Is TV at fault for blackmail plot?

HERE’S a quandary. Do fiction writers copy real- life crime for their plays sometimes, or do criminals take episodes from fiction and act them out in real life? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

I ask because a particularly nasty piece of work has just been sentenced to 14 years for inserting shards of sharp metal into jars of baby food before putting them back on the shelves. The plan was to blackmail the supermarket into paying a huge sum. But he was tracked and unmasked.

But I recall exactly the same crime forming the main plot of an episode of a TV thriller some years ago, just repeated on the box.

The good news is that no one has recently been trying to shoot Charles de Gaulle, perhaps because he died in 1970.