The men and women charged with looking after the public interest are the regulators, the knights of Ofwat, Ofgas and, in the case of electricity, Offer.Discharging this duty is not simple. Regulators need to strike a balance between the service and price offered to the customer and the need for the industry to be sufficiently profitable. It is of little use to the citizens of Britain if a major utility finds itself forced to under-invest.Nevertheless, something has gone wrong in the electricity industry. The response by Northern Electric, one of the 12 regional electricity companies (RECs), to the recent takeover bid from Trafalgar House has lifted the lid on how the RECs have been coining it. Seeking to avoid absorption, Northern Electric is promising another massive (and unplanned) dividend to shareholders to persuade them to remain loyal. On close scrutiny, it seems all RECs are potentially far more profitable than was realised.This is not to say that consumers have suffered through privatisation Prices have fallen and services have improved.

But there has been a clear failure to strike an equitable balance between shareholders and the public. It turns out that the RECs have been able to gain far more from enhanced efficiency than the regulator had been led to expect. Nor have the electricity companies allocated as much for structural investment as has, say, the water industry. The result has been a terrific benefit to investors (including pension funds), but not a correlating benefit to the public.Professor Littlechild must have known, if only by keeping a close watch on share prices, that this was happening, and shifted the balance back the other way. It looks very much as though he was hoodwinked a year ago by the companies' assertion that there was limited potential for further efficiency gains He made a mistake and he should admit it. If he does not, the regulator - our regulator - should be terminated.. Even if I am a hypocrite, that doesn't mean I'm wrong, says Oliver Stone with a logic that, in a less enlightened age, might have been condemned as jesuitical.

The central accusation of his film Natural Born Killers, which opens in this country on Friday, after months of skirmishing with the film censor, is that our modern culture of violence is essentially the product of newspapers and television stations, desperate to boost circulation and ratings. To prove the point, Stone has produced a movie in which the physical horror is orgiastic. The media reaction to Stone's violent condemnation of violence proves the point, he insists in an interview in this newspaper today. Journalists who habitually turn horrible murders into entertainment have been happy to report the copy-cat killings that followed his film's opening in the United States but then failed to report police denials that the film was a factor. Just who is being disingenuous here? The PR material for the film is full of meretricious guff about "a hallucinatory journey that shocks and disorients as it reveals and informs". Making it was, apparently, "an odyssey into the unknown recesses of each cast and crew member's spirit".