ABSTRACT
Limited resources can engender ingenuity. This does not have to be the fraud that led an Anglophile on the New York Times to refer to the padding of expenses by a White House aide in the tradition of Watergate as ‘double Billingsgate’. Nor does it have to be centred on the cynicism that leads to the view of jewellery as an insurance policy as in ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Rather it can stimulate the creativity which led script writers Denis Norden and Frank Muir to respond to a request for the return of a cheque mistakenly sent to them by the BBC. Seeking the exact language of dead officialdom which would quell any further requests, they successfully responded with, ‘We regret we have no machinery for the returning of cheques’.
