Speculation, Fact and Fiction

It's one of those news stories that makes you check the calendar, just to be sure it's not April 1st...

But, according to the Indie , it's lawyers at fifty paces for Judith Regan.

My usual metaphor of choice for an utterly futile fight is 'starting an arse-kicking contest with a porcupine', but that seems inadequate in this instance. Something along the lines of gnats and elephants would seem more appropriate.

I took a moment to blink and think 'say what?' when I read a piece a while ago in the Radio Times about a forthcoming telly series, The Verdict, which is going to be coming out on the BBC. It's going to go through a fictional rape trial, with a real, recently retired judge and proper barristers, plus actors, supposedly to explore aspects of our legal system, how juries deliberate and such.

The 'say what?' aspect was the jury being 'celebrities' and a mixed bag at that, including (arrrgh) Jeffrey Archer (convicted perjurer), Stan Collymore (soccer ball player with dubious record regarding sex and women) and Sara Payne (mother of murdered child). Oh and Honor Blackman, inter alia.

So I pretty much marked that down as something to avoid. But then I heard the chap behind it talking on Woman's Hour, with Joan Smith, noted columnist and also intermittent writer of rather good crime novels. Chap in question (name escapes me) was saying the reason for having these people with a public profile was because all jury members bring their own experiences and prejudices to the jury room. If the jury was ordinary folk, viewers would know nothing about this. Whereas viewers will know far more about these people and be able to judge for themselves how fair/biased/skewed their deliberations may be - I think I'm summing up his argument correctly here.

Okaaaaay... I can see something in that - arguably.

But he didn't have any kind of answer for Joan Smith's concerns about the reasons 'celebrities' get involved in this kind of 'reality' show, which she doubts are going to have much to do with a desire to explore the knotty legal and societal problems of the appallingly low conviction rate for rape.

So I'm in two minds, until I read Marcel Berlins in The Guardian yesterday. In a column well worth reading, he says:

Those 12 are as likely to provide a true picture of jury deliberations as Mickey Mouse is to give us an insight into the lives of small rodents, or Babar into the problems of the monarchy.

Given he knows far more about this stuff than me, I think I'll follow his lead on this one.