Showing posts with label BBC News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC News. Show all posts

That Time An Inmate Tried To Sue The Prison System Over A Broken Dreamcast

A while back we looked at the veritable treasure trove of Dreamcast-related stories that the BBC News archive represents. There are a multitude of contemporary news articles on the birth and death of the Dreamcast, locked in time in the BBC's extensive catalogue of long forgotten reports, and they do make for interesting reading.

There's one particular news piece I missed though, and it serves as an interesting glimpse not only into the past, but also into the life of convicts held at Her Majesty's pleasure in UK prisons. Hidden away on the BBC News site is this rather intriguing report from April 2006, which documents the efforts of a prisoner at Scotland's Perth Prison to claim damages of £350 from the Scottish Executive (the authority responsible for prisons) for damage to his Dreamcast console.

The case was eventually thrown out by Perth Sheriff Court, but not before the complainant accused prison officers of purposely breaking his Dreamcast. The article doesn't say how the console was broken (and the Scottish Courts website has no record of the hearing), but I'm going to guess that to make it totally inoperable they probably used it as a football. If it'd been a Gamecube, they could've driven a monster truck over it and it would still have worked; but then, a Gamecube can also double up as a deadly weapon when swung at another human so probably not the best console to allow into a prison. Anyway, here's the full article:

BBC News: The Unexpected Archive

The BBC News website is a service I use on a daily basis - indeed it's usually my first port of call if I want to read the news while I drink my coffee in the morning. Interestingly though, it's also a rather unexpected mine of forgotten Dreamcast-related news items, preserved in an internet-based time capsule for future readers to pore over. I've known about this for some time now, having done quite a bit of internet-based digital archaeology and digital preservation work in a previous employment role, but I thought it might be nice to share this valuable - and reputable - information source with you.