Midsomer Five-0
Midsomer Murders racist? Whatever next. Next the so-called Politically Correct Nazis will be calling you a racist if you dance around dressed as Hitler defecating on a brown person's face. And is it racist? No. No, never. Of course what these handwringing Guardian-reading leftie troublemakers fail to realise is that Englishness is exactly the same as whiteness, and that any deviation from that is clearly a sop to the forces of tyranny that tell us what we can and can't say nowadays, and woe betide you if you upset the PC Godzillas lurking in the limp lettuce leaf handshakes of everyone who works in television, and possibly everywhere else, except to say that they are of course the minority, and we are the silent majority.
Go to any English village and it's just like Midsomer Whateveritscalled - nice pink-skinned people wandering around like it's the 1950s, everyone being terribly nice with each other, and not one of them anywhere in sight - which is how it should be, of course. And yes, they all end up murdering each other, but that's the charm. Imagine if one of them turned out to be, you know. Well. It just doesn't bear thinking about - the whole magic of the Sunday teatime treat would be lost forever more, just to appease the PC Basilisks and their so-called ethnically diverse agenda about something or other.
Ugh. You're not even allowed to have a go at people because they're, you know, a bit funny, any more. Everything has to be hideously multicultural and 'diverse', almost as if you're trying to appeal to as many people as possible. Is that what we fought three world wars for? So we could have to look at beige coloured faces on our television sets on a Sunday night, or people who do things with each other even though they're not married? Is it? Is it? No. No, it isn't.
Good on Midsomer Murders for not pandering to the PC Army, and refusing to let anyone non-white in. That's the spirit. That's what made this country great.
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March 16th, 2011 - 19:35
Snore.
When will being liberal stop being fashionable?
March 16th, 2011 - 20:18
Probably the same time as being an arsehole stops being fashionable. Which means neither of us has anything to worry about.
March 17th, 2011 - 12:30
^^ This wins.
March 17th, 2011 - 12:56
Interesting how @stebax ALWAYS resorts to insults. Such an intelligent writer.
March 17th, 2011 - 12:59
I’m sorry. “Snore” is obviously intelligent criticism which I should have treated with due deference. My apologies.
March 17th, 2011 - 13:22
This made me laugh. Out loud. At work. I now have a review with my boss. I hope the two things aren’t connected.
March 17th, 2011 - 18:00
The irony is delicious.
March 17th, 2011 - 18:22
At least he doesn’t resort to using bleedin’ UPPER CASE!!!11!1
March 18th, 2011 - 17:14
I’d stop now Karen.
I’m not biased, it just feels like you are so far behind on points that it’s best to just, well, stop.
March 16th, 2011 - 20:31
Yeah and the leftie, leftie, PCing, BBCing BBC goes ultra opposite with their programmes. There are no Daleks in Cardiff but, you just look at the pinkie winkie PC weecie BBCeecie and there are loads of them nasty illegal, untaxed metal things sitting in coffee bars drinking cups of Euwe Dogberts as if it was natural. Bleeding scandal I call it. True British drama should be like the real British life, as portrayed every day in the Daily Mail.
March 16th, 2011 - 23:46
My village in Warwickshire is entirely white =/
March 18th, 2011 - 09:50
Your village residents may indeed be entirely white, but if you ever need any services from outside (BT, post, gas, electricity and deliveries) there will inevitibly be some provided by ethnic minorities.
March 18th, 2011 - 13:14
Are you sure? One of my work colleagues, who is definitely non-white, lives in a Warwickshire village.
March 17th, 2011 - 01:13
It’s such a small town, I’m surprised there’s anyone left with one or two murders every Sunday. For such a ‘comforting’ place, Midsomer is as dangerous as the Congo, with a psycho lurking in every cottage!
March 21st, 2011 - 20:24
The murders don’t generally happen in town they usually happen in one of the many villages around.
Sometimes they go back to the same village. Once they went back to the same village and someone was still there from the first time.
March 17th, 2011 - 11:36
Your failing to realise that it’s all about realism. The producers would clearly love to include more ethnic minority characters, but not one of them has ever lived in a small rural village, ever, at all ever.
Obviously, viewers can suspend their disbelief far enough to accept that a small country village has a higher annual murder rate than Baltimore, but expecting them to belief that there might be black people in the countryside is just too much of a mental leap.
March 17th, 2011 - 11:49
I grew up in a small village in sussex. there were some non-white people there, not many, but some.
I’ve tried maybe 8 times to get a post explaining this on the various mail stories talking about this, none of them have been posted.
some great breakdowns in logic in some of the posts in the mail “whatever next – they’ll have a black guy playing a king of england” – the key difference is:
no english kind has been black
there are non-whites in some english villages
the argument is built on a faulty premise – that there are NO non-whites in English villages. this is blatantly not true, and used in order to decide any suggestion that maybe the odd non-white face might appear in midsomer murders is bordering on some revisionist lies. it’s not.
