Grant Sanders, head of Stevenage-based ProxyHolidays, said he had the idea on a recent trip to Paris. ‘I was queuing to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, and I couldn’t help noticing how bored everyone looked. When they finally reached the front, they held up their mobiles to get a picture and then moved on to photograph something else without even having a proper look.’

With his contacts, Grant was able to recruit an army of tour reps who could hold up a mobile anywhere in the world to photograph buildings, scenery, statues, restaurants and airport lounges. A big advantage is being able to mix destinations, perhaps switching to Las Vegas when bored with Pompeii, without the inconvenience of a long flight in between.

‘Our service is totally flexible: you can send us a mobile of your own or you can rent one through us,’ said Grant. ‘You can even upgrade to the latest model at very reasonable rates. Many people just leave us to get on with their holiday while they enjoy themselves at home, but some do like to get more involved, and for them we have an interactive wall where they can hold up their mobiles up and receive pictures direct from the reps.’

While the service was initially aimed at sightseeing breaks, the company has experienced considerable demand for a beach holiday alternative, and now issues a free bag of sand to scatter around the bedroom floor and inside clothes for an authentic experience.

The company says the great thing about proxy holidays is the lack of arguments and not feeling exhausted by the travel. ‘You just spend your time getting pissed and eating takeaways, and you can get away from annoying mates or family members whenever you need to. And to complete the service, we can Photoshop all the pictures you take of each other into the ones we have taken for you.’

‘Simply install a new electronic till in a pub and, in minutes, the entire staff will be gathered around it, staring it as if waiting for aliens to emerge from the mothership,’ said MD Fee Brewer.

‘These days in the hotel and catering trade, the name of the game is ignoring the customers, so the brewery can shut down the pub and convert it into flats,’ said Brewer. ‘And nothing gets the staff gathered in one place, scratching their heads, like a new electronic till.’

The Instant Paralysis (IP) 700 will delight techies, who love the challenge of trying to figure out a till, to the backdrop of thirsty customers trying to catch their attention. And it will empower BTB (behind-the-bar) jobsworths, giving them one powerful reason not to serve the punters.

‘You no longer have to avoid eye contact, or dementedly stack glasses, in order to disappoint customers,’ said Brewer, ‘the IP 700 will close your pub down in minutes.’

This is thought to be the first time that everything has actually been sold in such a sale and is being acclaimed as a sign of economic recovery with Mrs Bentley, 68, becoming something of a retail heroine.

Mrs Bentley made the final purchase, a fuchsia cashmere cardigan, on a visit to Exeter with her friends from the Tiverton Women’s Institute. ‘It was a bit of an impulse buy, really,’ she told a BBC camera crew. ‘We popped in there on our way to visit the cathedral and grabbed the last few items left. My friend Mavis had the last box of Highland shortbreads and I got the cardie.’

Shop manager Irene Wilson admitted she was rather taken aback by her now empty shop. ‘It was like a plague of grey-haired locusts descending upon the place.’ she said. ‘We’ve had all sorts of sales in the past: stocktaking sales, refit sales and, of course, ‘everything must go’ sales but in the past we have always had plenty of stock left over, which we put into store ready for the following sale a week or two later.’

As retail experts remained at a loss to explain why this Exeter store should have been singled out for shopping history, Mrs Wilson said she was confident that it was the radical use of the work ‘Mega’ in her promotional posters.

The hi-tech system is intended to bring those living on the high street in line with High Street retailers, who switched to the system in 2005. From the weekend, homeless people and other beggars will have to use special portable card readers in order to obtain payment from passers-by and good Samaritans. The Association for Payment Clearing Service says that the chip & pin will deliver greater convenience and an overall better giving experience for the consumer.

George Gilbert, a 43-year old homeless man from Newport, says he welcomes the system; ‘It’s the future, isn’t it? What people forget about being homeless is that it’s all about moving with the times, or being moved on generally.’

