BATMAN was a favourite of mine. Not the films, you understand, but the original TV series, which started in 1966 and ran in repeating loops for years.

This camp TV version of the popular comic strip may have lacked the budgets of the films that followed, but it had a certain something.

Batman went over the top in arch style, with stern-faced over-acting, corny quips and far-fetched plots.

Adam West was cast as Bruce Wayne, the millionaire playboy who turned into Batman in the shake of a cape. He was partnered by Robin, his 15-year-old ward. By fiddling with a bust of Shakespeare, this Dynamic Duo had swift access to Batpoles that whizzed them down to the Batcave, from where they could shoot off into Gotham City, a place of permanent turmoil, in their Batmobile, a converted 17-ft-long Lincoln Continental.

What people mostly remember are the cartoon ejaculations that appeared on screen, "Pow!", "Zap!" and so forth, always followed by the vital exclamation mark.

Then there were Robin's Holy sayings, when a point in the plot would earn a topical reference, such as "Holy fork in the road!".

Were he with us today, earnest young Robin would be exclaiming: "Holy impostors!", thanks to the latest stunt from Fathers4Justice.

Jason Hatch scaled Buckingham Palace on Monday, dressed as Batman. Hatch makes a habit of this sort of distressing behaviour, having gate-crashed the General Synod in York last July, that time in clerical garb.

Other activists have hurled condoms filled with purple flour at Tony Blair in the Commons, dressed as Spider-Man and climbed on to the roof of Plymouth County Court wearing Tony Blair masks.

They are probably planning another publicity stunt right now. Whatever you think of these aggrieved dads, they know how to mug the limelight. There is no ignoring them, which is a shame.

Jason Hatch appears to be a prime mover. As well as scaling York Minster and climbing on to a ledge at Buckingham Palace, he was part of a four-man demonstration on top of Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol. He is due to answer for that piece of foolishness at Bristol Crown Court next month.

Clifton suspension bridge, as designed by the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is awfully high, straddling a 250-ft deep gorge. So Hatch and his co-protesters have guts. It is a long way down.

Fathers4Justice strike me as a troublesome lot. It is true that marital splits can be painful, and equally true that some fathers face difficulties in winning access to their children. This is wrong.

Yet the methods used by Fathers4Justice are questionable. It is easy to imagine that the thrill of the impromptu show, attended by TV cameras and the epileptic frenzy of the photographers' flash-guns, could go to their hot heads.

Being the centre of attention in this way seems almost more important than what they are protesting about. This raises a suspicion about what sort of fathers these men were in the first place. Were they there for all the draining stuff, the dirty nappies, the sleepless nights and, later in the day, the lifts all over the place? Or have they only become ardent dads in retrospect?

Jason Hatch is 32 and, apparently, has four children by three different women. He spends a lot of time away from his girlfriend and their seven-month old daughter, what with all the protests and court appearances. This is reportedly putting the relationship under such a strain that it could go the way of the others. Or maybe his girlfriend will end up forming a parallel protest group called Mothers4Vasectomies.

The members of Fathers4Justice may have right on their side, or at least some right. But their increasingly wearisome antics are not going to win many new friends.

Home Secretary David Blunkett is far from a favourite of mine, with all his right-wing posturing. Yet he spoke good sense when he described Hatch's intrusion at Buckingham Palace as "a foolish and silly thing to do which harms a very reasonable cause".

Updated: 09:20 Thursday, September 16, 2004