This is an example of the mail hyping a bit of a non-issue to give all the racists (sorry – to call a racist a racist – this isn’t allowed in mail-land!) an excuse to howl and pretend that you get in trouble with the mythical PC brigade for telling the truth – when the truth (there are no non-white people in English villages) isn’t actually the truth.
@ Karen – being angry other people have different views to you is always in fashion by the sounds of things.
March 17th, 2011 - 12:02
It is a fact that there are still small villages in parts of Britain where there are little or even no people from ethnic minority groups.
Maybe Midsommer Murders portrays that but it’s stupid to say that the show would not be a success if it had people from ethnic minorities in it as the producer did.
March 17th, 2011 - 15:18
In my tiny little hamlet, there are no ethnic minorities although my papaerboy accidentally delivered a copy of Le Monde to me last week so this suggests *gasp* that the French are moving in. Briefly, there was a sikh gentleman living next door to me but he has long departed. However, even in this tiny little hamlet, I encounter ethnic minorities on a regular basis. My postman is Sri Lankan and folks who deliver things to my house are often ‘ethnic’. Also my near neighbour is often visited by a black gentleman and his son and in the summer they sometimes pop over for drinks.
So they may not live here and are generally under-represented in villages(It would be interesting to find out just why that is) but they are hardly invisible.
March 18th, 2011 - 14:24
The village where I grew up was pretty lily-white and occasionally matched up well to the mail’s idea of an English country village. There were, however, at least two non-white residents who were involved in community life – both played for the village cricket team, for which my mum was scorer. Now, if you portrayed an idyllic village where the only two non-white faces were cricketers, that might still come across as a cliche, but yeah, invisible is not representative.
March 17th, 2011 - 16:03
I always assumed it was racist, alright, but against whites.
Seriously. Midsomer is like the murder capital of the world. There’s always someone being shot in the back by Richard Briers or locked in a house and set on fire or crushed by a forklift and shoved through a packing machine. You’d have to be a goddamn idiot to even want to visit the town. That’s why there are no non-whites in the town, because they’re smart enough to stay the hell away. White folk, on the other hand, are dumb enough to flock to this town, which they must be doing in order to keep the population up because if no one was moving in, the murders would’ve depopulated the town in about a week.
March 17th, 2011 - 16:38
Some of the comments about this have been along the lines of “if it was the other way round (white people not appearing in “black” dramas) then there wouldn’t be any complaining from the PC brigade, one rule for them etc etc.”
Which of course misses the point that if it indeed was the other way round, the Daily Mailers would be saying “if it was the other way round the PC brigade would be up in arms, one rule for them etc.”
Anyway, Midsomer Murders is a quaint English (aka white, as non-white aren’t English) drama about psychotic mudererers, some involved in blackmail, some involved in incest, some involved in suicide, and setting other people up for murders, and making murders look like suicide. But DARKIES? On MY screen! Disgusting!
March 17th, 2011 - 18:37
Has there ever actually been a black drama where there were no whites *at all*? Because I’m not remembering any. Anybody using that argument in all seriousness if full of shit regardless, but I’m curious.
March 17th, 2011 - 21:57
Possibly but not in Britain.
March 17th, 2011 - 23:55
Not to my knowledge. The last British comedy with a black cast, Desmond’s (which was on tv 17 years ago), had Tony the white hairdresser and a few other white characters.
March 18th, 2011 - 12:12
Ohh I remember Desmonds. It was quality!
March 18th, 2011 - 22:23
http://www.seesaw.com/TV/Comedy/b-2005-Desmonds
Just cos I’m nice
March 21st, 2011 - 01:08
BBC’s Empire Road (off the early 80′s) may not have had a white main character, but due to it’s Birmingham setting, there were white faces in it.
March 18th, 2011 - 19:28
The Desmonds! That was a good show.
In fact, how many shows even have so much as a black lead character? The only one that immediately springs to mind is Luther, and I feel that was mostly because Idris Elba has some star power nowadays.
God knows how the Daily Mail brigade would react if there were ever to be a drama or comedy made without any white main characters at all.
March 18th, 2011 - 14:00
Eastenders had an all-black episode in February 2009. It received a fair bit of coverage, even though the BBC didn’t make a big thing of it.
According to the Guardian, this didn’t go down too well with some of its viewers:
‘A BBC spokesman said 239 complaints had been received from viewers, with 57 received before it aired and 183 after the broadcast.
