Brian Reade.

Crippled, shaking, magnificent

I Spent the early hours of Saturday morning in the company of greatness. With two old men, David Coleman and Muhammad Ali, who kept me up until the fat milkman whistled and sent me to bed drained.

The Atlanta Olympics opening ceremony moved from the ordinary to the extraordinary and ended up being one of the most emotional televised events of recent years. It made our Euro '96 curtain-raiser look like a Brownies' fair after Brown Owl had run off with Akela and taken all the cakes.

It made the last US opening ceremony, Los Angeles '84, look like the vulgar, soulless, Hollywood disaster movie it was. This time America dug deep and found nobility.

And the reason it found it was summed up perfectly by Coleman, who once again opened his larynx and showed his class: "After a hundred years, the first games are held in a city where most of the people are black. And there's a feeling of buoyancy, elation and pride."

Coleman's been doing the Olympics for 36 years. He's 70 now, but he's still a legend who effortlessly pours authority, emotion and poetry into the most mundane of phrases.

He speaks in capital letters. And when he shouts in them, you know it's a big moment.

Such a moment arrived just after dawn when, along with three billion other humans, we set eyes on the man who 30 years ago had the third most famous face on the planet after Jesus Christ and Mickey Mouse. And is now a shell.

"LOOK. IT'S MU-HAMM-AD A-LI. WHAT A MO-MENT."

Coleman's words lingered in the warm Atlanta air as we took in the sight of Ali, struggling with the torch, his left hand shaking horribly. The same left that tore away the souls of Liston, Frazier and Foreman. A left that said more about the brutal beauty of boxing than a million columns from conscientious objectors.

For eight seconds he faltered, then triumphed, then stood there, his puffed-up face frozen with a crippling illness, yet defiantly proud.

He'd beaten the odds again, and the words of Atlanta's favourite son, Martin Luther King, which had earlier boomed across the stadium, flooded back. The ones about a dream.

And then it was back to our commentator, and a moment I'd spent four hours waiting for - a Colemanball.

"So now, in the words of the Greeks, LET THE COMPETITION BEGIN."

The Greeks never said it, but you knew what he meant.

No sweat for Dr Jane

This year Jane Seymour picked up a Best Actress Golden Globe for her performance in Dr Quinn: Medicine Woman.

Unbelievable. This is a woman even her admirers refer to as an "English Rose" because they can't bear to cheapen the word actress. A woman with two looks: Clean and beautiful, and clean and concerned.

The way I remember it, when The West was won the women looked like covered wagons, but our Jane is a walking bar of Lux amid a posse of armpits that reek to High Noon.

She's the only woman in the entire 19th-Century to have mascara and the only person since Creation to have a scalp that naturally produces shampoo and conditioner and blow-dries itself while men and cattle die of thirst.

Oh - and she never cures anyone. She just stands there glowing next to a Chippendale, looking beautiful, clean and concerned.

There's a saying: Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow and Jane Seymour has her pores glued at Harvey Nichols.

She is The Little House Of Estee Lauder On The Prairie.

BEAUTY AND A BEAST

PAGE 3 - A Celebration provided, without doubt, the sight of the week.

As a confident, suave voice boomed: "Page 3 girls really are unbelievably unsexy" the camera revealed a face that in a good light resembles The Pillsbury Dough Man after a bad accident in the oven. Yes, Michael Winner.

O Man, but it's awful

In A desperate attempt to escape Planet Tarbuck, I switched channels on Saturday night and heard an ageing albino-like chap screaming through the side of his mouth: "Welcome back to Man O Man, and an audience of 300 women."

Ah, I thought, so the viewing figures are out - but then realised Chris Tarrant was talking about the dizzy tarts in the audience who watch 10 sad men confuse the word "personality" with break-dancing, working out and self-love.

This week they were summed up by a contestant christened Christopher by his parents, who, to attract more attention ditched the first part of his name and called himself Topher.

He reckoned that summed up his anarchic character to a tee.

I hear this stems from the original Scandinavian version of the show, where all the men called Lars, dropped the first part of their name and called themselves Ars.

Now that really does sum up everyone connected with Man O Man.

More like a funny Farm

The Dingles have been a breath of pungent air down on Emmerdale, but it's getting a bit silly. The male members of the tribe have turned into The Three Stooges, and everyone's getting smacked into cow pats.

The entire cast has undergone total character transformations, (except Alan Turner, who had no character to transform).

It got to the point where Seth Armstrong played agony aunt to a suicidal Kim Tate: "Tha' owny gets one chance lass, so don't throw it away," he said.

And that from a man who had clearly seized all life's chances, which was why he was standing there, clutching a dead rabbit, with a forest of facial hair covering the saddest face in Christendom.

Don is on his last leg

There are a few tragic sights down at Coronation Street these days.

The white tape on Jack Duckworth's glasses, Ken Barlow trying to knock years off by dressing in denim and The Weatherfield Cowboy - Pogo Don.

Pogo is now pushing the door open on every shop and saloon in the street, forcing the owners to sink beneath the counter as he rants on about being a loser. He needs a bullet pretty soon.

And when he goes, they must use Kevin Webster's brilliant description of him as an epitaph:

"He's nowt but a stupid, useless, incompetent get."

His banal fawning all over the Queen in Happy Birthday, Ma'am was bad enough. But his unspeakable grovelling around John Major on News At Ten was in a different class. Next time, I hope ITN put a red nose and a clown's costume on their top anchorman and change his name to Ronald McDonald.