Shuffle Up and Deal, Canadian Style

The Premier enters the game wearing his lucky hat

I’ve been developing an interesting little gallery for our dining room. As Sunday readers know, I have been reviewing books in addition to discussing the television industry on Fridays. Thus we cover the spread from the ridiculous (Friday) to the sublime (Sunday).

So on a whim, I started asking the authors of the books I really love to send two words - any two words - on paper over their signatures. Then the result is framed and displayed. It’ll be a nice bit of something for the heirs to squabble over. I’m looking at one right now from Vicky Coren, the professional poker player, television presenter and proper journalist for The Guardian - the world’s greatest newspaper in case I haven’t mentioned that before, which I have.

In Vicky’s book, For Richer for Poorer, she talks about how the poker pros never, ever thought that on-line gaming would take off ... until of course it did. Suddenly shadowy figures who lived in hotel rooms and went by nicknames like Texas Dolly (Doyle Brunson), The Poker Brat (Phil Hellmuth), Kid Poker (Danny Negreanu) or Huck Seed (Huck Seed - no really) found themselves courted by the on-line sites like PokerStars, UltimateBet and so forth seeking their endorsement. The television explosion followed - essentially infomercials for the sites seeking to relieve members of unwanted wallet fat.

Always one to spot a trend years after it occurs, we now see that the provinces of Bee Cee and Ontario want their taste, their slice, their house vigorish, their piece of the action. In 2012, Mister and Mrs. Ontario will be able to ruin their retirement savings by looking at Jack-Seven in the hole and hitting the All-In button. ‘Honey, I was feeling it! ...’

Serious commentators have and will say serious things about the repugnant nature of this decision. I’ll leave it up to them. As for myself, a little television fantasy will do.

The Premier’s salary is about $200,00 and a Cabinet Minister’s is about $165,000. Gentlemen, I think we’ve established the stakes. I would like to suggest a little televised game to properly launch this wonderful, upcoming tax grab (Surely, ‘necessary revenue opportunity’? - Ed.). The players? Nine in total. The government will put up three: The Premier, the Minister of Finance and a third Cabinet Member to be named at the Premier’s discretion. They will each put up one year’s salary. All of it. If they lose - well, welcome to the outcome of your policy decision. If they win- I’ll get to that.

Three pros: I suggest Negreanu, who is Canadian, Hellmuth who has won more World Series of poker bracelets than anyone, and the stolid, black-hatted figure of Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson. I include Ferguson just so we can see the scene of Premier Dalton McGuinty explaining the wisdom of on-line gambling to a man named Jesus - who will have nothing to say in return. The three pros will put up their own money in this cash game.

The final three players will be the three poorest people in Ontario, who the province will stake to $150,000 each. They and they alone can walk away from the table any time. For everyone else, it’s straight knockout, winner take all baby because that’s how capitalism works sweetheart.

In the unlikely event one of the politicians win, they have to keep the money. Yes, they have to keep the money and spend it on the biggest, gaudiest, most wasteful piece of grotesque statuary they can find and sit it on their front lawn. It will be their own Stanley Cup, and serve as a visual reminder to passers-by that this is where their money lives.

I’m sure Vicky would love to fly over to host the event. And it will have the biggest ratings since the old Wintario draws. Surely no one in Queen’s Park could object? Leadership is leadership by example after all. Be seeing you.

Anchors Away 3 - "If God could do the tricks we can do..."

The best ever movie about movies...

In some ways it seems light-hearted to refer to television news as a traditional medium alongside newspapers. There is still a good percentage of the population alive today who remembers the pre-television era, whereas The Times of London has been around since 1785. But the presentation of news on television has been so arresting and vivid over roughly sixty years that it deserves its place along with the newspaper. There were many brilliant, words written about the assassination of President John Kennedy; words both poetic and rippingly conspiratorial. Yet hearing the phrase ‘Kennedy assassination’ first fills the mind with the Zapruder film, not William Manchester or Jim Garrison.


Yet, it is television that evidently feels more threatened by new media, likely because they are similar as closely-matched cousins. Except one cousin has more toys than the other. Both television and the internet combine visual and audio outputs - the internet does print better. Television has had the call-in Larry King type show since the first microphone was tap tap tapped. But on the internet, your droning thoughts are not cut off by a screening producer. Everybody gets on the air as it were. Even in terms of visuals, the internet allows the user to change angles, views or commentary with a click. Television is lurching along at this - naturally through sports first, by following your favourite driver in a NASCAR race - but still has a long way to go.

