Channel 4 is risking fresh controversy over a film that portrays Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker, in a sympathetic light says The Daily Telegraph.

“Hunger” premieres at the Cannes Film Festival today and is directed by Steve McQueen, the Turner Prize-winning artist.

It recounts the 1981 IRA hunger strike inside Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison which Sands led for 66 days until his death.

Jan Younghusband, the Channel 4 commissioning boss, said: “I feel it is the right moment to be revisiting and reconsidering the ideals of these young men who put themselves and others through a great deal for their belief that they could make their world better.”

Laudable indeed – but why does it always seem that Jan and her media buddies use a sat nav that only seems to take them in the direction of those who support the maiming and murder of innocent civilians as well as British soldiers and police officers by bomb and bullet? Or is that what she means by saying these young men put “others through a great deal”

Perhaps Jan would next commission a film about the IRA bombing of Belfast’s Abercorn Bar restaurant on a Saturday afternoon in March 1972 which killed two young Catholic girls and maimed many others including a young bride to be who lost both her legs yet months later walked up the aisle on her artificial legs, so determined was she to put her life together – but then perhaps she might see the bomber (who was never identified) – as another young man who put himself through a great deal for his “belief that they could make their world better.”

The Jan Younghusbands of this world are straight out of the world of Tom Wolfe, they are the Radical Chic, the beautiful (and wealthy) people of the media elite, our new ruling class who despise the ordinary plodders of the suburban world and prefer, as one commentator said, “to identify themselves with what they imagine to be the raw, vital lifestyle of the lower orders.”

What next from Jan, then…………… Reinhard Heydrich – Violinist?