ECCENTRIVIA – Clinton death, biscuits and criminal copper PC Oliver Banfield

Hillary Clinton – What was all that about?

Last night – as I have since May last year, I woke up every hour during the night with a parched dry mouth.

Twice when I woke up I was in the middle of a dream – different narrative dreams – where someone suddenly said: “Hillary Clinton’s dead!”

What was that all about?

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At the moment, I also have occasional vertigo problems.

This blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent, Anna Smith, wrote to say:

Two balls – “He had them indoors, en route to his loo…”

“Sorry to hear about your health problems with the balance. I think you should make sure there is nothing too weighty or sharp that you might fall upon en route to the loo.

“A friend of mine with a similar balance problem had a couple of large stone spheres on pedestals which used to be garden ornaments. He had them indoors, en route to his loo. 

“I insisted on taking them away, saying: Larry, I’m sorry but I’m removing your balls. I don’t want you getting hurt.“

Anna, alas, does not say what Larry’s reaction was.

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Keith suggests it is mucous causing my balance problem…

Ex ITV (et al) announcer Keith Martin, suggests I have a mucous disorder causing my balance problem. 

While he was at it, he also explained to me, in a non-segue, that the origin of the word ‘biscuit’ is French and it originally meant ‘baked twice’.

Who knew? Keith did.

And now the Americans have confused it all for no discernible reason.

If anything, they should be called bi-cookies

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Criminal coppers’ cuffs (Photo by Bill Oxford via UnSplash)

Keith had read my latest blogs about the case in which criminally-inclined PC Oliver Banfield wantonly attacked and beat a woman walking home alone. 

He (Keith) suggested that the reason for the recent spate of crime committed by serving policemen (there was also Sarah Everard’s recent murder by a serving policeman) is that the police were told they had to be closer to the people they serve.

And, of course, they deal mostly with criminals.

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This reminds me of the Stoke Newington police who were planting drugs on drug dealers not because they were frustrated by their inability to get genuine convictions but because they were getting rid of the competition – several of the officers at the local police station had a nice little – highly profitable – business going dealing drugs in the area.

Brian Sedgemore (Photo: Wikipedia)

In 1992, there was an Early Day Motion tabled in the House of Commons in unusually forthright language. I presume one of the sponsors – Brian Sedgemore, MP – had a lot to do with that. I encountered him, between his two stints as an MP, when we were both working at Granada TV in Manchester. 

The Early Day Motion on 31st January 1992 stated:

“That this House condemns those nasty, vile and corrupt police officers at Stoke Newington police station who have been engaged in drug trafficking and perverting the course of justice; is appalled that these officers should have betrayed the trust of people in Hackney in general as well as the trust of those who live in and around Sandringham Road, particularly those represented by the Montague Residents Association; notes that these officers have made a mockery of the way in which Hackney Council has co-operated with the police to get rid of drug dealing in Sandringham Road; notes that it now seems certain that at meetings and by letter Chief Superintendent Roy Clarke from Stoke Newington police station has misled the honourable Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch about the true nature of the problems because he himself has been duped by his own police officers… and calls on the Home Secretary to set up an independent judicial enquiry.”

As far as I am aware, no independent judicial enquiry was set up.

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PC Oliver Banfield (Photo: Channel 4 video)

Which brings us back to the appalling case of 6ft 2in tall copper/criminal PC Oliver Banfield attacking a random 5ft 2in woman in the street.

Banfield has now resigned from the police before he had to face a ‘misconduct investigation’ by his employers, West Midlands Police.

Sandra Smith, comedy fan par excellence who seems to have developed an interest in the PC Olver Banfield case, drew my attention to the latest media coverage of this – a Sky News report – which includes an interview with the victim – a mother-of-two – who, understandably, says:

“It’s kind of cowardly in a way, if you ask me, because I think he’s obviously hoping to make it go away… It’s affected the way I live my life; it’s affected the way I walk round the village that I’ve lived in all of my life… He’s been put on curfew (instead of a prison sentence) in a lockdown and that doesn’t make sense. We’re all on curfew so what’s he gonna learn or what’s he gonna gain from that?”

