Via the handily lotterial (I don't care what you may think, it's a word. Put your hand down and pay attention at the back there) method of rant generation, BBC2's prime-time, nail-in-the-coffin-of-judicial-process controversy farm The Verdict gives ample opportunity to hate all kinds of things and still come out at the end of it all looking all intellecutal and clever-like.
To summarize, for the benefit of those who had the foresight to pull out their own brains and then cauterize the vestigal stump that remained for fear of infecting themselves with this guff: a convicted perjurer, three individuals of varying talent who all linger under the moniker of 'actors', two musicians, one of whom sees fit to name himself after a Japanese manga craze and still thinks he ought to be taken seriously, the CEO of a well-known high-street purveyor of knickers and hilarious inflatable animals (erm, so I've heard, anyway), a footballing-type fellow, a woman who wasn't very happy when her daughter got murdered, some stripling of a lad of twenty-one who's too successful for his own (or is it my own?) good and a former Shadow Chancellor all get together to decided on the guilt or lack thereof of a made-up group of defendants accused of raping a made-up woman. So, just your average jury, then.
Oh, but wait, it's not. It's actually not a legitimate jury at all, containing as it does at least one man with criminal convictions who's served jail time within the last ten years, and at least a good few grounds for objection by even the most half-witted of barrister smattered around the place. It's also, let's be fair, so astonishingly unlikely that all twelve of these vaguely-known individuals would all a) be called for jury service at the same time, b) all be within the catchment area of the same Crown Court and c) all serve on the same jury that we may as well give up now and call in Darth Vader as the foreman.
Ah, but, say the programme's advocates (the puns! Oh, the terrible terrible puns!), that's the point! We get all these people together to crack open the nature of the jury and show everyone what the law's all about! Then it's not a big mystery any more and we all go home happy, discussing last night's episode of the case over the water cooler and on the BBC message boards, presumably with gusto. Well, here's news to you all, chumps: you can't have both, and, to be frank, you shouldn't have either. If you want to treat this like a real case, and if you want to watch what a jury go through as they take the agonizing decision between possibly locking up an innocent man and allowing a guilty one to walk free, while learning how the law that frames all this works, then fine. Go ahead and do it, you ghouls. But don't be surprised if I come round and bash your smug little heads together when at the end of the week you congratulate yourselves on guessing correctly whether or not she was lying. If you want Archer and his cohorts to treat this deal as though it was the real McCoy, you need to be doing that yourself, too. Of course, you've probably stopped reading by this point, because it's a long paragraph and mostly it flies over your head a bit with all the legal talk. Well, it gets thicker from here, so we'll have a Tourette's-style outburst so the stragglers can catch up.
Boobies!
But, much as I'd love to blame Jeffrey 'Perjurer Mcperjury Perjury Perjuryface' Archer and the whole damn programme for the whole mess, it really isn't their fault. If we've got to the point where a programme like this actually becomes plausible, then somewhere down the line someone's put a foot wrong, and I think I can guess who. Hint: it's quite a lot of people. Quick pop quiz: which piece of legislation defines the offence of murder? If you answered anything other than 'none, it's covered in the common law and always has been, you charlatan', possibly substituting 'charalatan' for your own highbrow insult of choice, then I'm not at all surprised and don't think any the worse of you. Unless you're a legal professional of some kind, in which case you'll understand if I don't hire you to defend me against my forthcoming lawsuit from made-up PhD lady 'Doctor' Gillian McKeith, with 'Doctor' here rhyming with 'not a doctor'. But I digress.
The only reason I have any particularly decent knowledge of the English legal system is because I chose to study it at A-level. Had I not done so, I'd probably be in the same boat as everyone else, which is mad: I actually had to elect to learn the law as a purely academic and university-attention-grabbing qualification to know anything much about it at all. Compare with the United States, and their schools' undying devotion to their beloved Constitution. Sure, it creates obsessively silly patriotic zeal of the kind that should've died out with all the rest of the Nationalist movement about seventy years ago, but at least it gives the little 'uns, and by extension, the big little 'uns, at least the vaguest grounding in their laws and how they come about. And then they go and spoil it all by doing something stupid like televising trials.
Citizenship lessons, that's the key! To most Johnny Commoners on the street, courts and laws and parliaments are all just a load of blokes in silly wigs talking in code while occasionally one of them sees fit to appear on the news and talk down to them, thus making the football late. Thanks to Law & Order and its brood, I'd hazard most English citizens have more idea how US criminal law works than does their own. Probably best not to dwell on what goes on on the civil side of things. Teach little Jimmy Commoner about Magna Carta, the blowing up of shit all over the world for the Campaign For This Sort Of Thing (as it was never known) and about a thousand years' worth of blokes with swords shouting at each other and getting quite huffy over the whole affair and you've suddenly got a whole new ball game. Probably best to leave out all the boring stuff, and quite right, too, but all little Jimmy needs to know is the beautiful balance of nature which has somehow fallen out of a constitutional Monarchy being ruled by a democratic assembly and a convention of aristocrats under a joyously simple set of legal frameworks and he'll leap for joy. Well, probably not, but possibly the little bastard will stop kicking peoples' bins over and laughing.
This rant was brought to you in conjunction with the letter 'K' and the number 7.
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