I had an enraged call from an officer at Kennet District Council today about a leader I wrote in this week's paper.

I was railing at the fact that the council's aprking attendants had rewarded the BBC Breakfast Time outside broadcast crew for coming to Devizes to promote its pancake race by giving them a parking ticket.

The broadcast van had parked in a disabled bay at 8am to get the best signal from chef Peter Vaughan's bistro. The wardens, using all the common sense of a lemming at Beachy Head, homed in on this transgression and ticketed Auntie Beeb's van while they were on air.

The council officer who rang to complain felt it was unfair of me to call the wardens petty-minded or point out that if the council is going to take that sort of attitude it might as well put up a sign re-directing tourists to Trowbridge.

I asked him whether he thought his wardens had been inflexible or whether they could have checked with their bosses before ticketing a van at 8am on a wet Tuesday morning when it was highly unlikely there would be an influx of disabled shoppers heading into town.

And of course they could have but, he said, they are told to enforce the rules "or we'd have them querying whether to give the tickets all the time".

Well, we couldn't suddenly have fair-minded parking attendants going round giving people the benefit of the doubt willy nilly could we?