Pious virtue signalling is ruining British TV
To have watched the BBC adaptation of John le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl is to have had a course of subliminal Suggestion to the effect that your own Western culture is no less perfidious than the terrorists who seek to destroy it; also that you should not dilute your fount of sympathy by extending it to Israelis as well as Palestinians. Charles Dance was wheeled out yet again as the archetypal stereotype of the arrogant unlovable Brit. Earlier in 2018 the BBC gave us this other dramatised expose of the dark underbelly of our own society in which UK human-trafficking is orchestrated not by shady foreign mafias but by quintessentially British businessmen and ex-military types. Illegal immigrants are mostly nice people whereas it is hard to find any decent and sane white people in Britain apart from a few who have the courage to spout some much needed left/liberal outrage at the state of this “nasty little country”. And as for decent and likeable people; these are most likely to be found in the ‘lgbt community’. This was the ‘gritty’ reality revealed in the BBC/Netflix mini-series Collateral by acclaimed (acclaimed by the BBC) writer David Hare.
TV schedules across the Western world are awash with drama serials of this kind, conforming to a formulaic scriptwriter’s tick-box: Non white person traduced but eventually revealed to be a surprisingly decent sort – Tick….Middle class white person eventually revealed to have a sinister dark side – Tick…Gay Couple included – Tick…. (Post 2017 update: transgender characters urgently needed). More recently it has become an integral part of the story that ‘lgbt’ people are abundant and everywhere. They are bound to be nice as well. Curiously though there is another box to be ticked: there needs to be some graphic depiction of violence especially towards attractive young women (by white men of course). By its final episode Collateral had ticked every box just as surely as this review of Episode1 predicted it would.
America is not immune to this sort of thing either. A 2015 Study analyzed three seasons of Law And Order: ”…results suggest whites are disproportionately portrayed as criminals five to eight times more often on police dramas compared to actual crime statistics for the city of New York, exposure to police dramas leads to elevated perceptions of white criminality among non-whites.…It is this same tendency that ends up with nearly all TV home-security ads featuring white burglars and rapists despite white under representation in both crime categories—especially when you consider that Hispanics are counted as “white.” And The Good Fight (launched by CBS in 2017) is PC box-ticking drama serial that seems to have been conceived with its primary artistic intention to wage a propaganda war on the Trump administration.
Many underpinnings of a 21st century liberal mentality are patently absurd: that smashing and looting your local shops is a cry for ‘social justice’; that anyone who takes issue with current PC pieties has a ‘phobia’; that it is the responsibility Western societies to adapt to the culture of their Islamic immigrants; that the West is suffering a time of ‘austerity’ needlessly inflicted on it by perverse right-of-centre politicians. Other absurdities include: a wilfully myopic field of vision with respect to the evil deeds of any but white people; outrage at casting couch type harassment of celebrity women largely eclipsing concern for the plight of hundreds of millions beyond the protection of liberal Western culture; a preoccupation with all forms of sexual behaviour other than that which is normal to the great majority of people.
So the question arises: how can so many millions of sophisticated people adhere to such absurdities? It is true that “unless you think hard about political questions in our culture, you are liberal by default.” But this begs the question why so few people actually do think their way out of this philosophical straightjacket: we are, after all, free societies are we not? The awesome technology of mass communication, in the 20th century and beyond, has to be a big part of the answer. It has afforded not just an enormous spread of information but also an enormous spread of disinformation – of the kind identified by Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Instead of an Orwellian thought police what we have is more like thought social workers and therapists – a great spider’s web of journalists, scriptwriters, opinionated actors, pop academics and advertising ‘creatives’, alternately flattering you, nagging at you and generally helping you to think correctly. It is a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone – even its own media elite – that brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It ‘keeps you informed’ with ‘The News’ and it entertains you with tv film and drama. It’s not that – in the West anyway – The News is generally a deliberate attempt to tell lies. It’s actually worse than that: the very concept is flawed. Flawed by virtue of editorial selectivity; by virtue of newsroom groupthink; by virtue of a journalistic mindset whereby the dramatic narrative is more important than the actual subject matter and worst of all by the illusion that the consumer of news can really know what is going on all over the world just by switching on the news for half an hour or so.
