ENGLAND 2 (MONKEYS), GERMANY 0

The credit crunch has obviously reached our criminal fraternity. As law-abiding people flog their jewels to keep themselves afloat, villains are having to learn new skills. Such as bending very thick metal bars very quietly, and handling wild animals.

Both came in useful the other day when thieves nicked two rare squirrel monkeys from Cotswold Wildlife Park in Oxfordshire, risking nasty bites and gouges and God knows what in the way of diseases. So I guess they won't be selling them on for peanuts.

Our thieves must be better planners than those in Germany. Die Polizei are this week hunting three would-be supermarket raiders who were thwarted by a cashier pelting – and hitting – them with ripe gorganzola cheeses, and an armless man who walked out of a shop with a 24-inch TV clamped to his body.

In the second case, two accomplices apparently clamped the TV on to the thief. But shop staff didn’t realise until they found an empty stand and looked at their CCTV footage.

Did no one in the street see him and ask him why? Or at least if he could stand still while they watched Die Lose Frauen? Did no one run up and offer to help? Or at least unclamp it and run off? Did the accomplices slip a remote control into his pocket? And if so, why?

So many questions. Yet both cases should prove a doddle for German police: Follow that smell! in the first, and Find the walking TV stand! in the latter.

I reckon even dead old Taggart could solve those.

But, conversely, could Inspecktor Von Morse find our monkeys? I doubt it. Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?