadi terrorists who had gained access to the facility’s weapons lab disguised as chimpanzees being used in a research project - who left a one month time-delay detonator coupled to a thermonuclear bomb they'd assembled from discarded tat and bits of scrap dumped in the lab’s recycling bin.