Mark Daniels: Supermarkets - out of sight, out of mind

I would like to go on record as being a bit of a lightweight. It doesn't take me very many drinks at all to get utterly drunk and, as I really don't like vomiting in to my Homer Simpson slippers, I tend to just stop drinking when I feel I've had enough.

Then I just fall asleep. And snore. The thought of being able to swing a punch wildly in the face of a police officer just doing his job or, indeed, getting my reproductive organs to even twitch is something of an impossibility.

This does mean that, no matter how many glasses of red wine my wife has, her sex life isn't going to be quite as good as reports last week might have suggested, and a night on the tiles on Yorkshire Street in Oldham is simply an anathema to me.

If, however, you watched Monday night's Panorama​ you could be forgiven for thinking that everybody-in-the-whole-wide-world goes out in Oldham, gets utterly blasted, punches taxi-rank officials and then gets in to a car with a complete stranger to be physically abused.

Now, before I get shot down in flames for being irresponsible, I am not - in any way - demeaning the BBC's programming. Nor the good people of Oldham, my step-mother's home town. I found Monday's show fascinating. My best friend is a police man and he backs up one of the statements made on the show - Oldham isn't the only place to suffer from drunken misbehaviour.

And I think that the approach being tested by the council is quite, um, unique.

It also highlights the British propensity for queuing. We are a nation of queuers. Sure, we moan like crazy about it, but go anywhere and the only people standing neatly in line will be the British. Last week, on a family trip to Madame Tussauds, we all queued patiently, waiting our turn. The only people to push by us were a bunch of foreign school children on a trip.

Yesterday afternoon, I took the kids to Hunstanton beach and had to sit in a queue for the car park. The only car to bully its way passed was a 1989 Vauxhall Nova with an exhaust larger than a Ferrari's, driven by a testosterone-fuelled teenager who hasn't learned the benefits of queuing yet.

The suggestion of queuing for your beer, and being limited to only two drinks per queuer, is therefore an ingenious, if slightly annoying, solution. But the bar it was in seemed, at least on my telly, to be somewhat devoid of atmosphere. And it highlighted a rather ominous future, as far as I'm concerned:

How long before we are faced with a digital display in our village pubs that announces "Barmaid number three, please"? It makes me shudder at the thought.

But what did make my blood boil during the show was the somewhat lackadaisical view of the supermarket's involvement in the problem of drinking. Vicky, Beth and Ella all highlighted the issues of pre-loading, purchasing a litre bottle of vodka and a carton of orange juice for about 3p - and then announcing that they would probably drink it all between three or four of them, before they went out on the town.

The Government's current consultation in to the retail of alcohol, as I pointed out in in my last blog​, states that they don't believe pre-loading - or purchasing from supermarkets - is a problem in the weekend binge-drinking stakes, yet here was a high-profile BBC documentary clearly showing exactly what happens.

Tony Allen, from Oldham Council, stated that supermarkets don't fall under their new watchful eye on alcohol retail because the effect of their sales are not seen on, or around, the immediate vicinity of their premises. In other words, they aren't responsible.

That's a sort of beer-goggles way of saying that, when it comes to supermarkets selling alcohol, they're out of sight and out of mind.

Indeed, Oldham does appear to have a drink problem. But, as my friend in the police force points out, it happens in his town too. And in many other towns around the country. And nobody can argue that bars offering irresponsible deals such as all you can drink for £5.99 in order to beat competition need to be reigned in.

But is queuing for your beer really the solution? Or making the licensee pay £45 an hour for police officers to be on site? No more, it isn't, than pretending that the supermarkets aren't part of the problem...