Related:

• The Least Successful Animal Rescue The firemen's strike of 1978 made possible one of the great animal rescue attempts of all time.
  Valiantly, the British Army had taken over emergency firefighting and on 14 January they were called out by an elderly lady in South London to retrieve her cat which had become trapped up a tree....
• The Least Successful Defrosting Device The all-time record here is held by Mr.
  Peter Rowlands of Lancaster whose lips became frozen to his lock in 1979 while blowing warm air on it....
• The Worst Car Hire Service When David Schwartz left university in 1972, he set up Rent-a-wreck as a joke.
  Being a natural prankster, he acquired a fleet of beat-up shabby, wreckages waiting for the scrap heap in California....
• Largest Number of Driving Test Failures By April 1970 Mrs.
  Miriam Hargrave had failed her test thirty-nine times....
• The Worst Prison Guards The largest number of convicts ever to escape simultaneously from a maximum security prison is 124.
  This record is held by Alcoente Prison, near Lisbon in Portugal....
• The Poet Whose Badness Saved His Life The most important poet in the seventeenth century was George Wither.
  Alexander Pope called him "wretched Wither" and Dryden said of his verse that "if they rhymed and rattled all was well"....
• Old Ladies Two old ladies were waiting for a bus and one of them was smoking a cigarette.
  It started to rain, so the old lady reached into her purse, took out a condom, cut off the tip and slipped it over her cigarette and continued to smoke....
• The Least Successful Police Dogs America has a very strong candidate in "La Dur", a fearsome looking schnauzer hound, who was retired from the Orlando police force in Florida in 1978.
  He consistently refused to do anything which might ruffle or offend the criminal classes....
• Failed Attempts To Break Records In September 1978 Mr.
  Terry Gripton, of Stafford, failed to break the world shouting record by two and a half decibels....