WE'LL be bombing Iraq by Christmas; your house'll burn down and no one will lift a finger; Osama bin Laden still haunts us with his ghostlike bearded face; the Royal Family is on the verge of abolishing itself; you can't even head a football without dying a tragically premature death.

Abroad, though, life this week has been far more entertaining...

IN the Queen's Speech, the British Government, for a record sixth consecutive year, announced it was getting really tough on anti-social behaviour. The Danish authorities, though, have cracked the problem without legislation. They've been playing Mozart's Don Giovanni organ music at full volume in the entrances to Copenhagen railway station. The alcoholics and drug addicts who used to hang around the station being anti-social couldn't take any more after two days and left.

BRITAIN'S graffiti is just run-of-the-mill cheap felt-tip pen swear-words, usually mis-spelt in an eloquent testimony to our education system.

In Paris, they do things with a little more lan. A rash of highly-polished, beautifully-inscribed metal plaques has started appearing on buildings, mimicking official plaques that note the birthplace or residence of someone extremely famous.

But these plaques say things like: "On April 17, 1967, nothing happened here." Or they mark the birthplace of an entirely fictitious computer programmer or civil servant.

THE Queen's Speech hinted that the British Government is still considering top-up fees for university students. America is ahead on this one, and students from poorer families are struggling to find the £7,000-a-year tuition fees.

So farmers in Missouri are paying for their offsprings' education in pork chops, sausages, bacon and spare ribs. Sally Bruns' two years at Lindenwood University have so far cost her parents about 50 pigs.

Most British parents worry that their children simply consume beer and pot noodles while at university, but Sally's parents know that her hall of residence is offering good wholesome fare.

"We're proud of that too," said Sally's mother Elaine. "You bet."

EVEN TV abroad is better. Russian TV this week announced that the prize in a forthcoming gameshow will be a week in space. The cameras will follow 16 contestants as they go through gruelling physical and psychological tests, with the least fit person being voted off each week. The one left at the end will be, at a cost of £1.26m, blasted up in a Soyuz rocket for seven days on Mir, the international space station.

British TV should follow such an example. They should put into a rocket Paul Burrell, Andy Gilchrist, Roy Keane, Michael Jackson, those sinister characters that advertise Coca-Cola on The Premiership and anyone who has ever mentioned the words "regional assembly" and blast it off.

Viewers would choose the order in which these unsavoury oddities would be forced to leave the capsule, although Michael Jackson would obviously have to go first because he'd start melting when the rocket neared the sun.