Dialogue: This initial bout might well end in a draw

By JOE BENNETT

And now for the main bout of the evening. In the green corner, ladies and gentlemen, representing the planet, let's hear it for the World Wide Fund for Nature. And in the red corner, representing the right to make money, please show your appreciation for the World Wrestling Federation.

At stake this evening the sole and undisputed rights to the initials WWF.

I presume you've heard the story, and what a cracker it is: two spectacularly antithetical organisations which happen to have the same initials and which understandably don't want to share them with each other.

The World Wide Fund for Nature wants to save the planet. Its members fret about ecological doom. On the World Wide Fund for Nature's website there are endearing photographs of the lion-faced tamarind, a Brazilian monkey whose wild population shrank to 200 but which, thanks to the efforts of the WWF and the recent birth of a male, has now reached exactly 1000.

Quite how the WWF knows the exact population I don't know, but since I am unwilling to crawl through the Amazon jungle counting monkeys while being bitten by things that no doubt also deserve to be saved, I will take the figure on trust.

The World Wide Fund for Nature is a charity and it always wants more money. The other WWF has money by the bushel. Its website is short on pretty monkeys but long on plug-ugly ones with names like The Hulk, The Undertaker and Randy "Macho Man" Savage.

Before an audience of many millions these beefcakes pretend to fight each other. The routine they indulge in is like ballet for hippos and the outcome of each fake bout is predetermined.

So there it is, the good guys against the bad guys in a battle for a set of initials and, in the court of public opinion, the duty of the ref is both simple and obvious. He should grant the ecology boys everything they want and send the wrestlers away with nothing but a bill for costs as big as their biceps.

But I am not so sure that the court of public opinion has it right.

The wrestlers have had a bad press. Some 10 years ago when they first roared on to our screens, people wanted them banned. Earnest child psychologists and play-analysts in v-necked sweaters insisted that the wrestlers exerted an evil influence.

We were told that in imitation of the wrestlers our children were slamming and pinning and otherwise bludgeoning each other into oblivion.

Well they weren't. They weren't then and they aren't now, for the simple reason that children weren't, aren't and never will be such fools. Folly like that is the prerogative of earnest adults.

Just as children know that Batman is fake, and that the sweaty man in the white beard at the Christmas mall is fake, so they knew instinctively that the wrestlers were fake.

The wrestling is a sort of morality play. If you want to ask why people watch it when they know it's not real, well, you can pose exactly, and I mean exactly, the same question about Star Wars, or Coronation Street, or the much-lamented Punch and Judy, that wonderful show which was killed off by the same wowsers who tried to kill off the wrestling.

We know that the wrestlers aren't really trying to hurt each other just as we know that ET is not really going home, that Leonardo DiCaprio is in no danger of drowning, and that the planes in Pearl Harbor are not planes.

It's entertainment. It may be crappy, simplistic and shallow entertainment, but then the World Wrestling Federation has never, to my knowledge, claimed to be either profound or serious.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, on the other hand, is profoundly serious. It argues that there is a far bigger morality play being acted out on our planet and that it is taking us to doom. The baddy is industrial development and the goody is the natural world.

But although I am sympathetic to some of the aims of the World Wide Fund for Nature I do not agree with its scenario. I do not believe that the world is doomed and nor do I believe that human development is entirely evil or scorpions entirely nice.

The World Wide Fund for Nature is founded on a sense of guilt. Guilt has never been popular, so the World Wide Fund for Nature will always be short of dosh.

The World Wresting Federation won't be, for the simple reason that people prefer entertainment to guilt.

So the solution seems to me to be obvious: rather than charging at each other in dispute over their shared initials, the two organisations should simply merge.

Use the big ugly monkeys to save the pretty little ones. Let's have fun doing good.