How often have you seen the characters in plays and films become howlingly, hog-wimperingly drunk on quantities of alcohol that would not give hiccups to a hamster?

I notice this odd, credibility-straining phenomenon all the time. There was a good example of it this week in Yasmina Reza’s The God of Carnage at Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre, which I review on Page 5 today.

There are four characters on stage who between them drink at most half a bottle of rum (and it’s not Wray and Nephew’s 63 per cent dynamite). Two then proceed to behave in outrageously drunken fashion. Very . . . er, rum.

The explanation, of course, is that members of the acting profession have no understanding of the effects of alcohol since so few of them drink it. And if you believe that . . .