SOMEWHERE on this planet, but most likely in London or its environs, lurks a man in late middle age who has done more to make my life a misery than Adolph Hitler, Maggie Thatcher and Tony Blair put together.

He could either be living in some luxury, with all those Tory MPs in places like Notting Hill, or in some hostel for elderly druggies in the old East End, surviving on brown ale and jellied eels.

On the other hand he could be long gone, dead from drugs and booze and rock 'n' roll these past 30 years.

However, if he is still alive I want him arrested and flown to the international court of justice at The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity.

The reason for this is that the Bats are back in Beggarsdale and this bit of paradise, which once luxuriated to the summer sounds of skylark and cuckoo, now reverberates, night and day, to dum, dum, dum de-dum, dum, dum, dum de-dum etc etc etc.

The bats, as I have explained before, are the youths and youthesses down from college for the long vac who occupy their parents' weekend cottages for the summer - presumably because they are too noisy to be housed at home.

They hang upside down in the dark all day, only to come out at night to feed on alcopops and take-away pizzas in and after the Glass in the Face in Mar'ton, bringing their bottles and cardboard back with them to decorate our verges and what passes for a pavement on The Lane.

But day or night, awake or suspended, their "music" is on for a solid 20 hours. And for them, their eardrums melted at their mother's breast, "music" consists of the aforesaid dum, dum, dum de-dum.

It all goes back to the late 1970s when top executives at recording studios suddenly realised that it was quite unnecessary to deal with proper rock musicians: there was a faint possibility that they could have some talent and talented people are always difficult to deal with for men in suits - they might even have views of their own.

Instead, they went out into the street and grabbed any young boy or girl who was passably good looking and made them into stars. They didn't have to be able to sing or play a musical instrument, of course.

If they could mime with mouth and fingers, all that noisy rubbish could be dubbed in at the recording studio. On stage, which they mounted only in front of video cameras, all they had to do was dance a bit and move their lips in time to the "music."

But there was the rub: to mime in time, someone had to provide a beat. That meant finding someone who could drum dum, dum, dum, de-dum, time and time again. And that was far too difficult for the musical dead-beats they were trying to train.

So they hired a so-called session musician who sat at his drums for a few hours playing dum, dum, dum, de-dum and then went off to the pub, no doubt bored stiff.

And that's the man I want to see in the dock. For his background track has been the basis over virtually every popular record made ever since. Pretty girls and boys totally without talent have become world famous to his boring beat. He has sold more records than the Beatles and the Stones combined.

And he has destroyed summer in Beggarsdale. Civilisation demands he pays for his crime.

o The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.