Truth about these 9/11 theories? They were just desperately dull

THE trouble with conspiracy theorists is that they give the rest of us suspicious cynics a bad name. Take this business of Hillary Clinton’s health. Until last weekend, to voice a doubt about her coughing fits and jelly legs was to invite mockery. Sane people don’t fall for crackpot talk.

Then the Democrat candidate for the White House collapsed in the street and was slung into a van by secret service agents like a bag of golf clubs. And even now, a selfrespecting cynic can’t say ‘I told you so’ because no one likes a know-all.

Fifteen years after the 9/11 terror attacks, half of Americans don’t accept they have been told the whole story. But accusing the U.S. government of organising a conspiracy is unthinkable.

You might as well wrap yourself in tin foil and announce you don’t believe in evolution. And in most parts of the States, that will get you talked about by the neighbours.

The problem with 9/11: Truth, Lies And Conspiracies (ITV) was that the investigators couldn’t touch the wilder allegations.

Many people, for instance, still can’t understand how the Twin Towers imploded so precipitously, almost as though the internal skeleton had been mined — though most skyscraper engineers will agree that it was due to the melting point of the metal framework.

Any mention of that issue was offlimits, however. It has been debunked, and the show didn’t dare challenge it, for fear of losing all credibility. Every allegation was silently prefaced with the words: ‘Obviously we don’t want to sound mad, but . . .’

According to 9/11 obsessive Jimmy Walter, who has spent £4.5million pursuing his theories, the cover-up is ‘the biggest lie ever told’. Sadly, Jimmy is the sort of oddball who talks about ‘falling down the rabbithole’ and ‘seeing the Matrix’.

If he can’t even tell his Alice In Wonderland from a sci-fi blockbuster movie, how does he expect to unravel a web of deception that wraps together the FBI, the CIA and the NSA (National Security Agency)? Jimmy was the programme’s most interesting witness ... which doesn’t say a lot for the rest.

There must be plenty of insiders with more engaging ideas, but for now they are keeping their heads low. Maybe in another 15 years or so, hidden evidence will begin to be uncovered — as happened after the assassination of President Kennedy, when key testimony remained secret for decades.

The best this one-off documentary could do was hint that the CIA had known about two of the 9/11 hijackers years earlier, and had allowed them to visit America in the hopes of recruiting them as double agents against Al Qaeda. But that’s a pretty weak revelation: the whole purpose of the CIA is counterespionage, after all.

The second half of the show was devoted to establishing a link with Saudi Arabia. Since Osama Bin Laden was a super-rich Saudi, most of us had already made that connection on our own.

Because the producers were desperate to be taken seriously, this was a dull, pointless programme which revealed nothing we could care about. Any documentary about conspiracy theories is doomed to failure, unless it is ready for ridicule. This one didn’t have the courage to reach for the tin foil.

I suspect Hairy Bikers Dave Myers and Si King have been known to twist their facial hair in tin foil overnight, to obtain the best curls — especially moustachio’d Dave, who looks like a tubby musketeer. His beardy friend Si is more of a Santa Claus for Hell’s Angels.

They are travelling the world in search of chicken dinners, and this week they were in France, on The Hairy Bikers’ Chicken & Egg (BBC2). The food included two meals served by three-star Michelin chefs, but the format was seasoned with far too many puns.

The yolks were dire. Add a couple of clucking awful sketches, sprinkle with eggscruciating puns, and you have the recipe for ‘Hairy Hentertainment’, as Dave would say in an eggscrable French accent . . .

Sorry, those dreadful wordplays are contagious. And a whole hour of them is enough to leave you dizzy.