Something For The Weekend

When I first saw the headline “Christians Complain about EastEnders” I thought perhaps some group of culturally savvy Christians had had enough, made a stand and demanded this poor excuse for a TV drama be taken off our TV screens. But no, this country’s taste for low end, badly-written, poorly acted and depressingly repetitive kitchen sink drama is nowhere near being satiated.

I remember when these programmes were interesting portrayals of lives lived out on the gritty streets of Northern towns, or farming communities in the Dales. But I haven’t watched one since Ena Sharples got buried under the railway viaduct and everyone in the snug of the Rover’s Return commiserated with Ena’s best friend, Minnie Caldwell, buying her milk stouts and lending a shoulder to cry on.

These days, soaps are a grotesque parody of themselves as they present increasingly implausible plots in a breakneck race to top the previous week’s plot with ever-more improbably complicated relationships and more incredible cliff-hangers to keep an increasingly credulous public on the edge their seats awaiting the next excruciating episode. Anyone who followed Jimmy McGovern’s groundbreaking drama, The Street, in recent times will surely have been spoiled for this sort of pap served up three times a week, the opiate of the people.

No, the complaint is about the portrayal of a Pentecostal pastor who turns out to be your typical neighbourhood wacky Christian wife murderer. It is a negative portrayal, they insist, and wonder if the BBC would have portrayed a Muslim cleric in such a bad light. I see what they mean, of course, but it isn’t as if this is a departure from the norm when it comes to portraying Christians in TV dramas. And isn’t this “you wouldn’t do it to Muslims” lark wearing a bit thin. It’s true enough but it is a tired old argument that everyone knows is true but it falls on deaf ears.

The aforementioned Ena Sharples, if I recall, was the caretaker of the local mission hall back in the ‘60s, and she was a right busybody, criticising the lifestyles of other inhabitants of Coronation Street and telling them to “think on.” A popular ploy for drama writers is to make the vicar gay (I think that was EastEnders too), or a woman in a comedy role – the vicar of Dibley, a limp and overwhelmed by it all liberal, as in the latest TV comedy “Rev”, or a hellfire and damnation, Pope-hating, Presbyterian with a Northern Irish accent (you couldn’t make it up)

What concerns me, however, is not how Christians are portrayed on television. After all, dramas revolve around conflict, that is built on character flaws and the bible is chock full of those, and comedy is founded on an oblique look at the ridiculous, and how can that happen if the vicar isn’t somehow funny, intentionally or otherwise. No, what bothers me is that Christians watch EastEnders. I think people who watch these things can distinguish between a dramatised portrayal of the clergy and the local pastor in their street. But what will they think of the faith when Christians show themselves so unimaginative in their choice of entertainment? Like sin, poor taste is something you expect from the world but, surely Christians need to aim much higher.

Life on Mars and PC Tact

“My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, or in a comma, or back in time?” So says the voice of Sam Tyler, a 21st Century police officer, over the opening credits of the hit BBC TV drama series Life on Mars, first broadcast in January 2006. It ran to two series and was such a phenomenon it was followed up by another series, Ashes to Ashes, featuring another character, Alex Drake, this time thrown back to 1983 as the result of being shot in the line of duty.

Both meet the same characters “back then” and both suffer culture shock as they have to adapt not just to the more primitive policing methods but the customs and idiom of those very different times. Both series are packed with politically incorrect dialogue and assumptions as we follow the very un-PC Detective Inspector Gene Hunt and his team  in their efforts to keep the streets safe.

You can sympathise with the main characters’ impatience with and attempts at correcting unreformed police officers who call a deaf boy a “spastic”, who regard WPCs as being there to make the tea and be leered at, who make gags at the expense of black people and homosexuals and who regard criminals as deserving of “a good kicking.” Thank goodness for most of us the world isn’t like that anymore. But is it any better?

If roles were reversed and DI Gene Hunt were to wake up in 2010 how would he faire? Of course, he wouldn’t last five minutes because in that time he would have broken just about every anti-discrimination law in the country, not to mention health and safety. But what would he think of a world where a question from a pensioner about immigration becomes an international news story?

Where we allow our society to be slowly colonised by Muslims at the same time as we are at war with Muslim countries and Muslims are becoming suicide bombers on our streets – and we are not even allowed to talk about it for fear of being labelled Islamophobic?

What would he think of the proliferation of mosques across the country when young Muslims are being radicalised in some of those same mosques? Of the rise in popularity of the BNP and the real and frankly frightening prospect of Nick Griffin getting a seat in the British parliament and all because no one else is prepared to talk about the problems of immigration and he cashes in on that fact?

What would Gene Hunt make of a Britain where our libel laws are so wacky that “libel tourism” has become a major problem and Eastern European as well as other criminals, businessmen and politicians are flocking to our shores to sue investigative journalists who are getting too close to the facts? Where a journalist is guilty until proven innocent? Where foreign criminals are enslaving girls and running them as sex slaves in our towns and streets?

What would he make of a country where broadcast news is no longer news but tittle-tattle and gossip. Where the cult of celebrity puts no-talent nobodies on the front pages of our newspapers? Where news broadcasters do pieces to camera while the main event goes on behind them because they believe their comment and opinion is more valuable than those of the people who actually run the country, its businesses and services?