When it comes time to discuss the newspaper industry and its survival, bear the above points about the internet in mind. I think we should deal with one medium at a time, to avoid clouding the issue and also because the newspaper industry will have to react to television’s changes, not the other way around.

Why is this? This is crucial for it sets up the remainder of my argument and recommendations. The lower technology always adapts to the higher technology, not the reverse. Live theatre by the time of England during the Victorian Era had become a place of spectacle, literally with pitched naval battles raging across flooded London stages. Along came the movies. Oddly enough, the two-dimensional, black and white movie screen did pitched naval battles better than the full colour live attraction; mostly because the stage was using little boats of the scale of Shetland Ponies, whereas the toy props the movie studio used looked like the full-size Intrepid or Bounty. Hence theatre dropped spectacle except in musical form and went for drawing room comedies and kitchen sink dramas. Things that fit the physical space of the stage and allowed the audience to feel as though it was ‘there’.

(Parenthetically - hence the parentheses - my favourite line in the movies comes from Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man. Peter O’Toole plays a half-mad movie director based by rumour on David Lean. He states that King Kong was only three foot six yet appeared to be a giant ape. O’Toole summarized before loping off, “If God could do the tricks we can do, He’d be a happy man.”)

I alluded to radio drama in the previous installment of this series. It thrived and was brilliant and achieved mind-cracking absurdity in comedy everywhere from Jack Benny’s imagined vault to The Goons and the sound of a sock filled with pudding thrown at a brick wall. (That was actually one of Spike Milligan’s script directions. He wanted precisely that sound.) But television had faces. Jackie Gleason’s eyes could widen, Perry Mason could raise an eyebrow, Mr. Spock could raise one hell of an eyebrow, and even pudding-filled socks could not compete. Granted, there is still comedy on radio (as in every drive-time show in existence), and some drama if you hunt it out - but as market share declined radio had to get out of the business. It retained its advantage in music, as music sounded better on radio.

So as a general working principle, television has to look at its competitor and plan like a football coach. What does the other side do absolutely better than we do? We don’t do that. What do we do absolutely better than they do? We concentrate on doing that.

The internet is much better, significantly stronger, than either television or newspapers on several counts. Television used to win on immediacy, but as Einstein taught us, time is relative. Having a crew on the scene in minutes is not immediate. A passer-by with a cell phone camera and a send button is immediate.

A second advantage is range. Any topic any where any time. For instance, if one is suddenly curious about the news from Luxembourg, can quickly find out that the country is cooperating in tracing Kim Jong-Il’s slush fund. Television is limited in its range by time; newspapers by space. Banking authorities in Luxembourg have to fight their way in (one imagines umbrellas housing sub-machine guns or lasers).

Finally, there is the advantage mentioned earlier - the consumer can have equal voice to the producer. Indeed, through posting or blogging, the consumer can be the producer. A Letter to the Editor seems positively quaint in comparison, perhaps because it is quaint in comparison. If the art of news is conversational - the premise we began with - with the internet the user can change the topic and/or deliver a monologue or editorial any time he or she wants.

- TO BE CONTINUED -

(I had originally expected to have finished this series off in three columns, but I am mindful that reading for very long on a screen is tiring. So we will deliver the Grand Unified Theory ... next time. In the meantime why not find a good book to read?  Please share on Twitter or Facebook and I love to read your comments. Be seeing you - H)

Anchors Away 2 - How News Media Will Survive

My kind of town, Luxembourg is ...

My previous column on news anchors and news media in general brought a surprisingly large on-line response in terms of page views. Apparently my opinions are quite well-received in Luxembourg. So in part thanks to those kind people who after all put the lux in Benelux, I’m going to expand on that column. There has been so much debate on the future (if any) of news media that it seems wrong to not fully flesh out my opinions. I’ve been writing a television column for eleven years, so my thoughts have been fully nurtured and evolved; and besides, someone might actually agree with me. maybe even someone with the power to do something about it.

The one point that media executives should rest easiest about is the one that they most worry about. Extinction. Will the internet replace newspapers, magazines, television, radio, movies and pretty much every other form of communication other than the note passed to Sally Curlicue by Jimmy Jeroboam in Grade Three written in invisible ink. Oh wait, Jimmy probably just texts her anyway, so scratch that.

But - I don’t believe that the internet will totally replace print. I have two good reasons for that assumption - the livelier one instinctive, the drier based on historical evidence. Let’s start off dry and get lively later, which curiously enough has been the daily motto of most great newsmen.

