We all take risks. Only some of us are punished

James Moriarty, Hannibal Lecter, Silas Lynch, Simon Legree, Iago, Iscariot, Schettino… pity Francesco Schettino:
 all but doomed by his name alone. What a great name for an alleged villain. The skipper of the Costa Concordia, the cruise liner now wrecked off a Tuscan island whose name sounds like a typographical tweaking of ‘gigolo’, presents an Anglo-Saxon media in search of cliché with an embarrassment of riches.

The disaster happened because (it’s claimed) Schettino was ‘attempting a “sail-by” salute to impress the islanders and passengers’. Tut tut. He fled his ship ahead of 100 passengers and crew. Boo hiss. He was ‘friendly with a Moldovan hostess’ who has helped the headlines by ‘denying’ she was having an affair with him. Tee hee. He tripped and ‘fell into’ a lifeboat before he had intended to leave his stricken ship. Yeah right. He was planning to return to the vessel. Pull the other one. The rocks he ploughed into ‘were in the wrong place’. Ho ho.

Every British comic stereotype of the Italian male is on display in these reported claims: bravado, incompetence, lechery, cowardice, denial. The Schettino portrayed plays into the role of a panto Italian villain. Notice how often his Christian name and honorific ‘Captain’ get dropped in reports, and he’s simply Schettino. Even Hitler was accorded his ‘Mr’ for some time by a more respectful British media. But, like ‘Mussolini’, ‘Schettino’ sounds wickedest unadorned.

All harmless fun, you may say, and I cannot disagree. Despite the enormous tragedy of lives lost, and the commercial disaster too, an undercurrent both of hilarity and of a rather sneering kind of censure has been present almost from the start. And perhaps that adds to the gaiety of nations.