Please look after this bear

Alas, a hard stare wouldn't do the trick. Paddington Bear's copyright custodians are suing a British television company for depicting him as a sweary, coke-snorting illegal immigrant.

- Jane Clifton

This comes on top of the screen industry’s uproar about free speech and poetic licence involving real people, with an academic depicted in a movie about the discovery of Richard III’s grave having just won a defamation suit, and mounting trepidation about pending action of the woman portrayed as a stalker in hit TV show Baby Reindeer.

As Leicester University’s Richard Taylor has established, having been painted as patronising, weaselly and misogynistic in 2022’s The Lost King, fictionalising a true story doesn’t remove the legal obligation to treat people fairly. The film now carries a warning and its producers are to pay him an undisclosed sum.

But can or should the law protect a purely fictional character from off-brand mockery? What harm is done from online spoof show Spitting Image depicting Paddington googly-eyed from cocaine addiction and booze, and boasting about serial identity fraud and sex robots? The French owners of the