"Alright?" asks Barry Michaelmore. "Yes thanks you murderer," we reply. Food and Drink's Michael Barry - his conscience is clean.   Writer: By cat amongst the pigeons writer Chiltern Scarp, who always watches his back, but never washes it.

Post Barrymortem.

Chiltern Scarp looks cautiously back over his shoulder at the incidents involving entertainer Barry Michaelmore and the death of the butcher who was found face down and fucked up at the ex-star’s house in Poole, in his bum, on March 2001.

The jury’s open verdict on the cause of the dead man’s gay death was as if to say ‘inconclusive’, which apparently some of them did. However here at Idiotica we reckon there’s piles of proof not only in the man’s bottom but also in a big bin bag we found abandoned on Beak Street to suggest the contrary – a closed verdict. A verdict of not so sure.

The bag, black in colour and made of thin plastic, could not be mistaken. It was rotten, smelling and dirty – just like Michaelmore himself – and inside it we found:

• Traces of coke – the very stuff Mr Michaelmore denies rubbing into Mr Lummox’s bum.

• A 100 metres swimming badge – Mr Michaelmore’s defence claimed he “could not swim yesterday and cannot swim today”. But according to this he could swim 35 years ago, although it seems he couldn’t sew.

• An early draft of the star’s GMTV speech – which says “You can call me a killer, that’s up to you. Just don’t say I’m a lousy entertainer” - which he later transposed.

• A Polaroid photograph of the ITV star laughing his head off as if nothing had happened.

• A copy of Attitude with Pat Butcher on the front – a sign not only that Barry had succumbed to the big gay fashion for liking butcher men (as reported exclusively in Idiotica) – but also bizarrely prophesying what Michaelmore would later go on and bloody well maybe do – pat a butcher, in the arse, with his fist.

With this big man-sized tissue full of blood and evidence mounting up here outside our front door, we don’t need a coroner to tell us what we already know: that while in Mr Michaelmore’s care, Mr Lummocks became the victim of some very heavy petting in his deep end. But whether this bloody bum mess was administered by Mr Michaelmore himself remains to be proved, although in the words of his brother, the BBC Food and Drink star Barry Michael: “Yeah, I reckon he definitely did it.”

Barrymore or less?

With the top, middle and bottom almost certainly falling out of his career, how often can we expect Barry Michaelmore to work after this? Spokesmen for ITV1 are keeping tight lips, gritty teeth and clenched bums but at ITV2 rumours abound about a series of programmes scheduled for next Michaelmas including:

• My Kind of Peephole
• Strike it Ducky
• I Snort the Funniest things

A biography entitled Bumming Away By Myself is also rumoured to be in someone’s pipeline, although probably not his estranged wife Cheryl’s, because she’s not a gay man, but he is.