TV Crime Reconstruction and its Limitations

Well….

You see, it all happened like this….

Well, sort of….

Obviously, the stepladder wasn’t quite so artfully arranged and the wood pigeon was somewhat more beguiling than this somewhat sorry specimen, but otherwise we can be fairly confident that the supermarket trolley is of the correct design. Although, I am more than sure that some out there take a special interest in the history, design and utilisation of the post-war shopping trolley who will take great delight in correcting any errors that may creep into this reconstruction of those never-to-be-forgotten events of only last summer.

Of course, if you were abroad or in some other place (i.e. Luton) during those tense few days of Britain’s worst 21^st Century hostage crisis then you may be unaware of all the details of the events of that day.

It all began when the aforesaid wood pigeon was kept hostage by seven fundamentalist terrorists all precariously perched atop the one step ladder just to the left of the Sainsbury’s supermarket car park in Snottygobble-Under-Lyme.

Of course, in retrospect it is obvious that the terrorist’s repeated demands for a shopping trolley that always went in the direction they wanted to push it, was an outrageous demand and one that could never be met under current technological know-how. However, it should always be forefront in the minds of anti-terrorist agencies that the fundamentalist shopper is by the nature of their fundamentalism almost completely impervious to reason. This is especially true when they are in pursuit of the fabled paradise of Buy-one—get-one-free that the holy texts of the shopper guarantee to the shopping martyr come the final closing down sale of this imperfect Earth with its limited car parking spaces and accursed opening hours.

However, it was a stroke of genius on the part of the security services’ hostage negotiator, which resulted in the successful resolution of this crisis. Resolving it with only the mere death in a hail of police bullets of the shopping fundamentalists with only the loss of one tail feather by the wood pigeon, when in a tactical gamble the negotiator said to the police marksmen: ‘Oh, fuck it, I’m in danger of missing Top Gear here, if we don’t get a move on. Just shoot the fuckers and then we can all go home.’

Which they did.