Idly watching the first episode of a TV crime drama series recently, I found myself in a slightly troubled frame of mind. We were already 35 minutes in and no probable villain had shown their face. We had seen black people, Chinese people, lesbians, the disabled, the impoverished and powerless, Muslims, the young and idealistic… yikes, I thought to myself, it simply can’t be any of them, can it? Surely not. And then, as if the scriptwriter had heard my private worries, for lo, a very rich, marble-mouthed white woman emerged and was shown being beastly to some young and idealistic people and I thought: bingo! We have our villain. There is no need to watch the remaining five episodes. She did it, the rich cow. The only slight surprise is that it was a woman rather than a bloke.
You may have had a similar experience lately, if you watch television. I watch quite a lot these days because for a while I’m doing the TV review for the Sunday Times. It is sometimes like being sandblasted by freeze-dried pellets of rhino excrement. Anyway, you will have found that if you are watching a drama, especially a crime drama, almost all of the following will occur.
You will be introduced to a world which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real world
First, the principal character, the good person, the star, will not be a white male. It will almost certainly be a woman and quite probably a woman who is also a person of colour. And more than likely batting for the other side, if you will excuse my rather dated allusion to homosexuality. Further, you will probably find she has a boss who is also female and probably a person of colour, too. And then, when you look around at the rest of the cast, you will find that the head of MI5 is a black woman, the prime minister is an Asian woman and the president of the USA is either a black man or a black woman. If the pope was in this show that role would almost certainly go to a woman and quite possibly one who was at the very least bi-curious and with cerebral palsy. You will also note that when it comes to a fight, the female star is far stronger and quicker than the men who assail her.
For sure, in this show you have begun to watch you will see some straight white men. But they are probably utter dunderheads, forever being shown up by junior employees who are female or of colour or more likely both. Either that or they are agents of limitless malevolence. Keep your eye on them, because they will almost certainly turn out to have committed the crime, whatever it is.
The other certainty is that if there is a Muslim character, and there almost certainly will be a Muslim character, they will be the most peaceable human being who ever walked this Earth, bearing nothing but glad tidings and benevolence to those with whom he or she comes into contact, inshallah.
Of course there will be other straight white folk milling around – but if they are poor and put-upon you can bet your life that at most they may play a minor role in crime, having been forced to do so by the exigencies of the capitalist system and the predatory white males who make their lives a living hell. They are, then, morally not guilty.
In short, you will be introduced to a world which in every aspect bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real world, the one in which you live. A world in which women are physically stronger than men and better at everything, in which people of colour are always much nicer than white folks, and ‘queer’ people of colour exponentially nicer. A world in which all crime is committed by the rich people. Frankly, if the show depicted a central London phone-snatch theft it would almost certainly be carried out by a middle-aged, middle-class white bloke called Oliver or Jacob riding a Brompton. ‘Hey, old chap, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take your bally smartphone!’ And the victim would be a 16-year-old lad of Somalian extraction.
Now, all this might irritate you, much as it irritates me. But it is not the crucial point. The crucial point is that as a consequence you will know exactly who has committed whatever crime it is that constitutes the fulcrum for this show. You will know them by the colour of their skin, their sexual preferences, their sex and their affluence. And this, to me, rather negates the point of a crime mystery drama. There is no mystery. It is all a little like that ITV series Liar in which the audience was enjoined to judge who was telling the truth, a woman alleging rape or the man who had denied the crime. And then the stupid TV producers declared that it couldn’t possibly be the woman who was lying, they couldn’t show that.
The actress Sophie Turner recently addressed this whole issue, but seemed very happy with it. All the villains in films these days were ‘rich people’, she said, and this was better because it was ‘less racist’. She did not mean this ironically, sadly.
Our scriptwriters and producers almost exclusively adhere to a post-Marxist view of the world in which the oppressor, and therefore the guilty party, is someone like you. Either that or they are terrified to portray anything which diverges from this template for fear of being cancelled. I don’t really care that this makes their programmes unrealistic and at times patently absurd – TV is like that; it is a cretin’s medium. But I do care that they make the programmes unwatchable because we know in advance exactly what will happen.
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