Peter Rhodes on a Doctor snubbing the Beeb, punishing the ungodly and the key question in the data scandal - who cares?

I WAS rather hoping the Cambridge Analytica data scandal was going to fade away before I had to pretend I understood it.

BUT basically it's about the harvesting, selling and misuse of billions of items of personal information about millions of Facebook users. Yet surely it only qualifies as a genuine scandal if those people are scandalised. Are they?

IF you remember the Cold War and George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-four, you belong to a generation which grew up cherishing privacy and living in fear of Big Brother. But today millions of people seem not only willing but eager to blab every detail of their own lives on social media. Secrets tortured out of Winston Smith in Room 101 are today freely volunteered. Some folk seem perfectly relaxed about their information being bought and sold, so long as it gets them a fleeting moment of fame or makes buying things on eBay a nano-second quicker. Middle-aged liberal hacks and crusty politicians may queue up to express outrage at this cyber-scandal but how many kids give a damn?

A TIME Lord has become a non-person. There is clearly no love lost between Christopher Eccleston and the BBC whom he accuses of putting him on a blacklist after he left Doctor Who. Starring as Macbeth at Stratford (and doing a brilliant job), the actor's attitude to Auntie Beeb is seen in the production's programme where artists list the film, theatre and TV work of which they are most proud. Eccleston's lengthy CV does not even mention Doctor Who.

A READER asks why journalists keep referring to the Salisbury nerve-gas incident as the first on British soil since the Second World War. Good point. As far as I am aware Adolf Hitler possessed nerve gas but never used it, possibly because he knew the Allies might retaliate with the atom bomb. In fact, as we now know, the Allies planned to answer nerve gas with mustard gas and had huge supplies. An American ship, SS John Harvey, was carrying a secret cargo of the stuff when it was sunk in the Italian port of Bari in December 1943. Sixty-nine people died from the effects of mustard gas, most of them American merchant seamen. That's the trouble with gas as a weapon. It tends to kill the wrong people.

NEVER let it be said that, when it comes to punishing the ungodly, readers lack inventiveness. After a court report on a particularly unpleasant attack on two pensioners, here's one online suggestion of what to do with the defendant: "He should have all of his skin removed with acid and a sanding machine, every bone broken with a sledgehammer, every joint destroyed with a power drill, every appendage amputated with garden shears. Only then should he be put out of his misery, by being fed to a swarm of rats." Put him out of his misery? What bleeding-heart, kid-glove liberal nonsense is this? No wonder we lost the Empire.