LegalDay

The Lord and the Rent Boy

I don't think there has been anything quite like it since the then leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, was outed by his lover Norman Scott in a courtroom tirade which included - absurd but fascinating - allegations of conspiracy to murder. But, this morning Mr Justice Eady knocked Kate Moss from the front pages of the tabloids with a decision to withdraw an injunction against publication of allegations, made by male escort Jeff Chevalier, against none one less grand than Lord Browne of Madingley, chief executive of Britain's largest company and frequently eulogised as the greatest businessman of the current generation.

Browne's entry in Wikipedia rather amusingly, and without the slightest evidence of intended irony, tells us he is 'a bachelor and lists fine cigars, antique furniture and the arts among his interests'. It reads like the kind of euphemism that used to be common when homosexuality was illegal, which was of course as recently as when Browne began in business, and when Thorpe had an affair with Scott.

Pursuing Browne for perjury seems harsh. It is difficult to see what was so important about whether he met Chevalier through an escort agency or while exercising in Battersea Park that he felt he needed to lie about it. I dare say he deserves to lose his job, and with it the £16m he would have picked up in salary and bonuses between now and when he retires in July, not to mention most of his reputation. It hardly seems worth a criminal prosecution.

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Phone Now to Vote for Your Favourite Scam

The guys who thought up Who Wants to Be a Millionaire are among the most widely imitated in modern broadcasting. There was not much about that it was original. The format is double or quits. The upward scale of difficulty is Sixty-Four Dollar Question. What was stunning was the simple idea of getting people who wanted to compete to phone up on premium rate phone lines.

When the show first started, my sons used to pester me endlessly to phone in to apply for a place in the competition. Sucker that I am, I did give it a go. Fortunately, my impatience saved me - it was soon enough obvious that a key part of the 'game' was long queues on the premium rate phone lines waiting to answer initial questions that were quite tricky and that had to be answered quickly, or it was back to the queue.

Since the cost of broadcasting collapsed with the advent of satellites and broadband, phone in game shows have become a staple of the hundreds of outback channels that clutter digital TV. When I have surfed into these channels, I have often wondered where the money is. The cost of broadcast may be small, but it is real, and the cost of a half-stoned actress in a bikini monotonously repeating cue-card invocations may also be small, but that is real too. And the prizes of a few thousand pounds are not lottery level, but they are still an actual cost (assuming the shows are being properly regulated, as one does). By contrast, the numbers of callers seemed miniscule - answers are often taken as slowly as one every four or five minutes, and usually last a few seconds. How could so few callers, even at £1.50 a minute, pay for anything? Silly me. The money is not in the answered calls but in the queues, in the unanswered calls.

Now Blue Peter has been caught out. A girl on a studio tour was bundled in front of the camera to be a 'winner'. Now that's public service - I suppose at least they don't try to sell you a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar on the way out.

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