There's something about madness that holds me captive. I know I am not unique in this just as I know that a captive audience is not limited to madness and extends to other aspects of human life and social behaviour. It's very hard to take your eyes off something or someone mangled or deformed, for instance.

Ugliness, fright, poverty, decadence, bad news - in short, life's tragedies, are in some way gripping and strangely magnetic, which probably explains my lifelong allure with Jaws, the Elephant Man, dwarfs, my morbid fascination of undergrounds the world over, of sleazy bars in Testaferrata Street or crazy Bangkok for that matter, and my unparalleled eternal love affair with even the dirtiest and dingiest parts of Valletta. I think you know where I'm going with this.

When I caught sight of Norman Lowell on Bondiplus last Monday, I knew there was going to be a battle with my son for the remote.

There have been so many occasions where I've tuned into the show as a matter of course, to see the usual familiar male faces unrelieved by the presence of a female, the smug, overweight, uninspiring pasty suspects who are allowed to make decisions that affect our lives forever, debating monumentally boring topics like wind farming or our ever growing deficit. Even Ben Ten Alien Force Omnitrix somehow manages to look increasingly like the better option for the evening.

So when I spotted Lowell with a chip on both his shoulders, (the only balanced thing about him) I pounced on the control and put my little size 36-and-a-half foot down.

And because I knew this was not going to be easy, I tried to get my son on my side, encouraging him to watch the show with me, telling him that the man on the box was not very different to Darth Vader and all the other dark, warped characters he is partial to on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.

Whereas he is usually pretty quick to give up protesting and leaves the room indignantly, resigning himself to Fifa 10 in the next room, this time round something had evidently captured his interest and kept him there, rapt and attentive. And I immediately knew the freak show that is Lowell was not lost on my 10-year-old either.

I engaged him further, translating what was being said into English and adding lib wherever I felt it necessary or appropriate. I explained that the man trying his damndest to look creepy, diabolical and different, didn't like black people and seemed to think white people were far superior.

My boy studied the television quizzically, evidently quite taken with the dynamics and the body language. Then he corrected me, as he always does, whenever black and white people are mentioned.

You see, my son seems to have inherited his mother's DNA and is quite unable to see life in terms of black or white. Whereas I live in shades of grey, he, on the other hand sees people as either peach or brown. And so he informed me, with that deadpan seriousness and innocence only children seem capable of carrying off, that there are no black people in Malta, only brown.

And on further analysis of the two men, he came to the conclusion that both were coffee brown. Perhaps God might have been slightly more generous with the milk when it came to Lowell - but according to the little man, neither of the two were peaches and cream.

I suppose I could understand the hoo-hah that surrounded Lowell when he first made his debut in 2004. It may have been earlier than that, but my memory of him seems stuck there and I have a vivid recollection of him on Smash TV contesting the EP elections.

I enjoyed watching him then in much the same way I occasionally enjoy watching circus clowns. He provides the perfect comic relief for those not so rare evenings when you're just a little bored and find yourself going through the contents of your not-very-exciting fridge, edging your way closer to the mature cheddar's rind.

But, he's not someone you'd ever watch if you had better things to do. And he's definitely not someone you could ever take seriously.

The day after last Monday's show, when people were aghast in that very 'what was Bondi thinking' sort of way, disturbed by the exposure he was given, seeing it as some sort of incitement to racial hatred, I on the other hand seemed unable to fathom what all the fuss was about.

Lowell worries me as much as Mary Poppins does. The only worrying thing about last Monday's programme was that we were hardly going to be in for any surprises and we certainly were not going to hear anything we hadn't already heard before.

Lowell's act is old, tired, frayed and very worn out, his Discovery Channel 'jokes' rehashed, his obsession with the Aryan superior race conclusive proof that he is ridden with an inferiority complex the size of a house.

And for a person who tries to carry off a larger than life attitude, he really ought to work on his accent and think about elocution lessons. He suffers from the same condition which seems to afflict so many people here in Malta - where e's and a's seem interchangeable. It's not 'Raligion', Lowell.

The 'lazy boy' was probably the best part of the show. It's odd how Lowell actually has a chair that looks like him. Something about it matched his starched collar and his raised eyebrows and I kept expecting it to take off. Then there was the eggy thing he gave Bondi. 'Rather sweet I thought.

I'm not being facetious. You see, for all his bravado, his desperate desire to shock, he's really quite an insecure guy, who is so very terrified that he will disappear without a trace and be all but forgotten that he keeps having to make some noise. So every so often he throws his weight and his stick around in the hope of going down in history as the auctoritas he evidently is not.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com