
Pious virtue signalling is ruining british tv | thearticle
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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: a_nother 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.