Colby Cosh makes a convincing case that “the hoax apparently cooked up by world’s-worst-dad frontrunner Richard Heene” could only have happened in America:
Richard Heene obviously wanted to be an experimenter-entertainer in this American, Edison-meets-Barnum tradition. He was, allegedly, willing to embroil his family in a criminal conspiracy to advance the cause. His determination was so total, he doesn’t seem to have given any thought to the possibility that the suspected domestic-violence complaint recently investigated at his residence might be revealed. What sealed his fate, though, was a near-total lack of genuine scientific knowledge or understanding.
When it comes to detecting folderol, television networks have a poor track record, but even the suits at ABC detected the stench of flim-flam on Heene, who had been a success on their series Wife Swap. His pitch to the network consists of a mix of tiresomely familiar classroom experiments, untrue folkloric claims he obviously didn’t bother to double-check, plain nonsense and furiously-brainstormed wackiness (“How long can we drive before having to pee?”). Even an explicitly stupid show made by a presenter who still thinks of lasers as enticingly novel would surely be unlikely to succeed as entertainment. There are fools all over the world, but the awesome chasm between Heene’s ambitions and his actual abilities — and the sheer disrespect he had for his own limitations — that, I think, could only be found in today’s America.
