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French TV can be awful. The best programmes are studio debates, but go on for ever and start when I'm often enough ready to sleep. But are things better in the UK?
So, I came back from France to find the place had become a street of crime. That's an exaggeration, but the police did seize cannabis-growing equipment, and drugs worth more than £300,000, from a house a few doors down. The last occupant had moved out and most of us thought it was empty.
Television drama loves crime. Each time you watch Coronation Street you get the impression that everyone in the street who is not, as well as being adulterous, a murderer, kidnapper or thief has at least been wrongly accused of being one.
And in the week just gone by, we've had The Jury, a vaunted series in which the outstanding Julie Walters, national institution and all, played a QC battling to free a man granted retrial after being convicted for murdering three women he met through an online dating agency.
Now I am all for artistic licence. The writer of the five-part series, Peter Morgan, probably had the vast majority of viewers gripped with the tale and hanging on the edges of their seats for the verdict. But what tricks he stooped to in order to spice things up.
The courtroom scenes were bad enough: lawyers making speeches instead of posing questions, police witnesses making speeches and declarations of the defendant's guilt instead of giving proper evidence, a judge sending the jury out without summing up. The liberties went on.
But what of the jury itself? One member was an imposter, pressurised by her appalling boss to take her place. A second fell in love with the accused and even wrote to him during the proceedings. The foreman was approached by a woman claiming (falsely) to have been his counterpart on the first jury; she gave him a piece of damning but entirely bogus evidence, previously unheard by the new jury, which he proceeds to reveal to the others. Yet another juror books a date with the online agency and gets as far as meeting her beau in a pub before turning sharply on her heels. I make that two, possibly three and maybe even four, criminal offences - and, at the very least, one offence and three wholly improper acts - committed by members of a single jury.
What possessed Julie Walters to allow herself to get involved with such tosh? I suppose we might think we know the answer to that but, in one interview, she has talked of no longer having any desperate need to work. This reeked of desperation, even though her own performance was sound.
Oh, and the man in the dock got off. And walked hand-in-hand with his juryroom admirer from the court.
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