JUST AS THE OSCARS HAVE SPAWNED another set of awards for the very worst spewed out by Hollywood in the past 12 months - so the annual Diver Awards have inspired their own, ghastly antithesis.
     The first-ever DUFFERS were awarded this year on a cold February evening at the wet end of Swanage Pier. The attending celebrities could be counted on one hand of a shark-attack victim.
     The search for a suitably qualified presenter had taken some time. The organisers eventually plumped for one Titus McIlrath of Detroit - a would-be criminal mastermind who, consumed by first-time nerves, charged into a bank and shouted: "OK, motherstickers! This is a f***-up!" Customers and staff alike doubled up in gales of mirth and McIlrath fled empty-handed from the premises.
     Like the Divers, the "Duffers" embrace a number of categories. For the Year's Most Crap Brand there were two nominations: Second Mates, creator of a range of fruit-flavoured regulators; and The Master Baiters, maker of vegetarian "chummy" for politically-correct shark dives.
     After a heated and ultimately violent debate among the judges, the final accolade was awarded to Second Mates, because its Tickler model, along with its technical-diving version Deep Throat, had induced near-fatal coughing fits in 87% of the test panel.
     Most Coma-Inducing Publication Of The Year was The Brown Planet, a hefty 800 pages on the sewage outfalls of the Tees Estuary. Runner-up was Blackford's Diving Life & Times 2, nominated only because the manuscript has sat unpublished for five years on the shelf at Diver Towers. A situation that could be so simply rectified, luvvies.
     The award for Most Spine-Chillingly Incompetent Tour Operator went to Thumbs Down of Kettering. Its liveaboard package to the Barents Sea in January left 22 divers ice-bound for four months in a guano barge. They survived only by drinking their own tears and ingesting a gruel of shredded travel brochures and walrus semen.
     There was just one nomination for Worst Dive Centre: The Abyss at Bleak Pond, Beds. Adjoining an abattoir and hide-curing plant, divers are compelled to don masks and regulators before leaving their vehicles. Besides providing a depository for the neighbouring heavy metals refinery, Bleak Pond forms a natural sump for the surrounding agricultural land, so harbours little aquatic life. But those creatures that have mutated to survive are enormous and unimaginably savage.
     Indeed, besides a handful of Indonesian ferry companies, the Abyss boasts the highest mortality rate of any water-based enterprise since Pharaoh tried to follow Moses to Israel.
     Inept Retailer Of The Year went to Coma Position, situated in the basement of the Zeitgeist Rubber Ecstasy Centre in London's exotic Old Compton Street. Coma Position attracts an entirely inappropriate clientele invariably disappointed by the goods on offer.
     Nevertheless, full-face masks and 3mm neoprene steamers have provided a fragile source of revenue. As has "Will", a disturbingly realistic EAR practice mannequin.
     Finally, the Chairman of the Judges was invited to make a special award for a life-time's disservice to the world of diving. At this, the first ever DUFFERS awards, Sir Kendall Mcdonald bestowed the ultimate accolade upon Vernon Hesketh-Smythe, inventor of the VHF wireless.
     "For almost 50 years," he told the rapt audience of three, "the boat radio has held out the promise of communication. And consistently it has failed to honour its promise, with an incalculable human cost in rage, despondency and bleak, bloody despair." See you at the 2002 DUFFER Awards - 1 April, the Charisma Club, Hartlepool.