The News then will tend to delude you into thinking you know more than you really do. But when consumers of mainstream (and social) media have done being ‘kept informed’ by its news, they may well escape to its ‘progressive’ tales. More insidious than The News, these apparently apolitical Narratives leech into your consciousness without you even noticing. And there’s the rub. You’ve sat down in front of the tv of an evening and flicked past any news and documentaries because – you’re not naive – you know it’s all biased anyway. You select a nice bit of drama instead. Here follows a selection of the sort of drama you might well end up watching:
The oldest ‘progressive’ story – and the one that sets the template – tells you that ‘poor’ people are nice and kind whereas ‘rich’ people are nasty and mean. Also coloured people are often accused but rarely actually guilty of wrongdoing whereas white people (especially middle class white people) often conceal a dark side under a veneer of respectability. The Casual Vacancy: a lavish BBC adaptation of multi-millionaire JK Rowling’s novel is a recent re-telling this old story (laced with some more recent PC additives). It is set in an English Cotswold village called Pagford and it’s the story of snobby Tory villagers trying to offload responsibility for its deprived council estate by means of some electoral boundary jiggery pokery. It is parodied by this reviewer who imagines a different BBC drama set in ‘Shagford’ (read Rotherham or Telford) where young girls are being pimped and raped by a brutal cartel of South Asian taxi drivers: “Mayor Des Barraclough… determined [not] to lose the votes of Pakistani-heritage residents…charges deputy leader of the council, Akram Bayadi, with investigating the allegations…We cut to a scene at a local café where Akram takes tea with his cousin, Sanjeev, who runs Shagford’s biggest minicab company. Sitting besides Sanjeev is Crystal, a 14-year-old girl….the camera moves slowly up Crystal’s arm, pausing to inspect a rosette of scorched flesh, the imprimatur of a stubbed-out cigarette.”
The Night Manager: another depressingly big international BBC hit, tells the tale of how much better the world would be if not for nasty white arms dealers. It is aptly nailed in this review for its cowardly “lack of concern for the victims of dictatorship; its indulgence of clerical fascism; its conviction that the West is the only enemy worth fighting”. And what, he wonders “would happen to John le Carré and the BBC if they took on more dangerous targets than MI6 and the CIA?”
Ah the BBC! More perhaps than any other place on earth, middle class Brits are cocooned in its cosy onesie of smug, virtue signalling selective outrage and wilful myopia. It is a veritable honey pot for the not so big-wide-world of the arts and academia (although to be scrupulously fair it does also occasionally produces some very good programmes). And in recent times, UK commercial channels seem even to have surpassed it in the ticking of PC boxes.
Kiri (C4 2017) picks up the ‘racism’ tale. A little black girl has been fostered out to some ever so nice white couple. Then she is mysteriously found dead after being briefly reunited with her estranged violent, drug-dealing father at the instigation of her ‘cultural preservation’ minded social worker. Guess who went down for it but wasn’t guilty? And guess who did do it – Yep, the nice white middle class foster father. But the really depressing thing is that, in all the rave reviews it got from Guardian to Telegraph to Daily Mail for its ‘brave’ depiction of the world of social work, not one single reviewer thought to note the cowardly inversion of statistical probability and the rampant racial bias of its plotline.
Taboo (BBC 2017) is the kind of drama about the ravages of colonialism on ancient civilisations that get the scriptwriter juices flowing; whereas these are the kinds of stories about those ancient civilisations that somehow don’t seem to inspire them so much: “Tv footage shows villagers sitting under the girls’ bodies as they swung in the wind, preventing authorities from taking them down… Autopsies confirmed the girls had been gang-raped and strangled before being hanged, police said… The family belongs to the Dalit community, also called “untouchables” and considered the lowest rung in India’s age-old caste system”
In the Narrative, rapists are always white. In Liar (ITV 2017) Laura meets this really nice, gentlemanly young (white) surgeon on a date and they hit it off straight away…but later Laura claims to have been raped whereas he says it was consensual. So who is lying? This Spectator reviewer knows the answer: “in this detective crime drama, you know the answers as soon as someone appears on screen. If they’re black or Asian they’re ok, if they’re female they’re ok, if they’re white and male they’re evil. So there is no drama at all, no mystery… just a kind of Orwellian hate week. The principal African-Caribbean character, by the way, is an egregiously transgressed, gentle, stay-at-home dad.”
The tragedy of all this finger pointing and desperate virtue signalling is that the authentic voice of Western liberalism – a general goodwill towards all decent fellow human beings and a general dislike of bullies of all stamps – is left no quarter. You either talk the PC talk or you are automatically deemed a bigot whereas it is the PC pieties themselves that are just the latest form of bigotry. I used to place the blame for all this almost entirely with what one might characterise as the media-academia complex ‘till I realised that this is just one more excuse. You cannot, in the West anyway, be brainwashed if you actively resist it; if you have the intellectual energy and the native curiosity to check your facts before signing off on the latest fashionable opinions. Huge media bias notwithstanding there is no shortage, in the Internet age, of hard evidence putting the lie to most left- liberal mythology but no amount of such evidence can prevail against its seductions to the piously un-curious. Perhaps the trouble is that most people rather like a bit of me-too groupthink: remember Hitler? The Cultural Revolution? Human kind cannot bear very much reality TS Eliot said.
