THE only thing wrong with the No Excuse campaign is that we all want to smile when we hear daft ones, don’t we?

If someone rings in late for work, for example, you secretly hope that, instead of telling you they are caught in a jam on the Spur Road, they’ll confess that their false teeth fell out, puncturing their water bed and flooding their bedroom.

And you can then say: “What sort of excuse do you call that?”

There was once a case of a parking ticket being challenged because, it was claimed, a parrot inside the car had knocked a resident’s permit off the dashboard. (“Who’s a silly boy then?”) When people break the law in moving vehicles, however, the stakes are much higher. For a moving car is a deadly weapon.

And your jaw drops when you hear some of the ridiculous explanations that Dorset road users offer to excuse their asinine behaviour.

I’m in no position to take a ‘holier than thou’ attitude and may have a degree of sympathy for the driver who, foolishly, took her hands off the wheel when an insect was buzzing round her.

But it is hard to comprehend what ludicrous “Duh!” thought process led a bike rider to take both hands off the handlebar in order to give a double thumbs-up to a friend.

The big question now is whether the No Excuse campaign is working. It began in January but 5,000 motorists have been nabbed in the past three months. So are people who drive dangerously getting the message and heeding it?

Excuses can be amusing... until you come across the scene of a tragic accident.

And, suddenly, no-one’s smiling.