Do art forms ever really vanish? The Greek plays of the 6th century BC are still performed as are songs played on instruments rudimentary to human civilization. Opera may wax or wane depending on nation or culture, but it is definitely not vanishing. Movies did not eliminate live theatre; in fact the more under-stated acting that the large screen welcomed ended up improving theatre. Based on the kind of movies he produced, Jack Warner had more to do with the development of the Method than Konstantin Stanislavsky; and I’m not so sure Jack Warner could have even spelt Stanislavsky.

And on and on. Radio did not replace movies nor did television replace radio (I’ll get to radio drama in the next column). Magazines did not replace newspapers and rock did not eliminate jazz.

‘Aha!’, you say believing you have a hole card that will beat me. ‘What about music? The LP is dead and who buys CDs except the elderly as Christmas presents for the kids?’ I’ll give that argument its due when it is proven correct. There are still LPs - ask Green Day or Radiohead - there are just less of them. If the music industry gleaned to the fact that there actually would be an audience out there for a product like the old ‘concept albums’ of the 1960s or 70s (Tommy, Aqualung etc.) with packaging that people would actually want ti own and display, there will be more of them. And the difference between an LP, CD or DVD is more an evolutionary scenario than an actual difference in form or content. Although granted DVDs can have visual content.

So, there is the historical argument. People and buildings may crumble into dust, but invent a popular art form and your imagination’s child becomes a god as immortal as Zeus. Nice to know.

And are newspapers and television newscasts art forms? Certainly. Even cursory observation bears that out. Are there elements of design? Yes. Are words and images chosen in order to impart meaning? Absolutely. Is not an editorial a soliloquy, a front page a theme and if there is an evening newspaper or newscast that didn’t have an interest in appealing to an audience then it certainly didn’t live long in the marketplace. (And yes art requires an audience in order to exist. Space is full of light but even light doesn’t seem to exist until it smacks into something and makes it shine.)

By my logic then - and I was schooled at the Vulcan Academy of Logic - news media is composed of art forms. So the lesson or the template to be derived by harried publishers or managing producers, racing about in the same mad way as my border collie was ripping through the house earlier tonight, trying to figure out what the hell to try next - that template can be found by looking at other arts and how they managed to survive.

I’ve already hinted at the answer. They largely survived by adapting elements of their new competitor into their own format. I mentioned the effect that movies had on live theatre. Acting changed, and so did writing. Because movies required camera movement to maintain visual interest, and because movies’ trump over theatre was the ability to instantly change settings, scenes were shorter in the movie theatre than in the live theatre. As such, dialogue became shorter, sharper and peppier. Theatre had to adapt. Effectively, there is a direct line from The Jazz Singer to David Mamet.

Book publishing to me is the classic adaptive art form. As an industry, publishing turns into a publicist for its competitors seeking public interest and dollars. Whatever the public shows an interest in, someone’s going to turn out a book about it.

So how can news media learn from their fellow artists. As they used to say on the radio, tune in next time. Be seeing you.

(Please share these columns and please share your comments. I always appreciate your opinions. - H)

Anchors Away?

Since the announced retirements of news anchors Lloyd Robertson from CTV News and Kevin Newman from Global, there has been an interesting series of articles in Canada’s major papers, all with a similar theme. Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and Thunder Bay have all had their readers chewing over the idea that television news needs a re-think and the days of the powerful anchor are dead.

As the regular readers of this column know, to paraphrase the late Vince Lombardi there are three things I am passionate about: God, my Family and the News. (And Liverpool FC, but that’s a subject for another day.) So it will come as no shock that I feel duty-bound to add to the debate.

I don’t think the days of the anchor are done, for reasons I’ll quickly get to. But I do want to cede one debating point to my print opponents. They are absolutely correct when they say that there is no anchor as powerful as Walter Cronkite was, and Canada’s anchors have never has similar influence. Mind you, events made Cronkite into Cronkite. He was the one in the studio when John Kennedy died and he happened to be the anchor and news editor when CBS News finally turned on the Vietnam War in reporting on the Tet Offensive and its aftermath. Full kudos to CBS for doing it first, but the mood of the United States was already turning strongly against the war and in many ways the major media followed rather than led public opinion.

There will not be as powerful a grouping as say Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley were to the 1960s or Rather, Brokaw and Jennings were to the 1990s. The simple truth is that there are a lot more news shows with anchors than there used to be and it’s hard to stand out in a crowd.