It is understood that most of the complaints were from people who felt it was “inappropriate” for the BBC to have shown an episode featuring an all-black cast.’
Some of the complainants felt it was unnecessary to raise the issue of the Notting Hill race riots, the BBC confirmed.’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/02/100-complaints-over-all-black-eastenders
March 18th, 2011 - 19:29
Thanks! Somehow I missed that.
March 19th, 2011 - 20:27
If anyone believes that the all black episode of Eastenders was done out of genuinly wanting to raise awareness of race issues or anything to do with black people they are barking right up the wrong tree.
As with all issue led storylines soap operas it was an attempt to increase audience share and beat the compertition.
March 18th, 2011 - 12:30
the closest i can think of would be the one off eastenders episode about a year ago that focused on a single black familiy (i don’t follow the show, so i’ve no idea of the name of them). which got some OMFG! coverage from parts of the tabloid press, and triggered some “you’d never get away with it if they were white” readers comments, all ignoring the other episode less than a year before featuring no one other than the very white (and in a tabloidland “opressed majority” double wammy, very christian) dot cotton.
March 17th, 2011 - 21:29
As far as I’m concerned it’s not a problem if the whole of the MSM cast is white. According to some figures I read today only 1.4% of English rural population is an “ethnic minority” (does this include Eastern Europeans?). I’m not going to demand that 7 in 500 actors are black, that is PCGM. Although you would expect someone non-white to turn up at some point over 14 seasons.
My problem with this is that his comments say that if you aren’t white you aren’t English. This is simply racist. Someone born and raised in this country isn’t English because of the colour of their skin. The production company were perfectly right to suspend him. The issue isn’t about the show, it’s about what he said.
March 17th, 2011 - 21:58
The overall portrayal of minorities on TV is inaccurate and unrealsitic. Homsexuals are the best example. They are mostly portrayed as muscley camp types (Christian in Eastenders) or repressed.
March 18th, 2011 - 13:47
That’s likely a corollory of their treatment of young people – who are are all either incredibly angsty and/or good looking – and their assumption that since being openly gay is a relatively new thing, almost all gay people are young.
March 17th, 2011 - 23:08
I’m not too concerned about the lack of non-white faces in Midsomer Murders nor the Daily Mail’s attempt to use this ‘poor mans Morse’ to have a dig at us bean munching, wooly sweater wearers, for three reasons:
1) Midsomer Murders is shit.
2) The Daily Mail is shit.
3) The people who buy, read and have the same parochial, insular, redneck, little-englander attitudes as the Mail are shit.
March 18th, 2011 - 01:02
Call me naive, but I’m utterly astonished that this producer guy came out with something so obviously unacceptable in this day and age, apparently without considering for a moment that it might attract criticism.
The odd thing is, he didn’t even HAVE to admit to deliberately avoiding putting non-white people in the show. Had he claimed that there was no intentional bias, that it was just a coincidence that there happened never to have been any ethnic minorities in the programme, I’m sure everyone would have believed him.
That makes me wonder; he seems to have done something racist without even giving it a second thought. Is that more or less bad than if he’d recognised the error in his ways and chosen to guiltily hide it?
Anyway, I’m curious to see how this pans out now. If the producers carry on featuring an all-white cast, then they’ll be criticised for continuing with their prejudiced policy. But if they suddenly throw in an ethnic minority character, they’ll be accused of being tokenistic and pandering to the PC brigade. The papers will be all over them either way. Tough call.
Incidentally, I grew up in a country village, and there genuinely weren’t any ethnic minorities there at all. My village was all-white, as were all the neighbouring villages. My primary school (about 300+ pupils) was all-white for the whole time I was there. Only when I went to secondary school in the nearest large-ish town did I meet any ethnic minorities, and even then we’re only talking one asian boy and one black girl among a thousand pupils (or several thousand if you take into account the annual turnover of students). I’m sure it’s a bit more mixed up there now, but still, this does suggest that it’s not entirely unrealistic for an isolated English country village not to have a visible ethnic minority community.
March 18th, 2011 - 17:35
“If the producers carry on featuring an all-white cast, then they’ll be criticised for continuing with their prejudiced policy. But if they suddenly throw in an ethnic minority character, they’ll be accused of being tokenistic and pandering to the PC brigade.”
Solution: bring in a black *murder victim*
March 19th, 2011 - 21:17
I’m pretty sure that would still get counted as tokenism.
How about this; if they had a murder victim who was not only black but also homosexual, and he/she was killed in an anti-gay hate crime, that would do a great job of deflecting attention away from the race issue. Brilliant!
If they use that I want my name in the credits…
March 18th, 2011 - 11:04
Steve. I wish you would write this sort of stuff at the NS. Left wing does not have to mean stuffy.
