Buried away late in the night, as almost all watchable French television seems to be, the latest edition of Faites Entrer L'Accusé had a cameo role from a certain British journalist.
The subject last night was Le Lord Assassiné, an extraordinarily in-depth look at the murder of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a flat in Super-Cannes in Nov 2004.
And I fully expected my brief contributions to pass unnoticed. When the interview was recorded in St Paul de Vence last June, I said as much in a piece here headlined The murdered earl, the hunted informant and me.
But one of Salut!'s most loyal readers, Gigi, sent a message via Facebook to say she was watching me.
In the event, my appearances were brief and perfunctory, limited to my explanations of why the tragedy of Lord Shaftesbury's disappearance and death had been of such interest to the British press.
This was a sub-theme, and there was a pejorative edge to the references to this interest that I found entirely hypocritical.
The earl's Nice lawyer, Thierry Bensaude, said during the programme that for a while back in November 2004 British journalists seemed to be everywhere; "for 48 hours, I had the impression that I was living with the English press."
Why hypocritical? Because after a slow start, the French press had shown at least as much interest, devouring every detail of the inquiry and reporting each twist with relish (the 66-year-old earl's appetite for dodgy bars and the sort of women who frequented them being a key part of the story: in such an establishment had he met his Tunisian third wife, Jamila M’Barek, convicted with her brother Mohamed of the murder, carried out for old-fashioned reasons of greed).
Did Maitre Bensaude also lament that he had a France 2 television crew on his back, doing much the same as those British journalists had before them, seeking out information about the events that led to and followed the disappearance? Not on the programme, he didn't. Nor did he point out that he was a perfectly willing source of information and comment at the time. My own meeting with him was arranged by telephone and proved an unhurried affair lasting well over an hour, and we later had several friendly telephone conversations.
But that is really quite a small criticism of mine. Strip away the implied sneers about another branch of the media, where it is established custom and practice for dog to eat dog, and this was an exemplary piece of journalism, whatever the language or medium.
France 2 profited from a level of access that would be unheard of in Britain.
There were not only the sisters of Jamila and Mohamed, the sister of Lord Shaftesbury and an expert witness but the most senior police officers involved in the investigation, lawyers for each of the accused and the earl's family and even the examining magistrate.
I find that openness, unobjectionable in any case because the trial and appeal have been concluded, completely healthy. What we ended up with was a valuable insight into the way the murder was investigated, solved and judged (25 years' imprisonment for each defendant, reduced in Jamila's case to 20 on appeal).
A friend in Paris expressed disappointment at the time I gave my interview to France 2 when I told him I had spoken in English.
But this had been agreed with France 2; the questions would be put in French but my responses would be translated. Quite simply, after 18 months living out of France, I thought the risk of making a fool of myself would be a lot higher if I spoke in French, not least because I knew I was the only British journalist taking part and suspected I might therefore be treated as a whipping boy for the absent tabloid press.
That concern was unfounded; the questions were fair and there were no cuts to show me answering out of context.
The France 2 reconstructions took me back to the places and people concerned in this desperately sad affair. Briefly, the earl was killed because he wanted to divorce Jamila, and this would have denied her access to a generous slice of his assets, not to mention a €7,000 monthly allowance.
I remembered standing for a few minutes in the flat where Lord Shaftesbury had died, listening to the tearful protestations of love, concern and innocence from Jamila at a time when all we knew was that he was missing but she knew him to be dead. And I recalled the dignity of the earl's sister, Lady Frances Ashley Cooper, on each of the occasions we spoke by telephone. None of that dignity was lost by her willingness to participate in this impressive re-examination of how and why her brother met his unfortunate end.
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