And yet, there is still a strong role to be played by the right person. If pressed to express a concise definition of what a good general news medium (newscast or newspaper) should be about, it would be this: the consumer will be suitably informed and capable of forming an opinion regarding whatever will be the important discourse of the next day.

That definition is left intentionally broad. Important discourse is as varying as public mood, which as a thousand computer programmers attempting to predict the stock market ruefully know is completely unpredictable. The big stories - war, peace, oil vomited into the Gulf of Mexico - are obvious. But Michael Jackson had been reduced to the perception of a burned-out creepy guy - then he died and became as beloved as Mickey Mouse. I don’t know why anyone cares about the large-bummed Kardashians and neither do you. Point is, there are people who do care these things, it is part of their discourse and therefore they are part of news.

So, given that the public cares about things that news editors may think are utterly trivial; and news editors care about other things that they wish to enhance or inject into public discourse, news is therefore a conversational medium. The medium offers up what it believes to be the consumer’s needs, but the medium must also satisfy the consumer’s wants, or else it’s time to fold up shop and go into Public Relations to earn one’s keep.

The crux of it though is in that word ‘conversational.’ A conversation implies communication between or among individuals; actual people with actual voices and actual personalities. This is why I have become a robotic drone on my view that newspapers that will survive the non-terminal  shrinkage of their marketplace share will be those papers that breathe with the thoughts and opinions of their writers, provided those writers also have excellent reporting skills. Every style sheet known to man or wire service should be burnt.

For television, it’s actually easier. While the editorial choices of what stories to present and how to present them will always vary from newsroom to newsroom, the fundamental nature of television requires a human voice narrating the story. Whether the story is presented as a mini-documentary or Rip Trenchcoat standing in front of the White House, the visuals require words.

Finally, fill in for me the final word of this phrase: People are creatures ? No, not the night, unless Alice Cooper is reading this. Habit. We like familiarity and therefore a familiar voice is a comfort especially when the news itself is hard as a cast iron frying pan.

The late Don Hewitt, creator of 60 Minutes and pupil of Edward R. Murrow coined the term anchor. I do believe it shall prove as durable as the nautical device from which it borrowed its name. Be seeing you.

Captain Dreyfus Goes to Aghanistan

Inside Television 512
Publication date: 7-30-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn

As irony is the outcome of coincidence, I would have say it was ironic that I was watching the news of the volcanic eruption of 90,000 leaked documents concerning the Afghan War at the same time as I was reviewing a novel called A Man in Uniform for bythebookreviews.blogspot.com. The subject of the book? The Dreyfus Affair.

For those who nodded off in history class, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was an artillery officer in the French Army in the 1890s. He was convicted of attempting to sell military secrets to Germany, was sent to Devil’s Island to be shackled and imprisoned.

As it turned out, the case against Dreyfus was false, evidence circumstantial or flat-out forged, and thanks to an eventual popular outrage spurred by the press - most notably Emile Zola’s famous letter ‘J’Accuse’ - Dreyfus was finally re-tried and freed. He returned to the Armya nd served with distinction through the end of World War One.

Why oh why is it that every schoolboy hears the phrase, ‘those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,’ but once the telling moments of adult life arrive, the lesson is completely forgotten? The Afghan revelations are the Dreyfus Affair brought back to life, minus the convenient scapegoat. So far. Heads will roll like melons on a conveyor belt.

At the crux of it is a military-governmental elite in the U.S., UK and even tidy old Canada that is as preternaturally disposed to cover-up or lying as a classroom of naughty little boys. Except naughty little boys fire rubber bands at little girls. Afghanistan involves six 2,000 pound bombs dropped on a village in an attempt to kill one man; who wasn’t there. Between 150 and 300 villagers were there. Emphasis on the past tense.

There used to be joking speculation that George W. Bush never really wanted to kill or capture bin Laden. To do so would be to eliminate the purported reason for the war and the war’s lucrative supply contracts. Now that we see documents showing that bin Laden’s movements and activities were well-tracked from 2003 to 2009, one seriously has to wonder if the paranoid were actually the sane, and the supposedly sane were the paranoids.

This sort of thing keeps happening throughout modern history and eventually one just wants to shut the drapes, lock the doors and cancel the newspapers. What frustrates to the point of tears is that the same pattern always repeats, like a snake shedding its skin only to reveal an identical skin. A misjudgement leads to criminal neglect leads to cover-up leads to revelation leads to embarrassment leads to counter-attack leads to scapegoat leads to nothing learned or at least nothing changed.

