Kenan and Kel.

In my heady school days, it was common for rumours to reverb around the schoolyard. These rumours could be localised (a common theme was that two teachers of the same sex were co-habiting, or that a particular pupil was a test-tube baby) or international in scale.

The most ambitious and enduring form of the latter was the rumour that Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell, stars of a hit US television show called, imaginatively, 'Kenan and Kel', had been killed in a car accident in the late 90s.

This struck a chord with friends and I, as the show had been very popular with high school children. It operated on the simple 'dumb and dumber' format, with Kenan, a reasonably intelligent, overweight, constantly scheming teenager leading his less intelligent, and orange soda-addicted (a popular recurring sequence in the show was for Kel to proclaim his love for the soft drink) friend astray. I am unsure where the rumour started, but by the year 2000 most youths in the UK, myself included, believed our comedy heroes to be dead.

I mourned the duo for 18 months, only leaving the house in black, and avoiding orange-coloured drinks, before finding out their death had been a cruel hoax. However, I must admit, as the initial blow of their deaths had lessened with time, I found nagging doubts had begun to form.

The doubts weren't over the fact that the twosome were dead, but rather the manner of their demise. Kenan seemed to me to be more of a contender for coronary disease than dying in a car crash. My reasons for this were two fold - his excessive bulk obviously put him at risk of heart failure, but also, given that he could actually fit behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, his size would surely prohibit any car from going fast enough to engage in a serious crash.

Meanwhile, Kel's much vaunted dependency on orange soda would make him a surefire candidate for diabetes, which I saw as more likely to finish him off than any car related incident. As with Kenan, I also had doubts about his ability to drive a car, as his sugar dependency doubtless made him far too hyper-active to pass a driving test.