AMANDA Holden obviously championed 79-year-old Paddy Jones and her partner in the finals of Britain's Got Talent, suggesting the final of the talent show should be renamed Pad-D-Day. Can you believe it? Probably with Amanda Holden you can. Crass.
Anyway, to my delight the salsa couple came ninth.
I was asked last week what the D in D-Day stood for and how long the operation lasted. I didn't know - was it Dunkirk? No. Deliverance? Some subscribe to that but in fact the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth came up with the answers.
When this military operation was being planned, the exact date and time wasn't decided upon until the last minute because of weather conditions so the term "D-Day" referred to the estimated 'Day' with the day before known as "D-1", the following day "D 1" until they got a suitable day to launch the operation. "Operation Neptune began on D-Day (June 6 1944) and ended on June 30 1944. By this time, the Allies had established a firm foothold in Normandy," the museum informed me. "Operation Overlord also began on D-Day, and continued until Allied forces crossed the River Seine on 19 August 1944. "The Battle of Normandy is the name given to the fighting between D-Day and the end of August 1944."
The television coverage of the commemorations was moving and to see those old soldiers holding on to younger friends as they marched and struggling to their feet for prayers and the Last Post, made me take a second look at my knee pain. If they can manage, so can I.
It also made me think back to two days in the summer of 1998 and the old British Aerospace Factory at Hatfield, Hertfordshire. I'd travelled 45 minutes north of London to the French village of Ramelle. A sorry sight, shops and
houses blitzed by German bombs, no-one in sight, although I was to see bodies lying in the rubble later that same day.
I'd better explain that this was the set for Second World War movie Saving Private Ryan and I was there at the invitation of production manager (now respected film producer) Mark Huffam.
I was the first and apparently the only reporter to be granted a visit but it came with conditions - no camera and no notebook. This was an exercise in visual memory and I'll never forget the sights and sounds.
Mark took me on to the set. "Some planes are going to pass overhead," he told me. "Don't move when they do - there are cameras everywhere."
At that, two American Mustang fighter aircraft approached, skimming 50 feet above our heads at almost 200 miles an hour. Explosions went off with great belches of flame and dense black smoke rising from the ruins.
The two planes made about three passes and it was a fearful experience; the noise alone rocked my insides. Then the spell was broken.
Mr Spielberg picked up a megaphone: "Thank you, everyone. Let's do it again." During a tea break I had a chance to walk into the set, eerie with muddy, war-torn soldiers, props men, camera operators and Steven Spielberg all coming towards me. He smiled at me - twice. Be still, my beating heart.
I walked past the town patisserie, the remains of a telegraph office, curtains hanging limply out of gaping holes what once held windows. It was wet underfoot - at that time in Northern France the weather was appalling and the mud ankle deep.
My heart almost stopped as I came across a man's body, one leg gone, chest lying open, exposing ribs and windpipe, no head, real bluebottles crawling through jam-smeared innards and entrails lying around. I had to keep reminding myself I was on a film set and these torsos and limbs had been painstakingly made in the hangers that once held the Comet airliner.
There I met the men and women who ran the special-effect departments, an armoury, makeup and costumes. Mark was also associate producer on this film: "If it costs money, I authorise it." His budget was £60 million.
Mark, a direct descendent of the godfather who gave Charles Huffam Dickens his middle name, began life as gamekeeper on an estate in south Belfast, moved to BBC as a runner for local elections then worked his way up the ladder and into the world of international film.
He took me for lunch in the big marquee and where I sat with American and German soldiers, bandaged and bruised from battle, now tucking into curried chicken and banana crumble dessert, their guns and grenades lying beside them on the table.
A familiar looking GI smiled over and waved a greeting. "I know that face." "Tom Hanks," Mark replied.
In the prosthetics department life-sized cows were fashioned with swollen underbellies to recreate the internal gasses which built up as they lay dead in the fields, one even programmed to explode. On another table was a 'dead' sheep and a putrefying horse. Nearby were rows and rows of heads with lifelike faces, eyes staring and lips drawn back in terror.
These were casts taken from the faces of the production crew, destined to end up in the mud and gore of the village where buildings were made of 'oasis' used for dried flowers displays, painted grey to look like house bricks.
Mr Spielberg, who had a director's chair with his name on the back just like in the films, asked solders to crawl over the bridge on their bellies.
They did it three times but it was never quite right so he got down into the gore to show them the painstaking action. They got it right on the next take.
Saving Private Ryan is as accurate a depiction of those horrendous days as you're every likely to experience. I hope it's even more interesting next time you see the movie.
* FIGHTING MEN: Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan - a film that remembers those who lost their lives in the Second World War