We Just Want the Facts...

The world truly has gone mad. This week a TV drama series found itself criticised for making something up! A recent episode of The Bill featured, as a plot device, a fictional drug which could provide relief for MS sufferers. I'm guessing that they chose to feature a made up drug as, if they'd used the name of a real drug, they'd have been accused of misleading people as to its properties, and thereby giving false hope to MS sufferers. They probably also feared that there'd be a flurry of people trying to obtain any real drug they featured. In the event, despite believing they were being responsible, the programme's makers found themselves under fire for creating false hope amongst MS sufferers by implying that there was some kind of wonder drug treatment for it! For fuck's sake, are people really that stupid? Do they really think that The Bill is a a documentary series about the work of the police?

It's fiction for Christ's sake! Everything featured in it is fictional! Mind you, I have personal experience that some people have difficulties in coming to terms with the difference between fact and fiction. In the days when The Sleaze had a message board, I had some moron posting there complaining that the story claiming that there had been a 'lost' Doctor between Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker in Dr Who, was, as he put it, "complete bollocks". Apparently he'd checked on the Internet Movie Database, amongst other sources, and the actor named in the story didn't exist, thereby proving it wasn't true! It never seemed to occur to him that the story was deliberately untrue, ie fictional! I at first suspected that it was some kind of elaborate 'ironic' joke on the poster's part. But no, it quickly became apparent that he was serious. When it was pointed out to him that the story was fictional and published on a site devoted to satirical fiction, he became quite abusive!

The guy's lack of critical faculties was astounding - at no point did it occur to him that he was reading fiction. Not even when the story claimed that Jon Pertwee had been sacked after going mad and attempting to sacrifice the actress playing his assistant whilst in the grip of a delusion that he was a High Priest of the Roman Goddess Mania. He just took it all at face value! What a knob! I'd like to think that he learned an important lesson from this debacle. However, I have a nasty feeling that he was one of the dicks complaining about The Bill last week...