The grief-driven news cycle

Having covered Newsnight recently I avoided writing about the recent Jon Venables-themed Question Time discussion.  There's only so much bragging about watching high-brow TV (albeit while covered in breadcrumbs and flicking through insane Red Dwarf tributes on You Tube) that one blog can sustain.  If I had, I would have mentioned the contrast between Will Self's humane common sense and the soon-to-be Baroness Vorderman's shrill tub-thumping.  As Self twittered shortly afterwards, "I'll have an F and a U please, Carol".

David Mitchell is very good in the Observer today on the public fascination with Venables' crime and the citation of it in any wider debate:

The Venables case is so horrifying, unusual and unrepresentative, such an outlier on the graph, that making it the focus of a discussion about how convicted criminals should be treated not only perilously weights the debate against clemency but is logically absurd.  You may as well cite Adolf Hitler as a reason for not encouraging children to paint.

I concur.  I also think it is alarming that the grief-scrambled pronouncements of Denise Bulger are being treated by the mainstream media (current BBC headline - "James Bulger's mother calls for commissioner's sacking") as proposals worthy of ministerial debate.  As the person whose life has been most forcefully and permanently ruined by James (never Jamie - that was a newspaper invention, as if his victimhood needed any more emphasis) Bulger's death, she is also the least qualified person in the country to have a say in the handling of his killers within a legal system built on impartiality.  Yet whenever the case seeps back into the headlines she is rushed onto breakfast TV to rail against her son's killers, which is then reported as if it should have bearing on judicial process.  Surely it is the greatest kind of cruelty to repeatedly give her such a platform, and so the expectation that her wishes will be carried out, when they can not and should not be?

Anyway, I doubt this sort of thing is what you're here for. Somehow this blog has found its way onto a site called Bloggapedia, where it is disdainfully described as covering "a range of fascinating and essential subjects such as [my] domestic cleaning habits, proudly obscure musical tastes and endless British social hang-ups".  I supposed that's fair enough.  Expect posts in the coming weeks on my dysfunctional relationship with Windolene, the underappreciated genius of Baader Meinhoff and why I find the whole nod/smile/avoid eye contact dynamic tricky when walking towards someone you know down a long stretch of office corridor.

Oh, and the Kennington Park laboratory experiment made an unwelcome return on Friday morning.  I intend to invest in some bolt cutters.