March 18th, 2011 - 11:23
I hear you.
March 18th, 2011 - 14:38
Agreed! This piece is great.
March 19th, 2011 - 11:05
I don’t really have an issue with whether or not Midsomer Murders has an appropriate percentage of non-white characters or not, it’s a bit of fluff television, like ‘Heartbeat’ with death. What is important about it is that it’s a nice comfy pillow for a certain kind of viewer to settle down into and not have to be troubled by anything that vaguely hints at the 21st century and that a certain amount of people who were born English, whose parents were even born English, *are not white*.
That this is a deliberate policy, as evidenced by the fairly blatant equating of Englishness with whiteness is the really repellent part. That and the “last bastion,” we’re-being-overrun rhetoric.
And I’m coming to love this use of ‘fashionable’ to mean anything vaguely liberal or left-leaning. It’s such a reactionary bleat.
If the history of Englishness was condensed into a day it would be white men shouting loudly about blacks and immigrants and foreigners and women and getting teary-eyed and trembly lipped about England from sunrise, through the morning, past dinnertime, into the afternoon. In the evening they might let some white women speak, so long as they moan (quietly) about blacks and immigrants and foreigners and get teary about Englishness and first prize in the lottery of life.
As we come up to midnight, some non-white people, immigrants, foreigners and a lot of women speak up and say “actually being treated like this is a bit crap.”
“God!” the reactionaries say, rolling their eyes, “you people. You’ve been moaning on for a whole minute now. Will it never end? Oppressed majority. House prices.”
April 7th, 2011 - 14:11
Absolutely spot on comment!
March 19th, 2011 - 20:25
The overall patronising “Look how enlightened we are” attitude of middle class soap opera writers is preety gauling.
They assume their mostly working class audiences are ignorant of issues such as homosexuality, rape and domestic violence and need edcuating. Given that such issues effect working class people on a daily basis that’s just plain igorant.
And in most cases such issues are used not as genuine attempt to raise awareness but to increase viewing figures.
April 22nd, 2011 - 21:22
Homosexuality, rape and domestic violence affect all humans, regardless of social class. To suggest otherwise is, well, ignorant.
March 20th, 2011 - 08:33
I lived in a village where there were welsh people! Still it was Wales so you have to be tollerant.
March 21st, 2011 - 01:12
Imagine the carnage if Jessica Fletcher paid a visit to Midsomer!
March 21st, 2011 - 12:00
They should get Colombo in. He’d tick them right off with his “I just want to ask one more question” thing
March 21st, 2011 - 15:51
The MS producer couldn’t help but froth like a true bastion. Now it’ll be “health and safety gone mad” in the Daily Mail until at least 2012. Or should that be political correctness? Damned if i Know. It’s all forrin to me.
March 22nd, 2011 - 11:29
I demand lots of white people in Bollywood movies. Disgraceful, there are far too many Indians in Bollywood. Anyone would think they were the indigenous population.
March 25th, 2011 - 07:13
This ‘indigenous population’ of India. Do you mean ‘brown people’?
March 26th, 2011 - 21:12
*whoosh*
That was the point flying right over your head.
March 22nd, 2011 - 12:59
Steve; if you want to see a spike in your blood pressure today, read our old friend Littlejohn’s current article; it nearly cause me to have blood clot
March 24th, 2011 - 16:27
There should be one black family in Midsommer. Every time someone is murdered, the police should ignore the obvious “white man in bloodstained clothing standing over the deceased with his nob out and holding a knife” suspect and arrest one of the black people. Further obvious clues are ignored unitl the end of the programme. Eventually, all the black family will be able to give the alibi that they were already in prison for crimes they haven’t committed, so cannot be responsible for these new crimes. Undeterred, Midsommers finest fit them up again and again and again………….
Mailgasm over 14 series. Last bastion of old fashioned law and order values.
March 29th, 2011 - 13:38
new article about this. seems to be along the vein of “it’s not racist to be quite openly racist and not want any non-whites near you, it’s errm just errm common sense?”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370987/British-country-villages-want-remain-white-middle-class.html
March 30th, 2011 - 10:26
My other half’s folk live in the country. When we go there me & the (non-white) daughter play ‘spot the ethnic minority’, even in the nearest big city (big is a relative term when it’s applied to Exeter). However we were aghast, shocked even, to visit the nearest tiny village for the annual fete and count five, FIVE of them – including a whole family! Some of them may have been students visiting friends during the summer hols, but still – FIVE! And we’re talking of the sort of village which has a pub and a church but no shop. Possibly she may now even consider Exeter uni…
As for when I were a child, well my best mate was the only non-white child in my class. That was Wembley. So things do change, and maybe Midsomer will too?