Because of space limitations, i can’t go one forever about this, but I invite the reader to take some time and look at Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers scandal of 1971; or the 1925 trial of General Billy Mitchell. Or in Canada’s case, we need only go back a few months to the reporting by Richard Colvin of the Canadian military illegally turning over prisoners to the Afghans. Colvin may not have been sent to Devil’s Island, but given the ferocity of the attacks waged against him by Tory ministers and various top brass during Question Period and televised hearings ... well, I’m sure the Prime Minister at least thought back on Dreyfus’ shackles and wistfully sang, ‘Those Were the Days.’

The saddest part of it is that deep down inside there has been a nagging voice in me that makes me think that the Afghan War actually was just. One cannot promote the causes of freedom and justice at home while looking abroad where those values are not enforced and say that these principles shall not apply over there because ‘you people are different.’ That is racism at its swinish worst. I suspect Christopher Hitchens, sadly battling cancer of esophagus, came to the same conclusions.

But the war is lost now. I think we all know that in our hearts. At the bluntest, were you an Afghan, would you trust us? The final word will go to the historian Garry Wills, who was invited along with several of his colleagues to have a private dinner with President Obama. Wills this week revealed his advice to the President. As he remembers in this week’s New York Review of Books:

I said that a government so corrupt and tribal and drug-based as Afghanistan’s could not be made stable. He replied that he was not naïve about the difficulties but he thought a realistic solution could be reached. I wanted to add “when pigs fly,” but restrained myself.

Keats had it partially wrong. Beauty may always be truth, but truth is not always beauty. Be seeing you.

(I look forward to your comments - and I welcome you to share this blog. And...clicking on ads does put food on the table. Cheers! - H)

 

Root Beer, Car Hops and Old Spice

after forced retirement, the Root Bear was reduced to begging

Inside Television 511
Publication Date: 7-23-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn

This is a story about two commercial campaigns I’ve grown to love as much as many as you. The first is the A&W campaign featured the rotund manager (whose real name I could not find anywhere) and the gawky employee Ryan (played by Ryan Beil). The ads have been running for years of course, but that made me curious. What makes these commercials work?

And they have worked. The latest trade figures I could find showed A&W (Canada) opening a pretty impressive 30 restaurants a week, having shifted focus away from a declining mall business into stand-alone restaurants. In some locations they are even bringing back car hops.

This of course is a fine idea, as anyone aged 40 or above will be happy to blather your ear off in confirming. For the younger reader, car hops were almost always teenage girls who came to your car window, took your order and delivered the goods. If you are in the car, she would come back to take your tray. The advantage for shy teenage boys was obvious. You were given the opportunity to chat three times to a cute teenage girl and where else was that opportunity going to come along? I remember having a massive crush on a car hop at the Arthur Street location in or around 1976 when I was 18. Remember her smile and the Dorothy Hamill-type blonde bob like it was yesterday. I still bear the scars. Not from the crush - from the acne brought on by over-consumption of Mama Burgers and Root Beer floats.

So the current campaign plays into the same nostalgia in that the restaurant is usually quiet, the service is personal and the music is soft. The sun always shines and summer is as endless as a Beach Boys tour. The interesting edge is that even though Ryan is about as competent as a German Shepherd left in charge of wallpapering the bedroom, the manager is always right there. The customer never suffers.

The second ad campaign - brilliant ... but really not doing what it’s supposed to do. I speak, as many have before me, of Old Spice Guy. The spots are brilliant. Interestingly, the rapid-paced ultra macho clipped as a cigar delivery was done as a prank by the actor, Isaiah Mustafa. Mustafa played a little ball in his day and called his old quarterback, Jake Plummer; ex-Bronco, current Bears disaster. Plummer wasn’t home so Mustafa read the script in that exaggerated way into the answering machine. Then he thought, “Hmmmmm...”

And holy sweet Matilda - I just looked at YouTube to check how many views Old Spice Guy has had since going viral in the last two weeks. He now responds to Tweets with videos. One video - just one of them - has over 10 million views.

So that must be leading to the sweet smell of success for Old Spice, right? Ehhhhhh, not quite. According to Brandweek, one of those anaesthetically boring trade publications, sales of Old Spice have declined 7% over the 52 weeks ending June 13th. The Old Spice Guy ads have been around since the Winter Olympics. If the ads were actually tugging people towards after-shave purchases, there should have been some positive signs by mid-June.

