WHATEVER happened to youth clubs? Oh yes I know, I know - the very phrase conjures up images of ping pong, weak orange squash and a terribly enthusiastic leader utterly lacking in street-cred. But many were good and the best were brilliant. And now they seem to have vanished.

Teenagers need somewhere to hang out. With no youth clubs, they'll opt for a bus shelter or even a phone box. Or they take to parks and town centres with cans of lager, cheap cider and a hint of danger.

And once they're 15, they take to the pubs and clubs.

Corby in Northamptonshire has banned under 15s from town centre streets after 9pm. It's easy to understand why. It's easy to see many other towns following suit. No one could blame them.

There are, of course, plenty of brilliant teenagers. Monday night's Positive Young People Awards in Darlington proved that.

But teenagers let loose on the streets are trouble. En masse, even the most innocent can seem terrifying. Some of them would be trouble wherever they were. But there are a lot who end up there because of the lack of anywhere else. Teenagers are essentially pack animals. They need to congregate in groups. They want to meet up with their own kind and town centres and parks are the few places they can do it.

I went to a youth club until I was about 14. We all did. We went to meet boys. Boys went to meet girls. It was a neat system. Ours was a very unorganised arrangement. It was really just a place to meet and listen to music

But other youth clubs have really inspired some people - sportsmen and women, actors, musicians have often had their interest sparked off and fostered by a youth club, someone who took an interest and introduced youngsters to things other than drink or dope.

By the time we were 14, we graduated to coffee bars. They've vanished too. We could sit all evening drinking just enough colas or coffees to pay our way. Again, it was a place to meet, a place to be. And as long as didn't get too loud or disturb the other customers - who were actually spending proper money and eating - we could stay in "our" tables at the back.

Then when we were 17 - and had learnt to behave in public - we hit the pubs.

I doubt if many self-respecting youngsters over the age of 12 would these days willingly go along to something that called itself a Youth Club. But the need is still there. Yes, I know there are sports centres and theatre groups and drama clubs and orchestras which are all very praiseworthy and doing a grand job. But they're all for teenagers who want to DO something.

A lot of them don't want to do anything, not all the time anyway. Many of them might already have had much of their free time organised throughout their childhoods. Now they just want to be - ideally in the company of their peers and maybe loud music and a pool table.

If we want to get young teenagers off the street, then we've got to give them somewhere else to gather en masse in safety.

Time for the youth club again - but this time a 21st Century version.

WELL, you can see why Halle Berry won an Oscar, can't you? I wonder if I was the only one staring aghast and embarrassed at her acceptance performance and yelling "Get a grip woman!"

So how wonderful to see the lovely Jim Broadbent, almost anonymous, muttering and with so little to say for himself except a proud beam.

There aren't many things the British still do well. But I think old-fashioned modesty might be one of them

FIFTEEN-year-old Seb Clover hopes to be the youngest person to sail single handed across the Atlantic when he races his father to the Caribbean later this year.

Bet there's a lad who doesn't spend much time mooching round town centres getting drunk.

The race was apparently Seb's mother's idea and, according to Seb, she has already started worrying. I think he's a brave lad. But to encourage him to go, maybe his mother is even braver.

IT cost £2 million to change the Post Office's name to Consignia - and then the next year they decide to change it back again.

You do wonder, don't you, at the competence of the people at the top of British business. Did they REALLY think it was such a wizard wheeze to abandon the old names, so redolent of years of history and tradition and service, for some made up meaningless tosh that could just as easily have been a chocolate bar, a verrucca cream or a lost property office? Next time they have one of their bright ideas, they could save themselves a fortune and test it out on someone sensible in the real world - a postman, for instance.

If, of course, there are going to be any postmen left....

ACTUALLY, the don who tried to sell a place at Pembroke College, Oxford to a wealthy banker wasn't that far out of line.

Nobody was going to miss out on a place for the "banker's" son (the banker was actually a journalist) as the college would have snuck in an extra place to accommodate him.

So why do not do it legitimately and as a matter of routine? Say ten places are available for the brightest, purely on academic merit. And the eleventh is open to offers. The highest bid wins.

That way, the brightest and best don't miss out and the colleges get a nice fat cheque to improve facilities for everybody. If you're going to have corruption, you might as well make it honest corruption and for the benefit of all.

OK, they needed to do something about the way people drive through Skeeby near Richmond - narrow bridge, nasty bend and a bad accident record. Senior Son was once done for speeding through there and I had no sympathy at all. It's a dangerous place.

But now they have road humps, five sets of them, so badly designed, so awkwardly placed that it's almost impossible to get over them without jarring all the fillings in your teeth and threatening your exhaust.

I needed a few bits of shopping the other day and the thought of driving over those humps put me off. So I drove down to Tesco at Catterick instead.

Good news for Skeeby - but probably not so much for the traders of Richmond.

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