none of his theories about the media or politics are particularly original - there are plenty of sane people saying similar things that you could listen to instead. I'm a big fan of Al Franken personally, who will tell you all kinds of stuff about the Bush family, for example, and how they came to power. Or about how a woman who had an oil tanker named after her became responsible for environmental policy, FFS.

Taken in the context of the lizards and the dimensions and the God-bothering, as Richard has so succinctly put it, Icke's political and media theorising becomes part of a much bigger paranoid delusion. I used to know someone, a diagnosed psychotic, who did similar things - he took the stories in the news as a jumping-off point, so it all started out perfectly sane, but then his theories spiralled off into fantasy and delusion - at one point, he told me he'd been locked in a cupboard for days with Patty Hearst. I asked him how that could be, as her kidnapping had taken place before he was born. He just laughed knowingly.

Mad paople can be very plausable. That doean't make them any less mad. The thing that concerned me most when watching the Jon Ronson programme is the idea of Icke being parentally responsible for two young children.