Rogue Presenters

Well, I'm certainly looking forward to the next series of Watchdog, just to see how Ann Robinson glosses over the fact that one of the Rogue Traders team has gone down for twelve weeks for benefit fraud. I've watched this story unfold with fascination, starting with a report on the local news section of the BBC website, which simply referred to the guilty party as a 'BBC presenter', right up to the conviction of Dan Penteado. It was clear the BBC just didn't know how to cover it, with national TV and radio news trying to ignore it. The only reports seemed to be passing mentions on the local news and the BBC website. Even the newspapers seemed to want to avoid reporting on it until the trial got underway. For the BBC it must be perplexing to have one of the presenters of a consumer affairs programme exposing fraudulent traders being convicted of fraud themselves. For the rest of us there is, without doubt, a certain sense of schadenfreude when we see this sort of case.

Whilst programmes like Watchdog/Rogue Traders undoubtedly do a lot of good and serve the public interest by exposing fraudsters and sharp practices by big companies, there's always a part of me that can't help but think what sanctimonious, smug bastards the presenters are. I mean, they're so holier-than-thou when confronting miscreants, you find yourself screaming at the TV , 'For God;s sake, haven't you ever dome anything bad?'. They surely must have at least one parking ticket, or a speeding conviction amongst them, you think. So when it turns out that one of them is a benefit cheat, you just have to laugh. As I said at the outset, the best is yet to come, when the next series starts and they have to decide whether to bring the whole sorry story up again to explain Dan's absence, or whether they just try and pretend that it never happened and that Dan never existed. I look forward to finding out which strategy they choose.