FLOREY-FLEMING feud dreamed up by a bunch of bored press agents in a bar , to cover fact that both Brits screwed up penicillin

Who, besides atheists and the BBC,  produces hagiographies any more ?

BBC FOUR's "BREAKING THE MOULD" is - intellectually - filmed through reverential gauze, with blessed petroleum jelly on the lens for added good measure, only this time it is penicillin pioneer Howard Florey it is busy beatifying when earlier BBC types did the same for  another penicillin pioneer, Alec Fleming.

A matter of redress , the producers claim.

But actually, the supposed FLOREY-FLEMING rivalry and highly public "feud" , on matters where it really counted for the lives of the dying millions, never ever existed.

It always had more than a whiff of Hollywood press agent handiwork about it - a feud dreamed up by a menage a trois of Hedda Hooper, Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell.

Summer '44 : Dodgers stiff , but Brooklyn shines in extended roadtrip : Omaha, Utah, Juno , Gold & Silver : more than just a tree grows green in Brooklyn ...

I am not saying such a headline ever appeared in a Brooklyn newspaper after it was learned that 90% of the penicillin that saved so many lives on D-Day was the naturally green stuff grown in the Brooklyn plant of Pfizer  --- but won't it be a great succinct prose poem if it had ?