Kate Copstick in Kenya: more child rape, corruption and struggling charity

Kate Copstick working in Kenya this week

Comedy critic Kate Copstick is currently in Kenya working for her Mama Biashara charity which gives small grants to help poor people start their own self-sustaining businesses.

The Mama Biashara slogan is “Giving a hand up not a hand out”.

Copstick receives no money from the charity and covers all her own expenses, including flights and accommodation. The charity survives on donations (you can donate HERE) and on sales in its London shop.

Three recent blogs had edited extracts from Copstick’s diary.

Now we catch up with what happened last weekend…

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Two of the women the Mama Biashara charity is helping

SATURDAY

My boggled mind forgot to mention yesterday that the women at the workshop in Kitengela – the ones whose husbands were raping their children – were themselves the victims of child rape, having been married off at ages from 11 to 14 (only one was as ancient as 14).

I hate the way the white conqueror always rides not just roughshod but with spiked soles over anyone else’s culture. But this aspect of Maasai culture is an abomination.

Today there is another workshop with another group of young women. But first back to see Vikram Dave and change the rest of the money I brought.

Dave has not yet read my email asking for school fees for the Ruai children. I tell him about the need for shoes in Western to help stop the jiggers infestations and he nods sagely.

I leave and hurtle round the market and then get back to Corner to the meet the girls. They look so young. They ARE so young. All just in their mid teens.

They are so terrified that I do not ask to take a picture.

These girls are from families in rural areas. When they get to about 12, their families get rid of them by sending them to relatives in the city as, more or less, house slaves. And the uncles and the cousins use them for sex. These girls have been sex slaves since they came to Nairobi. About five of them have children by their uncles. They are so lost.

But we drink tea and eat mandazi and talk and they slightly relax. We talk about rising from being no-one to being a businesswoman; we talk about the powers that money will give them. They are all going to get counselling and are very up for that.

They have been taught how to make rugs (the woolly ones for bathrooms and whatnot) by a woman Doris put them in touch with. The woman turned out just to be using them too – she sold the rugs and paid them almost nothing. But they have the skills. So we start a rug business. The profit is excellent and the girls really know their stuff. When I say Mama Biashara will be paying to set up this business some of them start to cry.

Mama Biashara’s Phoenix Project compound in Rombo, Kenya

SUNDAY

We head for Rombo.

OK, we are not exactly sure where Rombo is but we head for Loitoktok in the knowledge that there will be signage from there.

Just past Machakos Junction, we are stopped at a roadblock. The fat policeman toting the AK47 pokes at the bonnet, wiggles the wing mirror and gets David out of the car for a ‘chat’. He takes David’s licence. Now we will have to pay something or he will not get it back. He is obviously not happy with what David is saying as he comes and talks to me. He is taking the car to Loitoktok for impounding, he says, and I will have to get it released on bond. This will be very much money. And David will have to go to court. This will also end in ‘very much money’. He rests his aK47 on the window and looks in at me.

The ball is in my court.

I could play tough, but there are three of them now circling the David mobile.

“Is there some way to avoid all this trouble?” I ask, as charmingly as I can.

“You tell me,” says the fat policeman.

“Perhaps I could buy you lunch,” I murmer through gritted teeth.

He nods. Lunch is acceptable.

I offer 300 shillings through the window.

He turns into a parody Big Black Laughing Policeman, holding his stomach (no mean feat) and rocking backwards and forwards. This makes his gun sway alarmingly.

“Now you are making me to laugh,” he says.

“Then how much?” I ask.

“It is for you to say,” says Tubby the Extortionist.

“Five hundred is what I have,” I say, doing a pantomime pocket search. He comes around my side of the vehicle and grabs it.

David says, as we go, “I would have driven past but, when there are three and you go past, they shoot at your wheels.”

