Wednesday 5 September 2007

Splitting hairs

A 14-year old girl stands accused of murdering her older sister in a dispute about the potential life trajectory of her boyfriend – destined, says the accused, only ever to work in supermarkets.

Because of the age of the defendant, the judge and barristers have decided that during the trial they will – wait for it – remove their wigs. You really couldn’t make it up.

They will claim that their intention is to avoid intimidating the girl, but exposing any modern teenager to the sort of atrocious hairstyles affected by our legal brethren is nothing less than common assault.

And where does this lead? What bloodcurdling attack-toupées do they have in reserve for the trials of serious career psychopaths?

I suppose it’s pretty clear how all this began. Imagine the scene many thousands of years ago:

A What’s that stuff on your head?

B It’s a wig

A (Looks more closely) But it’s just a clump of mammoth hair and lard

B Yes, it’s good isn’t it?

A It’s fantastic, but what’s it for?

B I thought I might get a job as a judge

A Good call

There is other talismanic headgear at large in the legal environment however. There’s the British policeman’s helmet, recognisable across the galaxy as a symbol of, er, British policemen.

Our police forces constantly try to abandon the helmet in favour of the sort of cool flat caps they’ve seen on cop TV shows, but this is a big mistake.

The old helmet makes our bobbies seem so tall, which has to be an advantage when you’re dealing with desperate villains. Your flat cap is going to make you look like a traffic warden and people are going to feel more like giving you a strong poke in the gob after a few beers on a Friday night.

More importantly, the tall helmet works as a symbolic throwback to the days when the bobby on the beat was the acceptable face of neighbourhood policing – law enforcement at its most socially-targeted.

It has been for so long such a potent symbol of authority that knocking one off a policeman’s head is all you really need to do to make your point. Knifing and shooting our coppers have simply been unnecessary.

Take away the helmet though, and in our darker moments we’ll have to find something else to abuse. A strong poke in the gob will be the least of your worries, constable.

This is all about brand identity, and scrapping heritage, whether in legal headgear or Coca-Cola recipes can bring out the worst in us.