According to one serious front-page newspaper report, all those bones found on the site of that former children’s home in Jersey were actually left-over props from an edition of Bergerac. The whole place is taped off, they’ve had the floppy-eared sniffer dogs in and the supposedly grisly, horrible revelations have been leading our news programmes for a week or more. Now it may well be not multiple murders after all, but merely fake stuff left for John Nettles to find many years ago, before he forsook the Channel Islands for the scarcely gentler parish of Midsomer.
This revelation surprised me less than you might imagine. I have long held that almost everything I do in my life has been scripted by some grinning imbecile in the BBC light entertainment department and that unconsciously I am simply acting out a rather lowbrow situation comedy, the sort of early evening programme that once provided work for the likes of Melvyn Hayes or Terry Scott and revolves, for its jokes, around male ineptitude, misogyny or racism. So it makes sense that everything else is fictitious, too.
I suspect it wouldn’t surprise you if you were told tomorrow that Afghanistan was simply a vast, rocky set created for the benefit of Ross Kemp and that actually at the end of each day the Taleban militia members rip off their confining robes, wipe away the dusky greasepaint and enjoy a nice Sancerre in the Green Room. You would just nod wearily and say yeah, that makes sense. Welcome to something like the Truman Show, except less fun and with nothing at all beyond the glass barrier that confines us except for an omnipotent but paradoxically moronic television controller.
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