North Korea’s trigger-happy TV moment

A scene from Activision's 'Call of Duty' (AP)

To the short list of things we know about North Korea, we can add this: someone there, possibly in government, is a fan of first-person shooters.

Activision, the makers of Call of Duty games, yesterday asked YouTube to take down a bizarre propaganda video that featured footage from one of its titles.

The film, posted this week by Pyongyang’s official propaganda agency, combines amateurish shots of North Korea’s space programme with computer-game images of New York being destroyed.

“It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze,” a caption in Korean reads.

The propagandists presumably knew what they were doing, a defence that could not be issued by ITV when it included footage of a shot-down helicopter in a 2011 documentary about Colonel Gaddafi’s links to the IRA. The broadcaster later apologised for confusing the real footage, which it insisted it possessed, with scenes from the game, Arma II. If nothing else, such boobs are a tribute to the skills of games makers.