However, not all homeless people are so excited about the change. Corky McDonagh, a 37 year old down-and-out, of no-fixed abode, feels the new system has been crowbarred upon vagrants without proper consultation: ‘They keep saying we’re hard to get hold of,’ he explains, ‘but I’m under that bridge most nights. The main reason I became a hobo in the first place was the absence of unnecessary paperwork, that and the chronic alcoholism.’

Fellow rough sleeper Big Mick Ellis agrees and says, ‘I’m not looking forward to the new system to be honest. I’m pretty much a one-man operation, so I’m not really geared up to deal with the extra admin this is going to bring. I‘ve considered bringing in another destitute person to deal with the back office stuff, but its so hard to find a person who‘s the right fit. It always seems to end in a drunken fistfight over who’s got the most blanket.’

McDonagh adds: ‘I’m thinking of giving up the whole begging lifestyle, it’s just becoming too bureaucratic. The difficulty is that if you are looking for a similar career – where you have the freedom to come and go as you please, and do as little as possible – then your options are very limited. Still, if I end up becoming a postman I‘ll just have to make the best of it’

The example of George Bailey, the kind-hearted and altruistic proprietor of Bailey Savings & Loan, provides glaring proof of how the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. For years, the quiet and unassuming town of Bedford Falls has had only one source of contention – the rivalry between generous lender and lenient collector, George Bailey, and the miserly millionaire banker, Henry Potter. By all accounts, the majority of Bedford Falls’ citizens consider Potter an unrepentant villain. Potter himself offers no apologies and openly criticizes Bailey for his lack of business acumen and lax lending standards.

‘It’s cliche, but I’m misunderstood,’ Potter said. ‘The bucolic people of this town have no concept of legitimate business or how I’m trying to save their miserable nest eggs. George Baily is a reckless subprime lender. That’s the long and short of it.’ As sobering and stark as Potter’s opinions might seem, he makes a valid argument in appealing to the town’s consumers to reconsider the financial lessons learned over the last eight years and to stop dwelling on the sentimental.
‘I don’t even hold George solely accountable,’ Potter went on. ‘He learned everything about business from his father. Both men had never attended a college, let alone pursued advanced degrees in finance. Peter Bailey was not a businessman. That’s what killed him. Oh, I don’t mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals, so-called, but ideals without common sense can ruin this town. Now, you take this loan here to Ernie Bishop. You know, that fellow that sits around all day on his brains in his taxi. You know, I happen to know the bank turned down this loan, but he comes to Bailey and they’re building him a house. Why?’

When asked about this loan, Bailey responded, ‘Well, I handled that. Potter has all the papers there. His [Bishop’s] salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.’

Potter scoffed at the idea that character assessments measured up against real collateral. ‘You see, if you shoot pool with some employee here, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas.’

Given the absence of sufficient regulatory oversight, a situation that has worsened exponentially since the 1990s, Potter has now emerged as a sole voice of reason in a town perilously close to over-leveraging itself. Following today’s news of the additional bank closures, the Federal Reserve announced that it would be approaching Henry Potter for a possible position in the administration. A large number of Bedford Falls’ residents, many of whom previously ranked among Potter’s harshest detractors, have now come out in support of this decision.
Late Friday afternoon, local police reported that George Bailey was taken into protective custody after a failed suicide attempt. Bailey told detectives that with his life insurance policy, he was worth more dead than alive. Unfortunately, and due in large part to his gross mismanagement of funds, his policy’s value had depreciated significantly. It is now estimated at around $15,000, barely enough to purchase a decent casket from Walmart.

BCBass

As banks struggle to get their message across that the granting of finance is a gift from the almighty with only a small penance to pay for the ultimate sin of popping over your agreed overdraft limit, Professor Dawkins’ intervention couldn’t have come at a worse time.

