So farewell, then, Wallace and Gromit.

Apparently, the Plasticine pals who this week are set to be propelled to Hollywood-strength stardom with the UK release of their first feature-length movie Curse of the Were-Rabbit, are no more. A devastating fire at the Aardman Animation studios in Bristol has reduced the nation's favourite affable Northern baldy and his enigmatic pet dogcum-lodger to brightly coloured puddles.

Were the loss of Britain's greatest and most talented movie stars not so tragic, one might be tempted to scent a whiff of suspicion in all this.

Not, God forbid, the suggestion that the fire was staged to give a bit of publicity to the film that's out on Friday, but perhaps the thought that the disgruntled faces behind other movies out this week might have gone a little crazy at the thought of being beaten at the box office by a pair of cheese-scoffing clay models.

Were I the chief inspector of the UK's CinemaRelated Crimes Squad, I might right about now be inter-viewing Keira Knightley, star of this week's other big release Domino, and establishing her exact where-abouts at around 5.30am yesterday morning. And once she'd been eliminated from the inquiries, I'd be on a plane to Las Vegas to talk to that Nicolas Cage, who's in the Lords of War, also out on Friday. Of course, anyone who could call his new-born son Kal-El after Superman's real Kryptonian name, as Cage did last week, would probably be exempt from any kind of prosecution on grounds of total bonkers-ness.

To the credit of Aardman Animations, the expected loss of all the Wallace and Gromit models, sets and archives has been greeted in a fairly philosophical matter, given what else has been going on in the world over the last couple of days.

Nick Park, who created Wallace and Gromit, has said that in light of the devastating earthquake in Paki-stan, the loss of a few bits of Plasticine is "immaterial". It's good to see such down-to-earth sensibilities from someone involved in the entertainment industry.

No, it isn't good news for the company that they have lost their entire body of work in a blaze. On the other hand, no-one was hurt and the Wallace and Gromit movie has taken around $16 million in its first three days at the US box office which, anyone will concede, is enough money to buy quite a lot of Plas-ticine.

In my other life on the other side of the Pennines, before I was transported to Yorkshire for crimes too heinous to recount here, I interviewed Nick Park a number of times when I worked at his local newspaper in Preston.

He was a softly-spoken, pleasant young chap who, you suspected, would probably grow into the Wallace persona much later on in life. As difficult as it must be to keep your feet on the ground when you've cre-ated two modelling clay movie stars, he was always polite and ready to speak - even when I telephoned him in Los Angeles in what was the middle of the night for him to talk to him about the Oscar he'd just won for one of the earlier short Wallace and Gromit films.

Nick Park is also responsible for the recent hit Chicken Run and the Creature Comforts TV series, which teamed the sound from interviews with real people with animated clay animals in a variety of domestic, wild and zoo situations.

He was also the creator ofoh, hang on a minute.

Remember Morph, the squeaky-voiced Plasticine man from the old Tony Hart TV art shows? It can't be easy being yesterday's clay model. He hasn't exactly been a household name in recent years. That must hurt. I think we might have a culprit for that fire