He's back. One of my first ever guests is the man who taught his pug, those squashed-nosed dogs, to perform

a Nazi salute. It was a silly joke, pretty offensive, especially to Jewish people

like me, many of whom had relatives who died in the Holocaust as a direct result of that

symbol and what it meant and what it did. Worse still, the dog did

its deed or its trick as a reaction to the words, do you want to gas the Jews? So it's pretty bad and I saw it at the time I remember this

was a few years ago now and I was pretty offended by it and I didn't really find

it that funny because it's not it's just not really my type of humor although maybe it

maybe it's quite funny a dog doing such a silly it's sort of the naivety of the dog

doing such an awful thing I suppose without realizing it's doing it. The point is that some listeners will be

offended by the dog doing that or by the man teaching his dog to do that. Some will find it funny and some

will neither be offended nor find it particularly funny or newsworthy

except that Count Dankula or Mark Meachin, his real name,

was arrested for the joke and spent the night in jail and he was fined 800 pounds which he refused to pay until it was eventually seized from his bank account by an arrestment order.

He was convicted of being grossly offensive.

Count Dankula classes himself as right wing, his views are very different to mine,

and some of his views I think could be bad for society if they were enforced, though he might say the same about my views.

But regardless of all that and we can have that debate, as much as I did find what Count Dankula did, grossly offensive, I'm far more

offended by the idea that someone can be arrested and find convicted, punished, castigated by the state for what they decide is offensive.

Because by its nature, offense is subjective. It changes depending on the society and the time. I get

messages every week from all sorts of people left-wing right-wing liberal

conservative who are all offended by different parts of this show.

They tend to be offended by the parts that pass comment on their particular ideology, but

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