I was about to blog about Jeremy Vine being made to wear a cowboy's outfit and wave a fake gun in the BBC News Channel studio on election night, but there are, in fact, more foul crimes being committed by journalists in the name of TV entertainment.
Step forward Steve Scott with his Nightwatch programme, which is either in a constant state of production or is, like Jeremy Kyle and Homes Under The Hammer, on constant repeat.
Nightwatch, for those new to this blog, is a) a programme I thoroughly enjoy taking the mickey out of but b) have only watched twice so far. Imagine one of those Jame Theakston-narrated tv-cameras-following-the-emergency-services-style programmes but without a) Jamie Theakston and b) any entertaining emergency services people.
It runs every night, in the early hours of the morning on ITV1, in the slot where ITV used to fleece viewers by telling them they could win big prizes if they entered quizzes, only to put people on hold for an eternity. Perhaps part of the plan is to convince Ofcom that it really is possible for ITV to put something less worthy on air than the old quiz shows.
If that was the plan, it fails because of Steve Scott. He's a journalist who was starting to get a few plum gigs on the ITV News circuit until ITV wheeled Sir Trevor McDonald out of the spectacles museum he shares with Deirdrie Barlow offa Conoration Street and back into News At Ten, shunting the genuine news-reading talent back down the pecking order.
Scott, who is ably supported by a cracking pair of eyebrows which help glue you to the screen, stands in the ITV studio linking various fly-on-the-wall footage of the emergency services. Why would the emergency services allow such footage to be shot? Because, in the eyes of the hapless PRs they employ, it's a way of showing the emergency services in a new light.
Sadly for these PR supremos, all the positive angles have already been exploited by the numerous TV fly-on-the-walls which have filled our screens for a decade, right from Police, Camera, Action through to whatever Jamie Theakston is voicing over this week.
These masters of marketing should have picked up on this, and if they had, they'd have started saying no to the TV executives who know following coppers round, say Leeds, on a Friday night, is a sure-fire way to get some great stock shots of girls vomiting, men fighting, girls vomiting over men fighting and so on. But they haven't, and so the cameras continue to roll, following officers in increasingly random and obscure parts of the emergency services.
On Wednesday night, having watched Liverpool lose in the Champions League final, I watched ITV finally lose the plot as Steve Scott presented us with footage of the British Transport Police - oh yes - on patrol at Leeds Railway Station - worst for crime in the North East, apparently, even though I always thought Leeds was in, er, Yorkshire - on the Friday before Christmas. Showing it on April 30 confirms my suspicions that it was a repeat. Or that ITV really don't care.
With 150,000 people in Leeds for a night out on the Friday before Christmas - "We call it Black Friday" said one of the BTP officers we were to watch - you'd expect a neat little package of how these officers of the railway - they call themselves specialists - help keep travellers in and out of the North East's railway crime hot spot safe.
Wrong. Wrong Wrong.
First up was the drunken reveller who had apparently been using racist language on train about to travel from Leeds to one of those Yorkshire places with a name which brings to mind satanic mills. And I say that as a journalist who has worked in Accrington, Blackburn and Burnley. Anyway, man gets off train to complain about abuse, police get on train and take "racist" man off train. They start to talk to him, he instantly says "I'm not racist" before they even say why he's been hauled off the train. The train pulls out of the station and it suddenly dawns on our transport specialist coppers: The witnesses have gone off with the train.
Rocket science, patrolling Leeds Railway Station, innit? So they're left with a drunk non-racist who just wants to go home.
Next up, there's a homeless chap who obviously lives around the station quite a lot. I always thought that if a policeman found a homeless person, he'd move them on or find out the address of a hostel for him, or something. Not in Leeds, where our aged hobo is given very wise advice: "Don't keep your legs out on the floor, there's a lot of drunk people around tonight."
Just before we return to Steve Scott in the studio, we are whisked through a copper telling a bloke who's just chundered across the concourse at Leeds station to "go outside for some fresh air because the smell won't make you feel very well" (!), a bloke who covered in blood on his face who is asked, by a policeman of the transport sort: "Are you ok?" before we go round the back of the station, to the car park under the arches.
It's here, we are told, that the officers know that drug-using takes place, and it's happened "tonight" (Black Friday) too. How do we know? Because a banana skin is fresh. And fresh fruit helps drug users keep their blood sugar up after a "hit." All of a sudden, I have images of junkies trawling through the fruit section of the Simply Food at M&S on the concourse before heading round the back to shoot up. Still, if it helps them to their five a day.
As for our friends at the BTP, if ever there's a more compelling case to say "sod global warming, I'm going by car" then I've yet to see it.
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