Britain’s Oldest Crooks, ITV, TV review: With his multiple Asbos, he’s a cereal offender, that Morecambe Birdman

Crime seems a sphere refreshingly free from the curse of age discrimination

Seedy business: John Wilkinson, known as the Morecambe Birdman, on ‘Britain’s Oldest Crooks’ (ITV)

It used to be said that a sign of getting older was that the policemen (sorry for that gender bias – we’re talking about the past here) started looking younger. It also seems that our criminals are getting older and older. ITV’s lively survey of geriatric offending – Britain’s Oldest Crooks – confirmed that the criminal fraternity is going grey.

This was no Weekend World-style mission to explain, packed with facts and theses and talking heads in beards and glasses pounding their way through the sociology of gerontocratic crime. However, there were some interesting factoids to be found among the debris of the long lives of crime featured.

We learnt that 13 per cent (about 4,000) of the prison population are over 60, and that 96 women of roughly pensionable age languish in our prisons. Remarkably, there are about 100 prisoners over 80. I’m not sure how old the eldest is, but given society’s unwillingness to release even the most infirm old lags, the moment when the Queen sends a congratulatory telegram to a centenarian staying at her pleasure cannot be long distant.

Our taste for retribution accounts for much of this, especially in high-profile and particularly horrific offences – witness the continuing custody of the Yorkshire Ripper and Ian Brady (entirely justified, before you send the hate messages in, by the way) and the fuss made when a dying Ronnie Biggs was sent home to end his days.

The characters featured in the show were less famous and less dangerous. A prime example was Zeke Hughes, 81, who looked like a sort of superannuated pimp. Which, indeed, is what he was, having turned to crime almost accidentally not long after his arrival in Britain from Antigua six decades ago, his walking stick taking the part of the stylish cane that perhaps he once strode the streets of Chelsea with. He made, by his own account, “easy money” out of drug dealing and prostitution, but his immoral earnings don’t seem to have run to funding decent dental care.

Still, he seemed harmless enough now in a seedy sort of way. John Wilkinson, “the Morecambe Birdman”, was a different case. With his Captain Birdseye (no pun intended) bushy beard and stout figure, wheeling his shopping trolley around the seaside town, you wondered why the authorities wanted to bang him up. And then we discovered that he’s not as nice as he looks, as he emptied his shopping trolley, full of prime chicken feed, on to the front at Morecambe, feeding the town’s large population of pigeons, which, as we all know, do a good deal of harm to people and buildings.

His defence was that feeding his flock helped him unwind, which is not really an adequate reason to defile this charming Victorian town. Deliberately breaching multiple Asbos, the Birdman, you might say, was something of a cereal offender.

By contrast, the 72-year-old Audrey wandered into a £109,000 fraud operation on her employers, where she was a trusted financial manager, because she was a bit short of money. However, she certainly didn’t seem hard up from the shots of her comfortable little home. When discovered, she soon fessed up, her criminality almost as inexplicable to her as to the rest of us, and that sense of bewilderment at their fate was a common thread amongst these crims.

In any event, crime seems a sphere of national life refreshingly free from the curse of age discrimination. A cause for celebration, of sorts.