MEL Gibson and Roman Polanski have three main things in common. First, they are both Academy Award-winning directors, Mel for Braveheart, Roman for The Pianist. Second, they've been making news for the wrong reasons. Third, they both score an entry in Dickipedia, a website that calls itself ''the Wiki of dicks''. When it comes to reaction to their respective crimes and misdemeanours, however, they seem to be poles apart (no pun intended).

According to Dicki, ''Gibson is a classically trained and fairly versatile actor … he has been a burn out, a desolate loner, a crackpot with a death wish, an inciter of rebellion, a mutineer, and a disfigured freak. He has also played these roles in films.''

Funny because it's not entirely untrue. Film buffs point out how Mel has made a career playing unstable heroes. His characters seem to take a perverse pleasure in being tortured. A summary: Mad Max (mad, battered), Lethal Weapon (mad, electrocuted), Braveheart (mad, disembowelled), Hamlet (mad, mentally tortured).

Not all his roles fit this pattern. Critics tend to overlook What Women Want, in which he plays a guy who knows what women want, and Tim, in which he plays a man called Tim.

Admittedly, even Mel didn't go so far as to cast himself as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, a three-hour torture de force, but it's Mel's hand that we see in close-up banging the first nail into Jesus' hand. We are all guilty, you see. Original sin.