‘We’re being persecuted, and now even our most devout customers are seeing some different sort of light,’ said Lloyds Banking Group Chief Eric Daniels. ‘And now they’re trying to get at me personally. They’re phoning six or seven times a day, leaving nasty messages or sometimes just breathing heavily and hanging up,’ he added, before excusing himself to go to the toilet then sprinting down the corridor, out through the fire escape at the back of the building and running off to catch a flight to hook up with his yacht off the Cap d’Antibes.

Dawkins’ argument has been given renewed prominence with the completely accidental discovery of around 22 billion pounds’ worth of sneakily buried charges by a team of investigators from the Office of Fair Trading. ‘After years of searching we really think we’ve found the holy grail,’ said one of the team. ‘We’d looked everywhere: under the carpet, behind the curtains, even in the jar that Mrs Wilkins of Neasden keeps on the biscuit shelf. Not a sausage, until Professor Dawkins’ wise words led us to look in that little folder she keeps by the side of the bed, the one with seemingly unintelligible notes, from her bank, with ‘statement’ written at the top of each one.

It’s just snowballed from there and now we’re finding evidence pretty much everywhere we look; a treasure trove, a mine of information about how our ancestors lived, how we’ve all lived, right up to my Auntie Dolly who’s sitting right here, crying, because she’s given all her money to an invidious, callous, manipulating sect called HSBC.’

The government may step in but cautioned against regarding the views of Professor Dawkins as the sole truth, urging consumers to read the small print of any deal they entered into carefully and then completely ignore it as irrelevant, as they’ve been quite happy to do in the past.

‘I curse the non-believer Dawkins,’ said strategy chief at Barclays, Hugo Pimm. ’Who is he to highlight a serious raft of issues and open the debate on what I and my fellow bankers should believe and practice in our daily lives? Don’t worry though, we’re not about to launch a wave of reprisal attacks on the public using fundamentalist suicide bankers, or anything like that! We’re not mad, we’re not going to bring chaos to Western society or anything… Oh hang on a minute…’

‘It’s wonderful isn’t it,’ said Chancellor Alistair Darling, basking in the warm glow of the fire, ‘we’ve been scooping up lots and lots of cash in preparation and were supposed to burn it all in one go. Then Mervyn turns up with another £25 billion in hundreds of wheelbarrows and now it’ll probably keep going till Christmas.’

But keeping the cheery atmosphere going is likely be hard unless the right measures are taken in the medium to long term, the Chancellor warned. ‘We’ve run out of toffee apples already – Mervyn, don’t suppose you’ve got any cash?’

‘They know they’ve got the upper hand in negotiations as we can’t afford for the deal to fall through. There was a time when the threat of violence used to grease the wheels, but not anymore. Only the other day I told some bloke that if he didn’t pay up, I’d pull out his wife’s teeth. He told me that was fine, but could I leave her gold crowns as he’d never find any to match.’

With ransom prices in freefall, many kidnappers are becoming victims to the unscrupulous practices that are bringing the profession into disrepute. ‘Some of these cowboys just come along with no regard for protocol,’ reported one captor. ‘When I took that city trader’s daughter, I followed the industry guidelines, sending a legitimate pro-forma ransom demand, in the standard newspaper cutting format.

‘We had an agreement to release her for a hundred grand. Then some joker comes along and tells the parents he’ll release her for seventy-five. Before I know it, we’re in a bidding war and I have to drop thirty large off the asking price just to keep the deal. It shouldn’t be allowed.’

But canny hostages’ relatives are seizing the opportunities offered by the economic downturn to negotiate the best possible deal. ‘When mercenaries took my wife, they sent me a demand for 3million quid to guarantee her safe return,’ said IT magnate William Fence. ‘I told them they were crazy if they thought they were going to get that in this market.

‘I offered 1.8million if she came back with her roots done and a boob job. Ultimately, we couldn’t agree terms, so they dropped her off a bridge, which saved me paying someone else to do it – just goes to show that the great deals are out there, you just have to be prepared to haggle.’