The Page 3 girl is dead. Long live the Page 3 girl. Rumours that The Sun’s topless mascot and author of “news in briefs” was to be retired after her 45-year tenure at the tabloid paper proved unfounded. She bounced back this week, as pert as ever, and as unwelcome a surprise for those journalists who had penned her obituary as it was for the feminists who claimed her demise a victory for women.

I was just disappointed not to see how her future incarnations might manifest. The proposition that she could be “scantily clad” in future suggested such quaint possibilities: so very Helen Mirren in Calendar Girls.

It was not to be. The episode was but a daydream — or, possibly, an artfully directed publicity stunt. Instead, her continued existence remains one of the great anachronisms — and more pitiful clichés — of modern Britain.