During the Cold War I am fairly certain that films, TV dramas and other popular entertainment did not remain silent on the threat posed by the Soviets. In fact my memory from those times was that popular culture was filled with Russian baddies, drunken homosexualist double–agents and great western super-heroes who were intent on taking down the commie threat.
As cineastes know, this culminated in David Zucker’s 1988 master-piece The Naked Gun. In the opening scene, Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad disrupted a meeting in Beirut where an attack on America was being planned by Idi Amin, Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Our hero duffed up each of them one by one.
Our brave agents are on the trail of a dastardly villain – a white working-class man by the name of Whitlock
Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, movies and TV series still relied on Soviet or post-Soviet villains. When they started to run out of steam, the more butch movie franchises resorted to North Korean villains, which seemed tolerable, and certainly wasn’t in the realm of outright fantasy.
I only mention this because, as I have noted here before, in the era of Islamic terrorism there is nothing that our creative communities want to shy away from more than the main security threat of the day. This isn’t my security estimate, but the estimate of the British security services themselves. Despite Muslims constituting around just 6 per cent of the UK population, Islamic extremism accounts for more than three-quarters of MI5’s casework. As far back as 2020 it was revealed that roughly 40,000 Islamic extremists in the UK were on the security services’ watch-lists as likely to engage or re-engage in terrorism. I wonder whether that number has gone up or down since 2020.
If I were a television dramatist I might suggest a drama about this threat. Except that I would do so in the knowledge that I would almost certainly be committing reputational harakiri. I have been there before. Almost a decade ago, when I published my book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, I was booked onto one of the main BBC shows. But just before my scheduled appearance I was suddenly pulled from the line-up. A few days earlier a young Muslim had carried out the suicide bombing at Manchester Arena, killing 22 mainly young people and injuring scores more. Pushing the BBC booker as to why this might not be a good time for me to outline my book’s main argument, I suddenly realised the reason. ‘It’s too relevant, isn’t it?’ I pointed out. The booker agreed.
That problem of relevance seems to remain the case – nowhere more so than in television drama. If you were to commission a BBC drama in which, say, a radical Islamic cell chose to target the Jewish community or others in the UK then the problem is that the whole thing might chime a bit too much with that day’s news. Better by far to commission something which is unlikely to bear any resemblance to reality but at least helps embed the counter-narrative that the commissioning authorities would like to exist.
Which brings me to this week’s attempt at brainwashing the British public. It comes in the form of a BBC drama called The Capture. In this week’s episode our brave agents are on the trail of a dastardly villain – a white working-class man by the name of Whitlock. What is this villain guilty of? Well, one thing is that he has been found to have put in Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to the UK government in the belief (as one of the agents puts it) that it is ‘covering up the true stats on undocumented migrants’. When two of our agents learn this they immediately turn around their car and get on the chase. That’s great TV drama for you, right there. Not an FoI request!
As we can all agree, only a very perverted mind would ever suspect the UK government of covering up any such thing as migration stats. Everybody with a scintilla of common sense knows that consecutive governments have only ever been honest and open with the public over the levels of documented and undocumented immigration. It is one of the reasons why we have such up-to-date and detailed information on – for instance – the amount of money it costs to house the latest arrivals by boat across the channel. And it is why the government does not have to try to cover up which hotels they are putting illegal migrants in.
But the BBC’s dramatists are not content with a mere FoI-requesting wrong ’un as the chief villain of the story. No – this man must end up taking up a rifle, heading to Dover and trying to sharp-shoot a boatload of illegal migrants, including a young child of the type who almost never make the journey in question. I say ‘almost never’ based on the photographs and evidence I have seen. Most of the people who arrive in these boats are young males who you are also not allowed to describe as being of ‘fighting age’. If I am wrong on this question of age-demographics then I am happy to be corrected. Certainly I would rather be corrected than put in an FoI request and immediately make myself suspected of terrible far-right activity.
It reminds me of the great brouhaha that erupted when Netflix aired its drama Adolescence and we all had to pretend there was a serious problem of young white working-class boys from nice homes stabbing their female schoolmates to death because of toxic masculine online influencers.
For now the BBC is content to continue presenting illegal migrants as exemplified by a poor young child seeking shelter, and any questioning of the same as leading to actual terrorism. The evening news carries a different type of story. But somewhere it seems to have been agreed that during this particular war, it is easiest if we make sure that the baddies are ourselves. And so there is a certain logic to the fact that it is also ourselves that we must forever be beating up.
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