down to the countryside

The ITV1 detective show, which has run for 14 series, ‘wouldn’t work’ if there was any racial diversity in it, producer True-May said.

‘We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way,’ he told Radio Times.

He insisted he had never been tackled before about the ‘whites only’ rule in the show, which stars John Nettles as Det Ch Insp Tom Barnaby.

He said: ‘I’ve never been picked up on that but quite honestly I wouldn’t want to change it. ‘We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work.

I’ll tell you what’s missing here. My former employers did some number crunching on the 1991 census, which found that there was no constituency in the UK with an ethnic Chinese population numbering more than 2%, but only two constituencies with no Chinese population at all and they seemed to consist of places mainly populated by sheep. Broadly, any settlement in the UK large enough to sustain a pub had its own chip shop/takeaway, or at least one servicing two or three nearby villages. I don’t exactly follow telly drama of the Sunday night snoozer type assiduously, but I’ve seen some of it, and none of it features anyone snarfing down a chow mein and belching appreciatively. But what could be more quintessentially English?

Or make that “could have been.” I’m not keeping up, but I suspect that the same demographic changes hat have done for rural pubs have done for a lot of rural takeaways, and of course there’s the fact that the last thing the kids want to do is to inherit the store. In other words, we’re talking nostalgia for the recent past here, precisely the domain that this fool is talking about. Via.

Comments

[vavatch]

They could easily integrate minorities into the show whilst keeping their vision of England intact.

Just make them the criminals.

[BenSix]

Presumably murder, incest and sexual abuse are as English as tatties and herrin'?

This was amusing, from a coupl'a years back.

[belle le triste]

Inspector Frost pretty much makes his local Indian his second office: but wherever it is Frost coppers also has estates and drugs and abandoned factories and a local dump and class structure and indeed recognisable class struggle etc.

Vavatch is exactly wrong: what s/he proposes is what this TV nitwit is fighting to avoid -- because he wants to maintain a world that conforms to the inherited irreality of the third-rank Agatha Christies, where the cycle of blood and retribution is NOT shoved off onto the shoulders of a scary "Other"; it's all in-village when not in-family. The killer unmasked isn't just utterly familiar -- it's one of the comfy viewers' own and dearest. And the shtick is -- that's both comfy and scary -- is that sticking with your own, and the calm of absolute cultural purity, leads to regular violent death and dysfunction! There's plenty of other programmes on TV to provide vavatch's Other-monstering, after all: this outburst is all about retaining a quite distinct market share...

Problem is, bcz he's a silly racist twat, he reaches for "realism" and "Englishness" to defend his niche: what he probably needed were some orotund terms from PoMO Critical Theory, though they too would have frightened the shirehorses. ("Irreality", I ask you...! )

I watch Midsomer Murders quite a lot -- it's very undemanding when yr tired, and it's ALL CLUES AND SYMPTOMS, as likeable familiar safety probably always is -- like an endless soothing WickerMan which forever defers its its climax. Which we maybe just reached...

[Laban]

"any settlement in the UK large enough to sustain a pub had its own chip shop/takeaway, or at least one servicing two or three nearby villages."

Where do you live ? This just isn't true of Gloucestershire/Somerset/Wiltshire/Worcs/Hereford - and I'd put Midsomer somewhere in that neck of the fictional woods.

My village - 1 pub.

Last village I lived in - 3 pubs, 3 shops, no takeaways when I moved there. 2 of the pubs and 2 of the shops are now closed.

Village 3 miles away - 1 pub, 2 shops, hairdresser, English chippy. But it's a small old village overwhelmed by new development - part of which included a tiny modern parade of shops - and it's pretty much the only takeaway in any village for miles in any direction. They really are not common. A lot of villages have neither pub nor shop, let alone takeaway.

Takeaways in the rural southwest/borders are generally in the towns, not villages. Different where there's also an industrial legacy - quite a few chippies/Chinese in small villages twixt Chesterfield and Sheffield, say. But that's not Midsomer country. Midsomer I like to think is just up from the wonderfully named Marston Bigot.

[john b]

I thought Midsomer was more like the outer bounds of commuter-ness in Oxfordshire. Where, IMX, anywhere with a pub or three does have a take-out. The economics are different in the rural southwest and the Marches, I'm sure.