Let the punishment fit the crime

GERRY Anderson, the Irish chat-show star who died on August 21, finally got his obituary in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday. The late Gerry gets a very late obit.

YOU know what this country needs? More imaginative courts. Let the punishment fit the crime, as Gilbert & Sullivan put it. Sam and Joan Tree are a British couple who made millions by manufacturing and marketing useless "mine detectors." He got a short jail term, she was ordered to do community service. What an affront to natural justice. This pair knew that their devices, cobbled together from aerials and plastic boxes, were bogus and would put lives at risk. The Trees should have been put in the middle of a minefield with a pair of their "detectors" and left to find their own way home.

I SUGGESTED yesterday that The Detectorists (BBC4) might be a tad too clever for its audiences. A reader adds: "What about Only Connect (BBC2)?" Good point. This is the quiz show that makes University Challenge look like Children's Hour. The enduring puzzle about Only Connect is how, each week, it manages to find the only eight people in the country who could possibly answer the fiendishly convoluted questions. The rest of us watch, not in the hope of knowing any answers but from the curious enjoyment that goes with being utterly bewildered. There is also the attraction of the interrogator Victoria Coren Mitchell whose dresses defy physics by proving it is possible to get a quart into a pint pot. Almost.

BARRY Williams shot five people dead in a rampage in 1978. He was locked up in Broadmoor for 14 years until he was judged safe to be released under monitoring. He changed his name to Harry Street, moved to Birmingham, fell out with the neighbours, collected an arsenal of weapons and built a bomb. As you do. He was put back behind bars this week under the Mental Health Act. All of which raises a very obvious question. When the wild-eyed British jihadis trickle back from Syria and are jailed, will the decision to release them be made by the same sort of people who thought Barry Williams was no risk?

A READER writes: "Now that car tax discs have been scrapped, my neighbour and I are thinking of buying identical cars and having identical number plates. We would only need tax and insurance for one car. We'd probably get away with it, unless both cars crashed on the same day – and what are the odds against that?" Listen. I am absolutely sure the latest number-plate recognition kit will make such dodges quite impossible. Well, fairly sure.

NEVER let the facts get in the way of a good story. Remember the report a few days ago about experts discovering that cats hate being stroked? Newspaper columns and the blogosphere erupted as cat owners competed with each other for the most sugary, sweetums cat-stroking yarns. It now emerges that the experts said no such thing. The research, carried out on 120 cats in Brazil, focused on just 13 which did not enjoy being touched. It concluded that stroking such contact-averse moggies would cause them stress, which is exactly what you would expect. Somewhere in the reporting process, the wicked Press got the story wrong. If indeed there is a story at all. "Stroke-hating cats hate being stroked" is hardly front-page news, is it?

INCIDENTALLY, I have not given up on the campaign to rename the grey wagtail whose name does not do it justice. I have contacted the RSPB but have not had a reply. Not a chirp.