Is today's lenient view of police corruption down to The Osmonds?

PC Dixon was in no doubt: 

"There's nothing worse than a rotten copper. Nothing. The lowest thing that crawls on God's earth."

That's him addressing a corrupt young constable played by Paul Eddington. You can see the whole episode on TPTV Encore until midnight on Saturday. (You have to register, but the site is free to use after that.)

These days the police call corrupt officers "bad apples", with the implication that every organisation is bound to have a few and there's no need to look for deeper causes or effects.

But as a good Wikipedia entry points out, "bad apple" used to have the opposite implication:

The bad apples metaphor originated as a warning of the corrupting influence of one corrupt or sinful person on a group: that "one bad apple can spoil the barrel". 

Over time the concept has been used to describe the opposite situation, where "a few bad apples" should not be seen as representative of the rest of their group. This latter version is often used in the context of police misconduct.

The entry goes on to cite a linguist call Ben Zimmer on the reasons for this shift in meaning:

Linguists such as Ben Zimmer have pointed out that the proverb began to be used in the opposite sense in the 20th century, instead stating that "a few bad apples" are not representative of a group. 

According to Zimmer, this usage may have corresponded to the change in the grocery trade, where modern shops sold apples individually and would rarely put rotten ones on display, and people stopped thinking of apples as being stored in barrels,

And then, damn his eyes, Zimmer goes on to suggest something I imagined I had thought of all by myself:

Zimmer suggests the change in usage may have been solidified by the Osmonds' 1971 song "One Bad Apple", which includes the line "One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl."

Apples don't grow in bunches, of course, but had it been "a whole bunch", the lyric would have been in line with the US practice of using "a whole bunch" to mean "a large amount".

When I was at York, we ran a philosophy society that invited eminent philosophers for dinner and a discussion. We entertained both Bernard Williams and Norman Malcolm as guests in my time.

Another guest was Daniel Dennett, today perhaps the best-known philosopher in the world. I distinctly recall him saying that "a whole bunch of hillside" had fallen on the log cabin his family kept as a holiday home.