What the Dickens is going on with media standards?

  So which is giving you most cause for celebration this week: the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s accession, or Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday? With Prince Charles - our monarch in waiting - leading global jubilations for the esteemed scribe today, it’s perhaps not that difficult to work out where he stands. And while the pomp, ceremony and gun-salutes commemorating Her Majesty’s rise to the throne were all very well if you like that shiny, gilded, hierarchical sort of thing, as Big Issue patron and Dickensian scholar Simon Callow said ahead of his reading of David Copperfield in Portsmouth, today could be “dangerously moving” for the millions of people around the world whose souls have been touched by Dickens. Not exactly one for pomp, ceremony or gold-leaf himself, Dickens gave the voiceless a place in history. Presumably he’d be very gratified with people staging readings from his work, “from Albania to Zimbabwe” according to the BBC. But I suspect that he’d most enjoy actress Gillian Anderson’s private reading for the Prince and Camilla at the house in London where he wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, which is now the Dickens Museum. As a contributor to the popular press himself, you can’t help wondering what Dickens would have made of the latest star-turns at the Leveson Inquiry into media standards. After making his debut yesterday, Sun editor Dominic Mohan is recalled to the arena today to address the question: if women parading bare-breasted isn’t fit for TV until after 9pm, why is it okay to have them posing in nowt but skimpy pants and a news-related caption on page three of one of the UK’s biggest selling newspapers before 9am? A poll by women’s group Platform 51 found that 41 per cent of females and 41 per cent of young people in the country would support banning topless photos in newspapers. Perhaps Mohan could give his evidence this afternoon wearing just his boxers; go on Dom, it would be empowering, not demeaning. Perhaps he’d rather take a high-jump, like crazy Aussie space-diver Felix Baumgartner, who will try this year to become the first human to travel faster than the speed of sound unaided when he jumps out of a balloon 36.5km up – that’s the distance between Dover and Calais, but up and down. He’s being advised by ex-US Air Force pilot Joseph Kittinger, who leapt at 31km up in 1960 wearing a Bacofoil bodysuit and fell at 614mph. In the extraordinary film Man High, you feel the awesome, terrifying rush as you plummet with him for 13 minutes and 45 seconds from the edge of space back to earth. Is that what the UK’s editors are feeling like at Leveson…? Not likely.