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Competition No 3860

Set by Keith Norman, 29 November

You were asked to select a genre and offer risk assessment and insurance advice to the characters.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Pas mal. An hon mensh to Lisbeth Rake for her footnote on wedding insurance: "Policies are invalid if the couple discover they are parent and child or siblings." The winners get [pounds sterling]20 each. The extra Tesco vouchers go to G M Davis.

Information on incident probability for WPCs taking out police soap insurance 85 per cent. Getting pregnant while unmarried--having baby, abortion.

70 per cent. Marrying colleague, then discovering: he's a murderer, thief, gambler, drunk.

60 per cent. Lost son turning up, undisclosed, as vile-natured junior bent on ruining your career.

60 per cent. Daughter kidnapped--Pit and Pendulum-style countdown: imprisoned in stifling container, tied to railway line, given lethal pills.

65 per cent. Catfight with female officer--lesbian relationship.

70 per cent. Rape by superior.

75 per cent. Getting hooked on hard drugs.

75 per cent. Caught covering up crime, committing crime, falling in love with criminal.

75 per cent. Going on the game--to repay debts.

80 per cent. Injury at work--stabbed, shot, blown up, burned in station fire started by disgruntled ex-policeman, run down by crook's car, paralysed in traffic accident, in terrorist gas or biochemical attack.

85 per cent. Victim--of stalking, mugging, domestic violence.

90 per cent. Mental breakdown--from persistent over-emoting, bursting into tears.

95 per cent. Serious hair failure--frizzing, splitting from constant overbleaching.

ANNE DU CROZ

Women in soap operas enjoy enhanced fertility, and a single sexual encounter is liable to result in pregnancy. Provision could be made for this (but because women in soaps are also flighty and impetuous it may be hard to persuade them).

Soap women should beware handsome, sincere men who treat them with respect--they will be global fraudsters or homicidal maniacs. Women will be better off with cheery, cynical bullshitters who simply exploit them and make them unhappy.

Symbolic castration tends to be the fate of men in soaps, whether from faithless wives and nagging mothers-in-law (Ken Barlow/Corrie), psychotic daughters (Alan Turner/Emmerdale) or all men and women alike (Terry/Emmerdale). The only escape is to be ruthlessly evil, like Mike Baldwin (Corrie) or the late Chris Tate (Emmerdale).

Basic soap safeguard: take no one into your confidence--ever.

G M DAVIS

If in an "olde worlde" village/market town-thatched cottages, Norman church, mansion/manor house, etc:

1. Never work in a privately owned library. The noise--people murdered, corpses found, denouements--will be a distraction.

2. The renunciation of any title will vastly increase your chances of survival. Lord Edgware dies; Mr Edgware generally does not.

3. Be discriminatingly wary of domestic staff. Butlers are too obviously suspect to do anything. But every maid is in love with a cad for whom she will do anything.

4. If a murder is committed and the investigation is dominated by an amateur sleuth deducing, rather than a professional team forensicing, leave discreetly but furtively, especially if he has a cod foreign accent and is hamming it up all over the place as if he was the chairman of the Bacon Marketing Board. There will be at least one more victim before dilettantism and deduction solve the crime. It could be you.

5. Avoid the vicarage. Your life is as safe there as socialist idealism would be at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

6. Remember that, statistically, Brixton and Handsworth are safer than St Mary Mead.

J SEERY

No 3863 Set by Margaret Rogers

"So--what did you do for Christmas?" An innocent question. Let's have some real answers. Shock us with the truth.

Max 150 words by 13 January.

E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk