"TOMORROW, I start a murder. On October 21st, I'll do a rape and an indecent assault." Now, there's brash. Clearly, this wise guy doesn't need a self assertiveness course. But interviewer, David Rose, wasn't unnerved by the frankness. With Cracker-ish bluntness, he cut straight to the key question: "How do you keep your stockings up?" The judge smiled, perhaps appreciating the rapier sharp thrust of his interrogator.
"Starting" murders and "doing" rapes and indecent assaults are bread and butter for High Court judges. No mystery there. But the stockings - now we're sucking diesel. How do British High Court judges keep them up? Why do they wear such remarkable hosiery? Yes, these are the great courtroom questions. Eat your heart out, Perry Mason. The Verdict asked questions which sought to reach the parts cop opera cannot reach.
The High Court judge undergoing this trial by TV was Mr Justice Hooper, a big, beefy bloke with a ruddy, quite humane face. He looked as well fed as a prop forward. "A", the stockings... look, you're getting rather personal now." Finding black, thigh high stockings - appropriately sheer and fine, to hug the contours of the calf - is difficult for prop forward types. So it's discrimination against the larger man but that's fashion for you.
"I used to wear women's tights," said the judge, with characteristic frankness. But, he confided, they weren't really satisfactory. They tended to descend too easily, an image, which, let's face it, opens up an appalling vista indeed. However, help was at hand. The judge hit upon the idea of Thigh Highs and despatched his clerk, a Robert Morley lookalike, to Debenhams. "The elasticated top round the thigh" did the trick. Case solved.
To be fair to Mr Justice Hooper, he knew he was telling the tale against himself. Between the tights and the Thigh Highs, he risked being, quite literally, a laughing stock. But the point was made in rooms where human horror and human misery are regularly predominant, the most important man may well be uncomfortable in a pair of ill fitting women's tights. Surely, this turns courtroom drama into black pantomime.
Indeed, though the research would undoubtedly be difficult and not always pleasant, there are grounds to suspect that there is a decent thesis, waiting to be written about the relationship between sentencing and the level of discomfort being caused by slipping tights. As a working hypothesis, it might be suggested that the lower the tights, the longer the stretch. Then again, that is mere speculation, as yet unproven beyond a reasonable doubt.
What is more certain is that the gap between judges and the judged - while some distance is understandable - becomes, rightly, an object of ridicule, rather than respect, by the excessive elaboration of the panto costumery. Judge Hooper, again, in his favour, said that he had doubts about the ostentation of the rig outs. But, he added, if people - taxpayers - wanted judges in this gear, he'd go along with it.
It wasn't the most compelling justification, Justice. It's doubtful that there's a thunderous groundswell of public opinion insisting on such a degree of pomp. Edicts on such matters, as they do in courtrooms, tend to come from on high. Anyway, The Verdict, in addressing the question of sartorial daftness among judges, will hopefully have made the more robust defenders of its continuance squirm in their tights and Thigh Highs.
For their part, the judges interviewed understandably tried to do a bit of PR for the job. We saw Judge Scott Wolstenholme murdering a version of I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Scott plays drums in a rock band and even if his drumming is criminal . .. well, why not? Judge Simon Goldstein is a fanatical West Ham supporter. (Some judgment there, eh?) We saw him at Upton Park, cheering on the Hammers.
The rock and the football don't quite cast the judges as lads. But still, perhaps a breed of New Judges or Judges Lite is gestating in Britain. Mind you, the more traditional types haven't gone away. Judge Martin Tucker, who recently jailed a repeat bagsnatcher for life, had this to say: "We (judges) tend not to live in the council estates but I live very close to one. My gardener lives in one." Wow, there's street - ... walk on the wild side, Martin.
THE crimes of Peter Sutcliffe - horrific way beyond the point of considerations about courtroom costumes - were the focus of Network First: Silent Victims - The Untold Story Of The Yorkshire Ripper. It opened with news footage from January 4th, 1981, immediately after Sutcliffe had been arrested in Sheffield for having a car with false number plates. He had a prostitute with him and a ball-peen hammer, his favourite weapon, in the boot.
"Die yeh bastard. Die. Die," screamed a man's voice at the police van carrying Sutcliffe into custody. The old film reawakened perfectly the outrage and hysteria of the place and the time. Sutcliffe confessed to 13 murders and seven attempted murders before being sentenced to jail for the rest of his days. Network First raised the possibility that the Ripper may have killed more than 20 other women.
