Shared opinion

There was a photograph in one of the Sunday papers, and it caught my eye. It showed a cheery bald man in some drowned Gloucestershire village traversing the floodwater on a penny-farthing. Hmm, I thought to myself, almost immediately, I bet that’s faked.
I should be careful here. The kind of man who would ride baldly and cheerily through floodwater on a penny-farthing is the kind of man, I suspect, who would fire off a wronged and angry letter to a newspaper at the merest drop of a (doubtless jaunty, perhaps themed) hat. So, to be clear, I am suggesting no impropriety. I am merely suggesting that, perhaps, the situation was not quite what this photograph suggested. Perhaps there was some collaboration at work here. Perhaps, across flooded Gloucestershire villages, staunch men are not really getting around on penny-farthings. Perhaps, in two feet of muddy water, it isn’t a particularly sensible way of getting from A to B. Perhaps, perhaps.

Weeks on, media fakery remains big news. Was this photograph, I asked myself, misleading the public? Was it tantamount to showing the Queen backwards, or depicting somebody not quite meeting Gordon Brown for the second time when they were actually not quite meeting him for the first? If it is a bad thing to cajole a viewer into entering a competition they have no chance of winning, surely it is a worse thing to convince a reader that all Jesus really needed to cross the Sea of Galilee was one wheel bigger than the other, a keen sense of balance, and not to be frightened of looking a touch clownish.

Most recently, we have the scandal of Bear Grylls, who does not, it turns out, do nearly as many things in the woods as legend holds a bear ought. Grylls is the star of Born Survivor, which purportedly sees him dumped in perilous geographical locations and left to fend for himself, without food, shelter or penny-farthings to fall back upon.