Seven apologises for City Homicide ad

In the industry it’s known as “ripped from the headlines,” -using a real life case to inspire an episode of television drama. It happens all the time, all around the world, especially in crime, legal and medical dramas.

But Channel Seven has been forced to apologise for drawing parallels between last Monday night’s episode of City Homicide and the death of a British child in promotions for the show.

Seven used closed-circuit TV images of the case of two-year-old James Bulger being abducted in 1993 for its episode last Monday “The First Stone” in which a toddler goes missing.

The criticism has led all the way to the UK where the Daily Mail sought comment from Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus.

“It’s unfortunate that broadcasters tend to use James’ image as a token without recognising here was a real person, a real child who was horribly murdered,” she told the newspaper. “They should not use his photo this way.”

As with the British tragedy, the toddler in Seven’s drama was led astray by other children (pictured), before it detoured with a darker twist.

In the episode itself Detective Stanley Wolfe (Shane Bourne) told his crime squad, “This is not Liverpool in 1993. It is Melbourne here and now.”

Broadly speaking, it’s one thing to use an incident as the inspiration for a script, but another to blatantly utilise real life imagery in promotions.

Victoria’s Child Safety Commissioner, Bernie Geary, told The Age, “It a sensationalist and disgraceful way of gripping people’s attention. If this had been an Australian crime they wouldn’t dare use it for publicity like this.”

A spokeswoman for Seven told the Daily Mail:  “We used four seconds of a still image [of James Bulger].

“City Homicide is sometimes based on true crimes told in a dramatic way. The storytelling in our drama sometimes refers to headlines, based on those true crimes.

“Our aim was never to upset any viewer and for any offence, we apologise.”

Earlier this year, a Hunter Valley winemaker was shocked to discover an explosion at his family winery was reflected in an episode of All Saints. Another episode of City Homicide with the shooting of a suburban mother by criminals who bungled a home address, was not dissimilar to a case of mistaken identity some years ago in Melbourne.

Meanwhile tonight’s episode of Rescue: Special Ops sees a boating accident in which a ferry of partying youths collides with another boat. Last May several people died when a group of 14 young people in an overloaded runabout in Balmain collided with a fishing boat.

Source: The Age, Daily Mail