Eight years later, they’re still going strong, living happily together in a Rare Breeds Farm in Ashford, Kent, probably still bragging to their bored neighbours about their great escape.Their adventures have been dramatised as The Legend of the Tamworth Two, broadcast on Easter Monday 2004 with Kevin Whatley as the pigs’ evil owner, renamed Wolf. The next day he was cornered in a thicket and shot with a tranquiliser gun. Questions were even asked in the House of Commons, when the Home Office minister George Howarth said there were striking similarities between the pigs’ predicament and that of the Conservative Party.After a week of careless freedom, the pigs were seen rootling for scraps in the garden of a Mr and Mrs Clark Butch was captured Sundance escaped. Viewers were appalled to learn that the pigs’ heartless owner, Mr Dijulio, planned to reduce them to pork chops the minute they were caught, no matter how adorable their adventures. A full-scale rescue mission began.Reporters from Tokyo to Texas arrived to cover the story, while the UK newspaper offered Dijulio money to save the pigs. As police and farm hands searched for them, the story in all its full anthropomorphic glory broke in the papers and on TV.”Butch” and “Sundance” became hot news in America and even Japan.

When they were unloaded from the truck, some sixth sense registered in their porcine cerebella that they were too young (and too pretty) to die, and they suddenly legged it.They squeezed through a fence, bravely swam across the river Avon (their first experience of swimming) and took off into the fields and the dense woodland around Tetbury Hill. On 8 January, their owner, Arnoldo Dijulio, took them in a lorry to the local Malmesbury abattoir, V&G Newman’s. For Lynch, who had never sought the limelight, it was conclusive proof that being a hero was much more trouble than it was worth.ECThe Tamworth TwoThey were actually a brother and sister and only five months old, but that didn’t stop the media calling them “Butch” and “Sundance” as the brace of Tamworth Ginger pigs evaded capture, outran the law and stole the hearts of the nation for a whole month in early 1998.Butch was a sow and Sundance a boar and they weren’t supposed to live very long in the leafy environs of Malmesbury, Wiltshire. Ultimately, Flynt decided not to publish them, deciding that Lynch was a “good kid”.

And that’s the last I remember.” Lynch also stated that, contrary to reports, she had been well treated by her Iraqi captors, a position since corroborated by foreign journalists.To make matters worse, in November 2003 the pornographer Larry Flynt said that he had bought “fully nude” pictures of Lynch from fellow soldiers. “I don’t know why they filmed [my rescue] or why they say these things.. I did not shoot, not a round I went down praying to my knees. Nine US soldiers were killed in the ambush.A little over a week later, Lynch was rescued. It was the first reported successful rescue of a US prisoner of war since the Second World War, and the first ever of a female American soldier.On her return, Lynch claimed she was being manipulated by the media, operating under the orders of the US government.”They used me to symbolise all this stuff,” she said.

In 2003, when Lynch was a 19-year-old supply clerk with the 507th Maintenance Company, she was captured by Ba’athists near Nasiriyah in Iraq. Dia ended up taking a business degree iat the University of Northumbria, graduating in 2001.Nick HarrisJessica LynchJessica Lynch never wanted to be an all-American hero, but America didn’t listen. He didn’t set out to dupe Southampton, he was simply hoping to get a few games somewhere. He also claimed not to have realised his contact was passing himself off as Weah. Come the second half it was obvious that Dia was completely out of his depth, and the substitute was substituted.Further research revealed that Dia was a 30-year-old amateur from Senegal.

Within seconds, Dia had a first opportunity for glory, with time and space to score from all of 12 yards He kicked the ball straight at the goalkeeper. His chance came after half an hour when star player Matt Le Tissier was injured. Weah wouldn’t have recommended a dud, would he? And anyway, it was reasoned, Dia hadn’t been at the club very long and was probably still acclimatising to the way the game was played in Europe.Souness put Dia on the bench for a Premiership match against Leeds United. As the recommendation was supposed to have come from Liberian great George Weah, who was then World and European footballer of the year and the star striker for AC Milan, Souness decided to give the player a try-out.Ali Dia’s new team-mates noticed that he was strangely reluctant to exert himself in training, but no one made a big issue of the fact. Football manager Graeme Souness knows exactly how she must feel.Ten years ago, when Souness was the manager of Southampton, he had a player recommended to him called Ali Dia.