“Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.” -- Robert Hughes

TV There's a rather irritating advert for Radio 5 Live knocking around the BBC at the moment. Actually the idea is quite good. In order to demonstrate that the station does analysis as well as just news and sport it features a couple of situations in which news worthy and erm, sport worthy events are broken into as the protagonists then talk about what they're doing and how it could be done better. The first is a police chase in which a copper manages to pin a criminal to the ground who then gives him a discourse on his technique. What I'd like to know is -- why is the criminal a scouser? Haven't we gotten over this stuff? Why have different accents anyway (the copper is a cockney)? It just seems wrong to me that the BBC are reinforcing an age old stereotype in an advert for a radio station.