IN A WEEK that saw much praise and deserved adulation for the latest episode of Doctor Who in which the Doctor travelled through space and time to Alabama in the 1950s, the time of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott - a huge moment in the Civil Rights Moment and the fight for black rights in the United States - we also got a racist idiot on a plane.

I thought the parallels from the releasing of the shocking mobile phone footage to the airing of the TV show were quite poignant.

Of course, travelling through space and time is a bit of an overstatement since this all happened only a generation ago and a lot of people that faced the racist abuse are still here with us.

But seeing that footage showed that not much has changed in the minds of some. Segregation between black and white may have been outlawed but some would rather it have stuck that way.

So the idiot, and we'll stick with idiot as it's the most appropriate non-sweary phrase we can use, decided he did not want an elderly black woman sat next to him on his Ryanair flight from Barcelona to London and instead of being cordial and genial, he barked shocking racist abuse at the poor woman.

The budget airline did not exactly shower themselves in glory with its reaction to the whole incident and in fact reacted appallingly.

Just because the flights are budget, it does not mean the company has to have budget morals.

Quite rightly they have received criticism for its staff doing absolutely nothing to stop the horrific abuse. In fact, you could probably fit all of their goodwill and valour in one of those tiny plastic liquid bags.

The idiot kept his seat and the victim was moved to another part of the plane when really he should have been dragged off straight to the nearest police station.

And so we move on a few days and it looks as though the idiot could get away with it.

Ryanair let him stay in his seat with his newspaper and expensive sandwich and his bigotry and racism. He stayed grounded like, well, a Ryanair flight.

We can praise a television programme for its 'historical' portrayal but when the awful racism is still alive and shouting, it's a bit harder to call the whole thing historical.