After leaving tarmac roads at Illasit we hit a road worthy of a stage in the Dakar Rally. Dust is chokingly thick and swirls around inside the car coating everything. Slightly alarmingly, my phone welcomes me to Tanzania and I worry we are on the wrong road… but this is border country and borders are porous here.

30 kilometres later we are at Rombo, met by my amazing new contact Zaida. A glass of water and a plate of fresh mango later, I am handing out de-wormers and diclofenac gel in her lovely little house like the journey had never happened.

Our little medical afternoon goes on until 8.30pm and the ailments are exactly what you would expect: muscle and joint aches and strains, headaches, massive congestions and coughs from cooking over wood indoors with no ventilation, an ocean of snot, quite a lot of constipation and some UTIs.

These ladies carry massive bundles of firewood almost every day and they all complain of the same pains in the same places. My diclofenac gel is soon done. I will send more. The marvellous Glucosamine bombs from HTC take a battering, as does their miraculous Cod Liver Oil both for adults and children. And everyone gets de-wormed – adults and children. Some of the kids are eight or nine and have never been de-wormed before.

Mama Biashara reaches out to raped mothers

There is one sweet girl who is epileptic and quite severely mentally challenged. She is breastfeeding a baby.

“She was raped,” explains her mother.

She has, I learn, three children (the eldest is nine years old) and all three are the product of rape. Her mother wants more of ‘the white pills’ the pharmacy gives her for her epilepsy. We try to find out what ‘the white pills’ are but the pharmacy has closed and the (unlicensed) pharmacist is in hiding after a raid by the Ministry of Health.

Now we are heading (in the PITCH dark) out to visit a young wife who has been so badly beaten by her husband that she cannot come to the house.

The Davidmobile is packed with me and Maasai ladies and off we go.

Cross country. Pitch black and the only sound is the acacia bushes gouging bits out of the Davidmobile’s paintwork. Through troughs of water, over stones… as a feat of driving it is very impressive.

“We are here,” says a lady.

There is absolutely nothing to see but we get out, spark up torches, and, sure enough, we are in a collection of manyattas – Maasai houses built from mud and cow dung and wood. There is great excitement from the locals at the glow-in-the-dark granny in their midst. The manyatta is thick with smoke and the girl is bruised, battered and bewildered. Her earlobe has been torn apart and I clean and dress it and leave antiseptic and painkillers. That is about all I can do.

In the car back there is a LOT of talk about the problems of girls being sold into marriage with old men when they are about eleven. They undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) and get sold off ASAP. No school for girls. No school for most of the kids, but definitely none for girls. The ladies in the back seat talk of one girl currently who is heavily pregnant but so young she has no breasts.

One girl is mentioned who was sold off and ran away, sold off again and ran away again and took herself to school. She has been beaten repeatedly and ostracised and is now living in Rombo at a place the women (led by Zaida and some of the Maasai Mamas) hope will become a refuge and a school for girls running away from FGM and forced marriage at twelve years old. There is one other girl at the house whom they were unable to save from ‘the cut’ but who was rescued before being sold to an old man.

The cut, I learn, is treated with goat fat and cow dung when fresh. And the girls are made to drink cows’ blood to replenish what they lose.

Tomorrow we are going to see this refuge house, and the compound which could be the start of something massive here.

CONTINUED HERE

Copstick in Kenya: “They have huge sticks. They have huge guns. AK-47s.”

A couple of days ago, I posted diary extracts from Kate Copstick in Kenya, where her Mama Biashara charity gives seed money to impoverished people wanting to start self-sustaining businesses. It also gives medical aid and advice to those people whom other charities overlook.

These are edited extracts. Fuller versions are posted on Copstick’s Facebook page.

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SUNDAY

Kate Copstick working for Mama Biashara charity  in Kenya

I risk electrocution and plug my phone in to charge, close to where the torrential rain is coming through the roof. On the TV is a loud, happy-clappy, interminable church service and from outside comes the more restrained call from many mosques around the city. Around all the Goddy places the terrible, terrible shit goes on.

