The Execution Of Gary Glitter: He Bounced!

Well, he should have bounced in this ‘Alternate Britain’ where the death penalty has returned for the most serious offences.  Channel 4 seemed to want more controversy than any real drama.  The program would have been best served as a documentary talking to officials about why and how the Death Penalty returned into the system and who decided which crimes were so serious that they deserved the ultimate price.

Instead we have a program that’s 1 hour 30 minutes long calling Gary Glitter a Paedo, we follow the trial and all the proceedings but we get no real insight into what’s going on in Glitter’s head, a man facing death with only one chance of reprieve at the 13th hour.  The last five minutes just before the hanging were the most interesting and THAT should have been the crux of this show, as channel 4 have charted the return of the death penalty to the system.

Instead we got ham actors in a crimewatch reconstruction that would have had many writing into Points of View it was that shoddy.

Channel 4 may have been better served showing something along the lines of Aileen: Life & Death of a Serial Killer a portrait of Aileen Wuornos’ final days on Death Row in America, one of the true failures of the death penalty system, a clearly mentally distressed and not quite there woman convicted for the murder of seven men, made her one of America’s most renound serial killers. To the bitter end she was convinced the government were beaming signals into her head and she was being framed for it all.

That would have had far more impact on the 59% of brits who since September said they would be interested in seeing a return to the Death Penalty which was abolished in 1969 in this country.

It was a farce, a spin exercise for 4 which will have drawn the viewers in but made them think about the topic? Probably not as there was not enough information given by the program for people to form an opinion on anything other than the bad acting and the crimes of Gary Glitter himself.

Poor program making at it’s best but I stuck with it till the end… hoping Dr Who would show up to save Glitter from his fate and become the new assistant.

People know my views on the law, I do believe we need to be harsher on our sentences and that if a person goes out of their way to infringe on another persons human rights be it through theft, rape, GBH or other violent crimes or burglary, then they themselves if proven guilty should forfeit their human rights.  They know it’s wrong and therefore should not be entitled to the same standards of living that HONEST people are entitled to without losing their sense of safety and well being in their own home or on the street.

The program should have given more information, shown the reintroduction of the death penalty and cut in with comparisons to death row in the US, like the one below.

So I leave you with this… A clip from Aileen Life & Death of a serial killer