Utter tripe

This blog never properly addressed the much-hyped Bodyguard. Craig, who hadn’t watched it himself, covered it by way of Laura Perrins's Live Tweets.

Bloody Richard Madden

The BBC bigged up Jed Mercurio’s series shamelessly, but at the end of the day, to quote James Delingpole, it was a load of utter tripe.

The only way one could make head or tail of the story was by visiting the Guardian’s recaps - one of that paper’s few redeeming features.

It astonished me that so many viewers actually knew the names of the many indistinguishable characters, whom they referred to with such familiarity, ”Craddock”  and “Sampson”,  you’d think some of them actually knew what was supposed to be going on.

Haddock and Salmon

Anyway, Dellers has done such a good job, we at ITBB need go no further. Here are some of his best bits:

Even more distracting than the gratuitous sex, mind you, was the diversity casting. The whole exercise was like an extended United Colours of Benetton advert, with black female snipers, an Indian/Pakistani SWAT team head, an oriental bomb disposal expert, etc. If you sincerely believe — as the BBC demonstrably does — that the primary function of contemporary TV drama is to act as a make-work scheme for BAME actors then this is admirable. But from the point of view of most viewers it is distracting, insulting and discomfiting — for it forces you into noticing something you’d rather not be forced to notice. 

Worse still than the diversity stuff, though, is the relentless equality agenda. […] In BBC dramas now, it is absolutely de rigueur for anyone in any position of authority, including most of the police force, to be a strong, capable, confident woman. That includes, in this case, the female Muslim suicide bomber who — to allay any concerns that this might be racist stereotyping — was indulged with a little speech at the end announcing how proud and omnicompetent she was, not some male jihadist’s stooge, but an independent trained engineer with a mind of her own. 

I wonder, do BBC writers like Jed Mercurio feel any twinges of artistic self-disgust as they churn out this Social Justice Warrior propaganda? Isn’t it a bit like being a composer under Stalin, knowing you’re free to write whatever music you want, so long as it’s revolutionary, anti-bourgeois and celebrates the struggles and triumphs of the proletariat? Do they never worry at all what the audience might think?

They should because some of us have had just about enough. If it weren’t required for my job, I would seriously be thinking about stopping paying my licence fee. It’s a monstrous injustice — and, of course, a betrayal of its charter principles — for the BBC to charge people £150 a year on pain of imprisonment only to spit in their faces if they don’t hold the correct ‘woke’ views on anything from climate change and the EU to multiculturalism and feminism. My prediction is that the BBC is going to become increasingly marginal, partisan and irrelevant” 

I haven’t acclimatised myself to new-look Channel 5 yet, since I firmly associate it with voyeuristic topics like nature’s ‘freaks’ and physical abnormalities. But recently, according to James Delingpole, it has reinvented itself and it’s now the place to go for proper documentaries.

Whereas with Channel 5, what you see is what you get. Michael Buerk’s How the Victorians Built Britain (Saturdays), for example, tells you most of the stuff you need to know about the Industrial Revolution, why they built the Manchester ship canal, how the sewing machine changed fashion, and so on. You don’t get quite the production values that the overindulged BBC can still afford. But you don’t get the PC bollocks either, for which relief much thanks.

After the psychiatrist’s chair

Kill or cure remedy for Craig’s phobia about The Big Questions.

The prescription is a half hour dose of Channel Five.. you know, the weird channel that never feels quite right. In particular, the debate on immigration, because it made Nicky Campbell look like a colossus, which might cure your TBQ nightmares, and also, by the process of diverting you from one pain by giving you another. For example, distracting you from, say toothache, by pushing you into a bush of thorns.

“The Big British Immigration Row” 

Please catch it if you like a nice shambles. It was awful but I laiked it as Dick Emery would say.

