GOING off the strange name of the £1million Panopticons project to erect massive 'works of art' on six hilltop sites in East Lancashire, I can only conclude that its organisers have the same understanding of what taxpayers expect their money to be spent on as they have of what its fancy title actually means.

For unless it relates to hard-pressed taxpayers being the unwilling captives of the arty-crafty folk squandering a cool million of their brass, I can see no reason for naming this scheme after circular prisons with cells around their central wells.

But, then, again sanity and modern-day 'art' seldom go hand in hand, do they? One has only to cast an aesthetic eye over much of the public art on which hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money has already been spent in East Lancashire to appreciate that fact.

Yet protests and criticism go unheeded. And all the while those who commission our tin trees, bare-bottomed behemoths and other absurd abstract statuary behave like the fawning courtiers in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale who praised the emperor's new robes when he was in fact walking about in the buff, daring not to say it is rubbish for fear of being called philistines.

And such is this cultural climate that there should be no surprise at some of the stuff short-listed for the Panopticons first three sites.

They include mammoth letters spelling out "Accrington" on the town's skyline, an artificial hillock at Wycoller with shelter inside called "See me, touch me, love me" and at Blackburn, something that looks like a concrete wall with holes in it. This, however, is par for the public-art course these days.

But how do such designs compare with say, Darwen Tower, the India Mill chimney or the war memorial obelisk in Accrington's Oak Hill Park? There's no contest, if you ask me, as to which is the 'real' art.

But the question of taste apart, what of the cost of all this? As ever, the funding comes from 'outside,' so a pretence can be made that we are getting these enhancements to our region for nothing -- when all along the ones who are paying are the likes of you and me.

And may we not be asked whether we want this stuff at all?

Or whether, instead of vast sums being spent to stick surreal stuff up on our skyline, we would prefer them being used on down-to-earth stuff like filling in all the holes in the crumbling roads?