There is something very wrong with our priorities.
The world is reeling from, and must deal with, natural and man-made horrors. Natural ones like the Christchurch and Japanese earthquakes, or tropical cyclones.
Man-made ones like the western world’s EU and UN-orchestrated CAGW-driven self-destruction and Libyan carnage. And the consequences of the stupidity of installing nuclear power plants that rely on power to to run cooling systems that prevent fires, meltdowns and widespread radioactive contamination after an emergency shutdown. Without considering that an emergency capable of forcing a shutdown can also knock out power supplies. Especially in an earthquake and tsunami-prone location like Fukushima.
Rightly, these horrors are reported. They deserve our concern.
In the middle of all this, I see a report of the views of an English TV producer given wide publicity. Brian True-May is the producer of the much-loved “Midsomer Murders”. According to him, the ITV1 detective drama is “the last bastion of Englishness” and he asserts that ethnic minorities have no place in English villages. That, of course, is ammunition for the politically correct brigade, who campaign actively to have every British programme portray minorities.
This is the “issue”, you see. The programme has run for 14 series and has featured only one ethnic minority character! And we are told that ITV is in “urgent discussions” about the lack of diversity in the programme.
Terrible! All together now, let’s feel really guilty about a show that depicts Midsomer villages without featuring more characters drawn from minority groups. Quick, we must combat this racism by introducing token minority characters immediately!
That view is hotly disputed by the novelist Anthony Horowitz, as reported in the Telegraph: http://t.co/KlK8Ohw. Horowitz wrote the first episodes of the drama and came up with the title. As Horowitz notes:
“Brian True-May’s comments were inappropriate and should not have been made, but in our over-sensitive society there is this silly reaction to anything we say that involves ethnicity or religion.
Brian True-May’s comments were clearly inappropriate because race is an irrelevance here. The point about Midsomer Murders is that, in a village in Midsomer, all outsiders are equally unwelcome whatever their colour. If your family has lived here for 300 years, they’re likely to be white. That’s quite obvious.
“It was a foolish observation to make because colour is not an issue.”
The truth is, there are very few non-white people living in the Midsomer villages. According to the landlord of the The Six Bells in Warborough, Oxon, pub that features so often in the series, there is only one black man in the village, Who, by the way, drinks at the pub. The series depicts the villages as they are. Does that make it racist? Is “The fresh Prince of Beverly Hills” racist? Is “The Cosby Show” racist?
Of course not – none of them are. So why bother to float achingly politically correct and factually incorrect ideas? Well. there’s a guaranteed audience – a public that slavishly laps up celebrity gossip, and thirsts for controversy and sensational news. Were it not for that demand, and the existence of media to satisfy it, ideas like that would float like lead balloons.
There is quite enough really sensational and controversial news to report. There are sufficient matters of real importance to discuss.
Like me, a bloke called Eric Worrall comments on journalists’ blogs from time to time. He has an interesting explanation for why people concentrate on trivia, and are so ready to believe rubbish like this accusation of racism. Decadence is what he calls it. He notes that decadent societies focus on the inconsequential and lose sight of what is really important.
That’s probably the most accurate definition of decadence that I have ever seen.