Anne Diamond and Nick Ferrari were the “compères” but they were so incompetent at compèring that it was obvious that casting them was a ploy designed to bring about a dramatic melt-down, live on National Humiliationvision. The sadistic producer was surely overjoyed that so many  ‘now’ people had come along for a barney. Everyone was in the audience, or on the panel, and / or both.

A certain amount of pre-production preparation had been done. A few tricksy snippets of film had been cobbled together and transplanted into the debate at various inconvenient moments. Pleading the case for the rainbow nation, vox-pops of cuddly immigrants were inserted, with the subtlety of a clog, alongside disparaging innuendos about monocultural societies.  

A pub landlord from Margate was booed for saying that Margate has been ruined by immigration. Vanessa Feltz put on her “their views, not mine” voice to announce that many people had phoned in to her programme to say that they were troubled by immigration, and, with shining-eyes, rapturously recounted a multicultural experience of the NHS. However it had little to do with the deliberate social engineering that people are phoning you about, Vanessa, because your shared happy outcome, (baby-maternity ward) albeit a multicultural one, was the antithesis of the monocultural ghettos people are phoning you to complain about. You know, pockets of isolated, hostile, demanding immigrants who loathe the host society even more than they loathe slightly different sects of their own communities, or the other way round or both. 

Anne Diamond had an incongruous, impish smirk on her face, the grin of desperation, which vanished the instant someone looked like saying something racist, and came back again the instant the danger was over.  She failed to assert any authority over Mohammad Shafiq and Lee Jasper, whose shouting had risen to a deafening cacophony; no matter how hard she shrieked nor how high the pitch she merely added more decibels to the racket.   “Sorry Anne” said Nick, intervening with faux chivalry, before also being drowned out till nothing made any sense at all.  

Nicky Campbell is a masterful compère. He’s suave and incisive. Are you feeling better yet?

What Nancy De Lolly-Oh! was doing there was a mystery. She’s a lawyer? “Could you imagine Britain withou’me?”   

Yes.

Mohammad Shafiq and Lee Jasper were satisfactorily belligerent, but the star attraction was Katie Hopkins whose combustive potential had been heavily trailed in advance, and she was a great catalyst. Tenacious, persistent and glamourous, but it was a shame that, having uttered “people have had enough” for the umpteenth time, she ran out of ideas. People had had enough of her saying “people have had enough”. 

However she did manage to draw attention to some of the things people had had enough of, namely not being able to get their children into schools, not being able to get an appointment with the GP for three weeks and having an interminable wait to see a doctor at a hospital. 

It was exasperating to watch her ploughing the same old furrowed, conspicuously non-racist ground to justify all negative talk about mass immigration in view of the specter of Islam that was hanging over the proceedings all the while, like a black cloud/shroud.

Suddenly they introduced the phenomenon of the  “no-go area” and things got slightly more interesting. They showed a clip of  Anjem Choudary the pantomime Islamist, whereupon Mo Shafiq, and Mo Ansar who had been patiently squatting in the audience with his stripy scarf and diaphanous black dress, began frantically disowning Choudary and saying he wasn’t representative of the Muslims.

It ended inconclusively, having failed to do anything more than make the Big Questions look like a civilised debate. 

So there. Are you cured?

I didn’t recount all this just for Craig’s well being. It was in response to the headlines about the “withheld” statistics about the effect of mass immigration upon British Jobs for British people. 

You know what? I don’t care so much about foreign daffodil pickers undermining our indigenous ones. Sorry, but what I do care about has nothing to do with EU immigration or migration or whatever the polite euphemism is.

My concerns are loosely in synch with Pat Condell’s. They’re very specific. I’m concerned with the powers-that-be, (media/ politicians) pandering  to the whims and fancies of antisemitic immigrants from the Islamic third world. So there Katy Hopkins, never mind keeping your kids away from Chardonnay and Jayden, I’d advise you to ignore that and stay away from the ones with spiky names with lots of zs and qs that look, on the page, like barbed wire. You know, the ones in the captions on those child-grooming lists.

  

That’ll wipe the smile off Anne Diamond.