This in turn puts Old Spice into a vicious trap. They can’t very well kill a campaign this successful; for they shall be hated - torches lit, villagers enraged. It is a fascinating conundrum and one that I cannot find a parallel to in media history. Love the ad, hate the product to the point of buying less of it.

Then again - and come on now, you were thinking it too - have you ever actually smelled Old Spice? Be seeing you.

Sex, Power and Justice

No no, we want you to be blind NOT blind drunk.

Inside Television 510
Publication date: 7-16-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn

Power, sex and justice are three of the four basic themes that have driven human interest since the time human interest began. The fourth is money, if you’re interested. This week’s news coverage has been driven by two stories that involve all three. One is the dismissal of Candian Brigadier-General Daniel Menard for having consensual sex with Master-Corporal Bianka Langlois (and no, I’ve never seen that name spelt anything other than Bianca either). The second is a Swiss Court denying an extradition order filed by the United States seeking trial for film director Roman Polanski. the charges against Polanski are that he had sex with a thirteen year old girl in 1977. Polanski at the time was 44. This may have been a very good week for media, but it has been a very bad week for justice.

Let us deal first with the Menard case. His dismissal followed the filing of four counts against him, three of which involve section 129 of the National Defence Act (the NDA). Master-Corporal Langlois also faces a charge of being in violation of section 129. Let us look at that relevant section of the NDA:
Prejudicing good order or discipline
129. (1) Any act, conduct, disorder or neglect to the prejudice of good order and discipline is an offence and every person convicted thereof is liable to dismissal with disgrace from Her Majesty’s service or to less punishment.

In other words, break any code of behaviour set by the Department of National Defence and you face dishonourable discharge. Section 129 of the NDA is written that broadly, as you can clearly see. Therefore, 129 acts as a comfortable and very proper sounding ermine cloak within which to wrap the code of behaviour. Thou shalt not have sex with an officer or enlisted personnel under your command. To which I respond with my finest Edmund Burke rhetoric; Well, why the hell not?

The obvious stricture is about abuse of power. While power may have been an attracting element between Menard and Langlois - leave us face it, successful and powerful people tend to be more attractive than others who may look the same but aren’t powerful. The German gnome Henry Kissinger was even considered to be attractive when he was at his most powerful. There is  no counter-argument. So while power may have been present, was there abuse? I have seen no evidence to suggest its presence. And if there was abuse - ‘Have sex with me or else’ abuse - then why is there a charge against Langlois. For there to be abuse there must be a victim. Surely the Canadian Department of National Defence are not charging an admired and highly-ranked General like Menard on behalf of his abandoned wife? (Which is regrettable, but how many divorced men are there in the DND - I’d wager more than a few.) Is that not a matter for civil courts?

And finally on that subject - Dear God these people risk their lives every second they serve this nation’s purported goals in that quagmire of Empires, Afghanistan. Who else are they going to meet? Locals who may or may not be Taliban? I tend to think not.

As for Polanski, I remember that case very well. I was 19 at the time and a man who would become my email friend, the late Tom Snyder devoted I think three shows to the topic. What was nauseatingly remarkable then and remains so today was Polanski’s defence. Assuming the event actually happened, which I say to keep lawyers happy, the line that went out among Polanski’s supporters was based on two arguments. One, the girl looked and acted older than 13; and besides, she and her mother were a sort of harlotry-based family tag team available to grace the finest of parties with their wits and talents. And second, poor Roman Polanski. In 1969 his wife Sharon Tate had been killed by the Charles Manson gang in the grisliest and most notorious crime of a decade that had its fair share. The man is a victim and deserves our sympathy.

Let us destroy that second argument first. All men who suffer tragedy do not get a licence to become pedophiles. If celebrity gossip is anything to go by, this sickness of Polanski’s has carried on. The year before the charged incident, Polanski and the then 16 year old Nastassja Kinski had an openly romantic relationship which carried on for three years. The wonder is that he wasn’t charged with that as well. But you know, gosh darn it, its them Hollywood folks.

As for the first, there is not a thirteen year old girl in existence capable of making the rational decision to become a harlot or to have sex. That is why statutory rape laws exist. And to the American legal system’s credit it did finally file charges. For the Swiss courts to protect Polanski from extradition is an abrogation of justice.

Imagine if the case was twisted the other way. What if Polanski had raped a 13 year old girl in Switzerland, had fled to the United States and the American courts had refused extradition? You need to be about as perceptive as an anvil to imagine the shameful outcry that would be heard around Europe and Canada.

A fascinating week of news watching, but not one I can describe as a good week. Be seeing you.