Dialogue: TV cameras make courtroom a farce

Am I deaf or merely inattentive? Or perhaps I was out of the country when the people cried shame, because surely the people must have cried shame.

And then they must have been beaten down and had their tongues pulled out at the roots. Otherwise, I cannot explain the silence.

But just in case everyone has left it to everyone else to cry shame and somehow shame has not been cried, let me cry it now.

I apologise for stating the obvious but nowhere have I heard it stated: television cameras have no place in courts of law.

Televising courts is a barbarism, a vast step backwards into salaciousness and titillation. Why was it allowed to happen? Who let it happen? Whoever did should be in the dock.

And I would hope to see him or her condemned to 20 years of moral education.

I was going to treat this subject ironically and say what a lovely thing it is to have real trials on television. So much more fun, I was going to say, than watching fictional trials in detective series.

But people don't always get irony and I would like them to get this. I think this matters.

Courts are open to everybody. Jocelyn Public may go to any court in the land and watch justice in action. Furthermore, she can be summoned to take part in it. She can be called to jury service and she'll need a very good note from her parents if she hopes to be let off.

When someone is accused of a crime, he or she stands face to face with the people, who are represented by a jury. Between the accused and the people stand the lawyers.

Although the lawyers may be learned, they must always pitch their cases at a level that the jury can grasp. The people in the end are the arbiters of the law. And that is how it should be.

The argument, therefore, runs that courts are in the public domain, so putting a camera in the court is merely to exercise a right we have already.

Indeed, the camera advances the democratic cause. It allows more people to see justice done.

The argument is nonsense. Some years ago, I took schoolchildren in uniform to watch a trial. They looked forward to the trip.

Outside the court, people from rough suburbs milled around, smoking. Threat hung in the air. In the courtroom the accused man looked like a thug, but he was treated with formality and fairness. It was an impressive display of institutional restraint.

The case was grisly. After half an hour, some of the children asked to leave. They had seen plenty of fictional trials on television but when present at the real thing they felt uncomfortable.

The sense of a real person accused of a real crime and being tried by real people was strong meat. The children found it hard to swallow.

Had the trial been on television, they would have wolfed it down. And that is why cameras have no place in courts. Television is the medium of the voyeur.

The camera always lies. It presents a mirage. It misrepresents the truth. It gives a parody of an occasion.

Merely by being televised, any event is edited. The viewer sees only what the camera points at. He hears only what the microphone picks up. He smells nothing. He touches nothing. Television deprives us of most of the senses by which we judge the world.

For evidence, consider my dogs. When anyone moves within 20m of my house, they wake on the instant and prepare for invasion. But if I turn the television on, they don't so much as flick an eyelid.

Despite constant claims to the contrary, television is not reality. Like dogs, we do not respond to television in the same way as we respond to reality.

This seems to me so obvious a point that it should not need to be made, but perhaps it does.

If we see a car crash in the street, we respond as human beings. We stop to offer help. If we see a car crash on television, we don't.

On television we can watch people dying of starvation while we eat dinner. Take those people out of the television set and put them on the living room carpet and we would give them food.

The fallacy on which the argument for televising courts rests is that watching something on television is the same as being there. It is not.

The camera cheapens, edits, sanitises and, above all, falsifies. It titillates the voyeur in us and dulls our humanity.

By televising the law, we inevitably turn the foundation stone of a free society into an entertainment.