What would Gene Hunt think of a country where we are policed at a distance by cameras and are now the most scrutinised society after China and Russia? Where teachers run the real risk of being physically attacked, maligned on social networking sites, accused of abuse and little or nothing to be done because we are currently in the grip of the cult of the child? Where having a baby is regarded by some as a career move and others as an occupational hazard? Where aborting a baby is considered so inconsequential that it is possible to do it in your lunch break, like going for a dump?

How would he faire in this brave new world where we are all so PC, not because it makes for a better world but because of some misplaced guilt over our patriarchal history of empire that makes us feel we have to be the world’s social worker and “understand” how hard it must be having been our victims? Where we are actually implicated in charges of torture along with our “special friends” and war allies? Where right and wrong are defined not by agreed standards of decency and morality but by who has the money to sue you if you don’t toe the line they draw and dare you to cross, those who cry, “its our world now so have a care how you walk in it or we will have you for dinner!”

There have always been problems and each generation must find its own way to deal with them but the one “solution” that must be avoided like the jaws of hell is the one that insists, like Basil Fawltey, “Don’t mention the war (or immigration, or abortion, or over-surveillance, or Islamification)!” If we can’t express our views, share our fears and hopes, declare our convictions and speak our minds without fear of retribution and the PC brigade then we are storing up problems that may explode in a reaction of violence that we neither want nor can fully realise until it is too late.

George Orwell said, “Liberty is the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” That liberty is in real danger in Britain and while we are all arguing terms on what terms we can use in public discourse and private conversation there are those with a very different agenda planning our future and that of our children. Maybe we need a Gene Hunt to share with us some well overdue home truths and perhaps it doesn’t matter too much in what terms as long as we face them.

Yes, it is a different world and in some ways the changes are welcome, but is it really a better world? I don’t think so.

BBC News - Sceptics stage homeopathy 'overdose' to discredit drugs

Homeopathy sceptics have staged a mass "overdose" of homeopathic remedies, in a bid to prove they have no effect.

Protesters ate whole bottles of tablets at branches of Boots in places such as Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London, Leicester, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

I am no fan of homeopathic remedies and would probably agree with the arguments presented by these protestors. However, I can’t help regretting that such a thing is done in the name of Scepticism and not some more positive outlook on life. If they had a happier cause they might throw their weight behind some of the positive science they purport to believe in. Still, it’s all grist to the mill I suppose and gives us something to think about.

BBC News - Sceptics stage homeopathy 'overdose' to discredit drugs

BBC NEWS | Business | Troubled ITV cuts jobs and costs

With what barely disguised glee the BBC reported the problems at ITV this week.  Seems to me they have little to feel smug about since most TV is not worth saving, what with all the reality TV garbage, the production line soaps and endless rows of talking heads vying with each other for air time to tell us where we are all going wrong; why your souffle's go flat, why your children go off the rails, why you can't sell your house and how to make the best of staying where you are.

Meanwhile entertainers who have spent years honing their skills and developing their acts and who used to be seen on our screens regularly are working on cruise ships and at private functions. I actually saw a poll this week asking people which "entertainer" from a list of about eight was their favourite. Jade Goody was on the list! Now she is a lot of things and deserves our sympathies but an entertainer she is not. I think  BBCiPlayer should change its slogan:

"Making the missable unavoidable"

Do yourself a favour - buy a radio.

BBC NEWS | Business | Troubled ITV cuts jobs and costs

Bonekickers

Just something I simply had to get off my chest. I wrote the following to the BBC. Whether it will even be noticed I doubt very much but surely somebody has to say something. If you want to know what this is about you can find it here

I have just watched the new BBC 1 drama, Bonekickers, and disappointment does not begin to describe how I feel about this 24 carat unmitigated disaster. The writing was formulaic, the acting clunky, the production capable of being done by a first year drama student. It made the Da Vinci Code look (almost) respectable by comparison.

The historical detail, such as it was, would have been at home in a copy of 1066 and All That. The heavy prejudice against Christian history and practice and obvious sympathy for what the writers clearly saw as noble and downtrodden Islam would be simply embarrassing if it wasn’t for the fact that many people will come away with this tired, clichéd and flawed view of religious history.

And all the clichés were there, in splendid and predictable numbers. The superstition about “the true cross”; the demise of the bloody and bloodthirsty Crusaders who had, unprovoked, cut a swathe of death and carnage through the peaceful and peace-loving Muslim population of the Middle East until they were disowned by their own; the scurrilous suggestion that Crusaders and been followed and killed by Saracens, scurrilous of course because it turns out that it was not Saracens (phew!) but Christians butchering Christians – typical; the portrayal of modern-day Christian believers as either simpletons or unscrupulous and violent zealots; and, of course, the voice of religious reason is that of a Muslim who, inevitably, gets butchered by a Christian zealot (history repeating itself surely). And, in the midst of it all, trying to be the true voice of knowing and liberal reason, is a secular archaeologist who approaches her subject with all the cold and scientific reason of a Richard Dawkins.

Finally, I found myself wondering whether, in the current climate, it was altogether politic to put before an already fragmented nation, trying to deal with Muslim zealots, a portrayal of Crusaders that is inaccurate in that it is incomplete, violent so that it feeds the very prejudices we are trying to quell and brought right up-to-date so as to make the threat very real for those who choose not to think but to react to the terrible clichés they are fed and that inform and reinforce their cause.

I will find something better to do with my Tuesdays