It's the custom for Spanish TV presenters to hold a stack of crib cards and work their way through them. This reeks of old technology, if that is the word, and it's amusing to see what happens when they lose track of where they are. It’s hard to understand why they don’t – like the newsreaders - use an autocue. One theory I have is that, since the audience always sits behind the presenters, the director doesn’t want to run the risk of someone reading the autocue and shouting out the would-be witty commentary in advance.

A couple of months ago, I recorded that, in bullfighting, the markings used (in the Culture section of newspapers) range from ‘A Silence’ all the way up to ‘Two ears and the Tail’ - taking in An Ovation, One Ear, and Two Ears along the way. Well, the Spectator’s bullfighting correspondent [Yes, there is one] has said that there are also ‘light applause’, ‘whistles’ and ‘rage’. This is on the part of the crowd, of course, and not the newspaper correspondent. Or the bull. I’m not sure which is worse for a bullfighter – rage or studied silence - but I do know that, at this stage of the proceedings, the bull couldn’t care less.