Doris is in agony with all her bites. I promise we will get bicarbonate of soda and make her less itchy. To be fair, I am horrified to note, I am catching up fast on the unsightly bump front. My back looks like a couple of pounds of mince and my left side feels like the bottom of a football boot. I check the symptoms of Dengue Fever again. The buggering things are like Ninjas here. I have neither seen nor heard one. In Nairobi you at least hear the little bastards. Here – nothing until the lumps and bumps catch fire.

We get a tuk tuk to the ferry and join the sea of people (no pun intended) waiting for the crossing. It is free and fast and unsettlingly efficient for Kenya. We get a matatu and reach Chungwe, our medical location.

The villagers are suspicious at first. None of the people Doris had spoken to have turned up but we soon have a massive crowd. All the de-wormers go, we hand out kids’ cod liver oil and there are loads of coughs and colds, a man with possible malaria, some UTIs, a man who had had bloody poo and was turned away from the hospital because he had no money, a load of rashes and a worrying little girl of two with itching and pain ‘down there’ and diarrhoea.

We are out in the open and there is nowhere private to go. I ask the mother if ‘someone’ might have done ‘something bad’. She looks blank. But she has a husband. And a brother. We are coming back on Tuesday. So I give her stuff for the itching and a mild kaolin mix for the trots and we will see her then, somewhere private.

There is a LOT of malnutrition here. Kids who look like babies turn out to be three years old. So Tuesday will also be about nutrition

MONDAY

Doris, one of Mama Biashara’s key helpers

More torrential rain and a sad sight as I get out of bed to find two humongous cockroaches, apparently dead, lying on their backs on the beautifully clean floor of my room. I hope it is not an omen, as I scratch my ever-increasing number of lumps and bumps. We are meeting Vicky for an update on All Things Coastal.

I need to get some dosh out and finish my research on the law regarding the behaviour of the police in ‘Ho Central’. We are heading back there and I want to have a leaflet for the girls, explaining their rights. Not that the police respect their rights, but it will be a help.

The flooding is quite bad, with the extra frisson that, if the lake on the road has a pothole in it, the water suddenly doubles or triples in depth and you are, well, almost literally up shit creek without a paddle.

We are dropped at the City Mall where we are joined by Vicky. Her update is a delight. The fumigators from last time are ‘fumigating everything’. And now have three groups. Life on Lamu in the poor areas has been ‘transformed’.

People have electricity, they have food and the men are no longer idle. Everyone is doing business. Unfortunately, the men are less keen on sharing the money they have with their wives. So another 60 of the older ladies have asked for funding. Vicky reckons that 20 is the ideal number for a group and so one group wants to sell eggs (hard boiled with kachumbari: they are a phenomenally popular snack), another to make samosas and the third to sell Smokies – a popular sausage sold by the roadside as a snack. The 60 ladies are kicked-off in business for about £350. Hoorah!

The flooding is still crippling transport to and from the island. People drown with monotonous regularity. On the boat Vicky came on, one woman was swept overboard and the fisherman had to save her by casting their fishing net overboard and landing her like a big fish.

We get a tuk tuk out to Mtwapa. It is raining again. We set up and talk to the ladies in ‘our’ bar. They are impressed by the leaflets and by what we are telling them. We go walkabout. The next big group of girls work out of a sort of lodging house. Well, brothel. The girls rent a room and then they are freelance agents. They do not believe what we are telling them. The rain gets heavy. So we go inside the house.

We soon have a big group. And they are excited. We explain about being ready to film whenever the police swoop. Film them in their criminal activities. The women understand about the loitering aspect. But, they tell us, if there is no-one outside, the police just come into their rooms, and demand 3,000 to leave, and this is not even when the girls have a client. We get through to them though. And we are in the middle of arranging a big meeting when there are shrieks from outside.