It was gripping and chilling TV - excellent in terms of information but dubious in terms of devices. It was just too much like Crimewatch meets The Rock `n' Roll Years. Eerie reconstructions of Ripper attacks and a pop music soundtrack which included Jimi Hendrix, Sweet, George McRae, Roxy Music, Abba, Gary Newman, David Bowie and, get this... The Stranglers, certainly pumped up the entertainment value volume. Fair enough, it kept you watching. But it was questionable.
Sutcliffe's admitted crimes took place between 1975 and 1980. This documentary suggested that, in fact, they began in 1969. Using pop music from the various years up to 1980 was intended to evoke the mood of the times. In its way, it did; but Roxy Music's Love Is The Drug, played over scenes of cars cruising the red light district of Bradford, was hardly the most discreet or sensitive choice.
Anyway, reconstructing three attacks, during which the attacker was surprised (by, respectively, children a car and a young couple) and talking to the women who survived these assaults, the documentary left no doubt of the massive police bungling which marked the Ripper case. Sutcliffe was, it seems certain, attacking any woman, not prostitutes exclusively. The three interviewed had been, at the time, a trainee teacher, a nurse and a student.
They faced hostility from police, who wished the public to believe that Sutcliffe confined his attacks to prostitutes. In court, Sutcliffe decided to plead insanity, on the grounds that "God had told him to kill prostitutes". Case pretty well closed. Not quite. Chief Constable Keith Hallayvell of West Yorkshire police began investigating 60 unsolved murders dating back to the hey day (Hey Joe day?) of Jimi Hendrix.
Even since leaving the force, he has continued to visit Sutcliffe in prison. In 1992, he elicited two further confessions - Sutcliffe knew details which, Hallawell said, only the attacker, the victim or the police could know. Hallawell insists that the Ripper will eventually admit to 20 more murders. It was commendable investigative TV. And yet, the mood music did not evoke just its time. Much of it was too flippant, too gaudy, too silver platform boots for that. It struck a discordant note, considering the subject matter.
THERE was something unharmonious, too, about the Echo Awards, broadcast from the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Yes, the television and radio programmes up for awards - were genuinely worthy and totally deserving of celebration. Many of them were superb in documenting and revealing powerful political and social evils in the world. Excellent. But still, the awards ceremony grated.
It wasn't that any of the recipients indulged in self congratulatory Oscar or BAFTA gush. No it was much better than that. But coming from ECHO (the European Community Humanitarian Office) it was impossible not to question the role of Europe in the Third World. So, there are greater exploiters than Europe - at least in this century - but, really, do we imagine that no European wealth is at the expense of the Third World?
To be fair, the people gathered in Kilmainham were not the financial rapists of poor countries. Far from it ... yet, being there to celebrate European decency, while fine in its own way, might have been more laudable if the stark truth were told - not by TV and radio producers and directors - but by a Euro political heavyweight. As awards go, these were well merited but they could well give the impression that Euro altruism is more effective than it really is.
ANYWAY, over in the RTE recycling department, Marty Whelan was this week's presenter of Raiders of the Lost Archives. Mr Whelan is a light entertainment sort of guy which resulted, predictably, in his between choices patter being discordantly fluffier than the choices themselves. Indeed, some of his chosen recyclings were amusing in ways which he links most certainty were not.
He picked out Hall's Pictorial Weekly (almost de rigueur, it seems); the late Vincent Hanly interviewing Gilbert O'Sullivan; Richard Nixon in Ireland in 1966; Robert Morley on Kenny Live; Eamon de Valera's funeral passing the GPO; Des Keogh talking to Burl Ives; Ferdia MacAnna presenting a 1982 show, featuring rock guff from Paul McGuinness and BP Fallon; Margaret Rutherford at Trinity College in 1961; Gay Byrne, Mike Murphy, Twink and Aine O'Connor rigged out as Abba and - the one which mattered - Murphy Agus A Cairde.
All the original Murphys have been wiped. The only remaining image of the puppet, who babysat the children of Telifis Eireann's first generation, is on a documentary. This is wanton. So much of home produced 1960s TV is gone. Still, it was good to see Murphy again, to re experience his awesome, transcendent banality. Not, of course, that he was ever in the league of Daithi Lacha.
Murphy, with all those cairde, was too much of a social animal, a gossip coluran, creature. It was Daithi (the alliterative David Duck in English) who offered essential starkness, his vulnerable Aililiu pitched precisely between hope and fear, echoing the quintessence of the human condition. Ah yes, Daithi was Beckettian in his brevity and distillation. He has, I'm, assured, a cult following among discerning fortysomethings. All right then, he was absurd, pure codology but no more so than men wearing women's tights while they judge on very grave matters.