Today presenters in the duck house

Two presenters of BBC Radio's Today programme were struck down by a fit of the giggles this morning while covering the latest episode in the MPs' expenses scandal. It was Sir Peter Viggers's now infamous 'floating duck house', for which the MP had claimed £1,645 of taxpayers’ money, that did for Evan Davis and Sarah Montague.

First to show symptoms was Davis, whose amusement became apparent as he outlined Fleets Street's cartoonists take on the saga. But it was when they began to discuss a story in the Daily Telegraph that the affliction really took hold.
 
"There's more to the duck island coverage than amusing visual hi-jinks," began Davis routinely enough, before his sang froid rapidly dissolved into giggling. With listeners none the wiser, and his co-presenter Montague also showing signs of losing it, Davis tried to abandon ship. "Let's just move on to the next one," he gasped.
 
But Montague was having none of it. "No - you've got to tell the story," she admonished him, before taking over herself. Telling her co-presenter "Evan! Just shush" as he whimpered in the background, she gamely explained that, according to a breeder in the Telegraph, the duck house in question had too big an opening for its residents. Ducks, it seems, prefer to squeeze through a smaller opening.
 
It was all too much for Davis and he continued to struggle through the subsequent, rather more solemn, item about fears for the future of the British economy. Salvation eventually arrived in the form of a pre-recorded report.
 
The meltdown is the latest in a long line of corpsing episodes on Today. The chief culprit until now has been Charlotte Green, who broke down last year after hearing a clip of the world's oldest record - a squeaky rendition of Au Claire de la Lune - and who famously lost her composure during an item about Papau New Guinea's chief of staff Jack Tuat in 1997. ·