We rush out. A big jeep has parked there. About ten huge men in army combat gear are dragging girls into it. They have huge sticks the thickness of baseball bats but maybe four feet long. They also have huge guns. AK-47s. It is like a vicious, violent, heavily-armed version of the Childcatcher. It is horrifying to watch and they do it without compunction.

In two months, five sex workers have been murdered. Some of the placards read: SEX WORKERS – DON’T KILL THEM

In the back of the jeep, two of them are laughing. The women are manhandled with appalling ferocity. It is stunningly shocking. I am maybe twenty feet from the jeep, staring open mouthed in horror.

The big guy at the back with the AK-47 just grins at me as they drive off. Doris is devastated.

She is having immediate flashbacks to her own days on the streets. She is genuinely traumatised.

We hand out as many leaflets as we can and talk with one of the girls who escaped the men. Doris and I go back to base and do some handing out of douches and diclofenac gel and Flagyl and advice. We more or less have the matatu back to town to ourselves. And it is so relaxing. Half eleven and all is completely safe.

We get a tuk tuk from town and do not even have to bargain. At midnight in Nairobi any taxi driver would be demanding 2,000 for our trip across the bridge and into the never-ending jam. Our lovely tuk tuk man asked for 350.

I take my ever-increasing collection of pink lumpy bumpy bits to bed and scratch myself to sleep.

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… CONTINUED HERE …

Hell created by half of a comedy duo, a rollerskating pop star & 108 Jaffa Cakes

Rich Rose. The Man who put the lit into clitoris

So I got an email from Rich Rose of comedy duo Ellis & Rose.

“A friend of mine and I,” it said, “have written the pilot for a sitcom. It’s called Hell and is set in a grubby Soho sex shop. It’s being filmed from 5th-9th January at 3 Mills Studios and we were wondering if you would like to pay a visit to the set.”

So that was why, yesterday afternoon, I was in East London surrounded by dildos and accidentally walked through a vagina.

“It’s a full-length 25 minute sitcom pilot,” Rich told me yesterday, “divided down into five 5-minute webisodes which we are going to put online this summer.”

“So five climaxes,” I said.

Rich looked at me and said nothing.

“And potentially a series,” said Rich’s friend and co-writer David Ralf.

“Are you both appearing in Hitchcock-type cameos?” I asked.

“David’s cameo,” explained Rich, “is him standing in the shop scratching his nuts in a tracksuit.”

“So good clean stuff,” I said.

“In it’s current incarnation,” said David, “I’m not sure that any mainstream television studio would, eh…”

The crew look at a playback during the first day’s shooting

“Ofcom would shit a brick,” said Rich.

“Are you going to have any nudity?” I asked hopefully.

“There’s a lot of doll nudity,” David told me. “I’m not sure how doll nudity goes over.”

“And you walked through the giant vulva,” Rich added.

“I did?” I asked, surprised.

“The curtains,” explained David.

“I feel soiled,” I said. “If you want vaginas, you want Martin Soan, supplier of large scale vaginas to stage and screen. Some of them sing.”

“Really?” asked Rich.

“Really,” I told him. “So what’s the plot of Hell?”

“A hopeless romantic,” explained David, “finds himself working in a Soho sex shop, a grubby little den which is subject to all the pressures and changes in the area. And he embarks upon a sexual odyssey.”

“Well,” said Rich, “he is forcefully coerced into a sexual odyssey by the assistant manager of Hell.”

“The message is very wholesome,” said David.

“No it isn’t,” said Rich.

“Yes it is,” said David.

“So what’s the message?” Rich asked.

“Well,” replied David, “what does the central character learn at the end?”

“Don’t slip on lube?” suggested Rich.

“I think,” said David, “we may have taken different things away from this whole writing process.”

“What do you think the message is?” I asked David.

“The central character learns about himself. He is a very repressed individual and his only outlet for intimacy is idealised rom-com romance and I think he learns about other ways to express himself.”

“Also,” added Rich, “there are loads of dildos. Try to emphasise that, John. Loads of dildos.”

