Quasi-actor/hard man extraordinaire/unremarkable footballer Vinnie Jones is taken to task.

Vinnie Jones, eh? What a man. Whether lugging bricks across a building site, crushing the gonads of thick Geordie lads, or treading the boards as a thespian, Vinnie has risen to the level of master, sensei, supremo in every field he has chosen to, ahem, tackle. Not only that, but he has a bird who, unlike himself, is a fully paid-up, card-carrying member of that exclusive club known as the "beautiful people". During Summer 2000, thanks to a Vinnie-centric movie-promoting media blitz, he found himself positioned squarely at the centre of the prevailing zeitgeist. There were those who doubted that things could get any better for him. Then, however, he pulled off a stunning coup that earned him the respect and admiration of the entire population of Western Europe (lest we forget, for many months previously the Americans are supposed to have been been "ga-ga" (or something) over him).

Under the auspices of Red Devil cider, Vinnie treated the television-watching public to a brief advertising vignette of a man luring an unsuspecting robin to its death. As the (admittedly fictional) robin slid down the window pane, life draining from its (notional) body as blood and pulverised brain tissue poured from its (implicitly) crushed skull, and as the last nerve impulses travelled down its spinal cord, to end at the point on the base of its (again, implicitly) broken neck where the nerve tissue was severed, Vinnie turned smugly to camera, expressing satisfaction at a job well done. Vinnie, you see, is a hard man.

The sad part is that a goodly portion of the general public thought that this advertisement was hilarious. Obviously, Vinnie did. It's a sad indictment indeed on the standards of modern society that (1) a man with mediocre soccer skills and a reputation for violence on and off the pitch should be elevated to folk hero status, and (2) that this same man should be employed to promote a product of any sort (regardless of whether a significant proportion of the market for that product belongs to the lad-thug range of the social spectrum) by depicting an act of cruelty against a defenceless animal. Never mind that it wasn't a real robin. That's not the point. Nothing is real on TV, whether or not it really happened. Even something as horrific as a Sudanese famine relief camp is slightly sanitised when experienced through the medium that also brings us Blackadder and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? To our eyes it becomes neither real nor unreal - it's simply TV-real, something that is part of our perceptual world, but not part of the physical world. Vinnie's antics on the football field were also TV-real, because they were part of the entertainment tapestry known as Premiership soccer. It's a fair bet, though, that for Vinnie's footballing and street-fighting victims, the pain was real enough.

As a futile gesture, DangerHere hereby declares that it probably won't be purchasing Red Devil cider the next time it's in the pub. Not that it's available in Dublin anyway.