It was an interesting unfolding of events: a man who had shot and killed his girlfriend’s boyfriend and then shot a police officer in the face goes on the run threatening to shoot members of the public and then states that he won’t stop shooting until he’s dead, is finally tracked down and dies maybe at his own hands, maybe because he was suffering from some form of convulsions brought about by the taser that the police had used on him.

Let’s keep in mind though that whatever the cause of Raoul Moat’s death he was armed and extremely dangerous, however when their prey was finally caught the boys in blue got nothing but flak for “killing"the murderer.

I read the story of Raoul Moat as it unfolded, and watched with horror as people set up fan pages to him on the internet.

Fan pages? For a cold bloodied killer? A perpetrator of domestic violence? Human nature never ceases to amaze me, and in this case, Moat’s personality was seriously warped from the outset, but those who identified with him and who regarded him as some kind of hero also seriously needed questioning in my opinion.

Of course the media’s reportage of the real-time events went over-the-top, that’s the media’s job after all. If newspapers were full of fluffy stories they would go out of business over night, but this was something else. We had the public reporting on the reporters, we had clips filmed on mobile phones and somehow the secondary story, the reporting of the story, became almost as fascinating as the mainline.

I wasn’t sure what caught my attention the most, the news coverage of the events or the members of the public reporting on the coverage of the events. People who had been warned to stay indoors suddenly wanted their fifteen minutes and wandered into the backgrounds of the camera crew, like an audition for the X Factor.

In a very warped world this could be the new premise for a sick game show. And here I was thinking that shows concentrating on and rewarding people with procedures at botox sussex were disgusting…