“Yes,” agreed David, “maybe go with that.”

“You crowdfunded it,” I said.

“We assumed we could make it for £8,000,” said Rich.

“Which we raised,” said David. “Then we went to Koto Films who raised more and now the budget is more than twice that, with Jack Plummer of Koto Films directing. We are doing it at a level that I think has surprised us. A higher quality level. A huge number of people have given a huge amount of time and energy.”

Producer Holly Harris with writer David Ralf

Producer Holly Harris of Koto Films told me: “A friend of a friend has lent us some fetish wear she collects. So many of our props are quite expensive and we just would not have been able to get such an amazing variety of different things on set if it wasn’t for her generosity.”

“How – indeed, why –  did you come up with the idea?” I asked Rich. “Just because sex always sells?”

“I thought of it,” he told me, “when I was leaving university in 2011. I was being driven home back to Purley and we passed a sex shop in quite a pleasant suburban area – not in Purley. My initial thought was How funny would it be to do a sitcom set in a sex shop in a leafy, cheery, suburban area? But that didn’t really work.”

“When we first worked on the script together,” explained David, “the shops we went to – for research purposes, of course – were all in Soho.”

“We had to visit many, many shops,” explained Rich. “We are professionals.”

Development. Hell had many script changes

“And then,” said David, “we gave Koto Films what now turns out to have been a very, very early draft.”

“It’s been taken apart and put back together again,” said Rich.

“And Koto have made it look much better than we ever imagined it,” added David.

“And the crew?” I asked.

“It was amazing,” Holly Harris told me, “to see so many people come out of the woodwork who have some kind of relationship with the adult industry. Our art director’s mother is a sex therapist who spent 18 months in Spain running a strip club. Our construction managers are also drag queens.”

“And the central female character?” I asked.

“Is Crystal Hart, the manager of the shop,” David told me. “She is an ex-pornstar turned small-business woman.”

“Played by?” I asked.

“Saffron Sprackling,” said David, “who fronted the 199os band Republica. She was and is an actress. She was in Starlight Express.”

“So she can roller-skate,” I said.

“Yes,” said David. “This morning she was telling me about rollerskating around Soho in the old days.”

“In the streets of Soho?” I asked.

“Yes. She knew people who owned exactly the sort of shops we are portraying in the show and they used to have police among their clientele. But the police had to raid the shops every now and then, to keep up appearances. So they would ring ahead whenever they were going to raid the shop and Saffron would leave the theatre where she was performing Starlight Express, pick up a bag which she assumed was full of cash and held on to it until they gave the all clear and then she returned it to the shop. Hence the roller-skates.”

“So she roller-skated through the streets of Soho?” I asked.

“I believe so,” said David.

“Saffron has a very strong gay and lesbian following,” Holly told me.

Dissected: One of the most important parts of the production

“I will have to get more Jaffa Cakes,” David mused as I left the studio.

“Because?” I asked.

“Because the crew have eaten 108 Jaffa Cakes in two days.”

This afternoon, Koto issued their first press release about the production, saying: Hell is a grubby story with a warm heart.

David Ralf is quoted as saying: “A sex shop is the last place most people want to admit to going to for research. But we found a world of independent Soho sex shops with dedicated and friendly staff, mind-bending products, and a rich and fascinating history in an area of London that’s changing fast.”

Rich Rose is quoted as saying: “So we kept some of that stuff and crammed the rest full of dirty jokes.”

I think that pretty much covers it.

Police corruption according to a Grouchy Club comedy critic & a blogger

Kate Copstick and I expressed our views at The Grouchy Club

Yesterday’s blog was two brief extracts from the first Grouchy Club “mostly comedy” weekly podcast with Kate Copstick and me.

Before Copstick was an actress or TV personality or comedy critic or ran the Mama Biashara charity, she was a lawyer in Scotland – an Advocate. During the podcast, I asked her why she changed careers. Was it because she got fed up with trying to get guilty clients found innocent?

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COPSTICK
Exactly the opposite. I stopped being a lawyer because I sat one too many times in a court where members of, for example, the Serious Crimes Squad lied in their teeth.

JOHN
This is in Glasgow?

COPSTICK
In Glasgow and Edinburgh. I realised that Law is just a big posh boys’ game where your accent will always matter and money will always matter and everything other than innocence or guilt will always matter and I was on a very fine knife-edge between thinking… well, I did… I thought: If they’re going to lie, then I’ll lie – and that is the slippery slope.

JOHN
Well, the only people who lie more than lawyers and solicitors and barristers are the p…

COPSTICK
The police, yes.

JOHN
… and, bizarrely, all the criminals I’ve met have actually been terribly honest.

COPSTICK
Well exactly. The most frightening people I met – ever – were members of the Serious Crimes Squad in the Glasgow police.

JOHN
Does the Serious Crime Squad still exist? – I think the London one was dismantled because it was so corrupt (in fact, it was the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad).

COPSTICK
I sincerely hope not. (It does.) There was a code – It’s ridiculous – It’s all that Oh no! We only slit the throats of the bad guys – But there always seemed to me to be a kind of a code of honour…

JOHN
Among thieves?

COPSTICK
Among thieves and murderers and armed robbers. I would have been a terrible… I’m a far too emotional and shouty and not-watching-my-mouth person to be a decent lawyer.

JOHN
I’ve always found criminals are very upset by injustice, which is bizarre.

COPSTICK
Yes. Absolutely.

JOHN
They commit crimes and, if they get caught, fair enough: that’s part of the game.

COPSTICK
Yes.

JOHN
But if a genuine injustice is done, they get terribly uppity about it…

COPSTICK
Absolutely.

JOHN
… whereas a policeman just thinks that is part of the game.

COPSTICK
Those in charge of the system are the ones in whose interest it is to keep the system corrupt.

JOHN
If proof were needed, this is an example of how this podcast might not always be comedy.

COPSTICK
Well, indeed.

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The Grouchy Club’s first 43-minute weekly audio podcast is available to hear HERE, with a 10-minute video extract on YouTube. The Grouchy Club will be live at London’s Jewish Comedy Day this coming Sunday.

The English court system? Don’t make me laugh. Tell the very dead Stefan Kiszko it works…

Today I was supposed to be starting jury service in St Albans but, a week or so ago, they told me I had been cancelled because they had “too many people”.

The same thing happened last year. I was cancelled due to too many people.

So, this time because, as they said, they’d “messed me around”, rather than automatically re-schedule me, they gave me the choice of either being rescheduled again or being excused jury service completely this time round.

I chose to be excused.

I was in two minds about the whole thing anyway.

On the one hand, it would have been interesting to see the jury system (not) work first hand. One person I know who served on a jury in South London told me it was virtual anarchy with jury members not understanding or not being interested in large swathes of evidence and one jury member repeatedly turning up late for the deliberations on innocence or guilt because she “didn’t think it was important”.

On the other hand, I would have been very loathe myself to find any accused person guilty because there is no telling what is being hidden, lied about and distorted in the presentation to the jury. The object of the English court system is not to find out who committed the crime but to decide which of two highly-paid advocates – Defence or Prosecution lawyer – presents their evidence better and hides evidence better. It is like judging an ice-skating competition with imprisonment as the top prize.

Plus, I would not want to convict on uncorroborated police evidence.

Margaret Thatcher’s solicitor – a partner in a major law firm – told me he would never put a Metropolitan Police officer in the witness stand without corroborating evidence because you could never be certain a Met officer was telling the truth.

Likewise, the owner of a prominent detective agency who employs ex-SAS troopers etc, told me he never employs ex-policemen because you can never trust them.

The story of the framing by West Yorkshire Police of Stefan Kiszko, his disgraceful trial and his wrongful imprisonment for 16 years should be taught to every schoolkid in the UK.

It is an illustration of the English court system, not an exception.