Exactly as you said here in America....you can accurately without fail predict how the plot of any randomly chosen TV drama will progress by skin color, sex, perhaps income levels etc...dreary crap which I've long ago given up watching.
Late to this, but making my way through your posts. Everywhere we see victim narratives constructed to obtain unearned resources, and the wilfully stupid or strategically ignorant don't care about real statistics. So glad to see your substack. You'll laugh at this: I work in marketing and had an agency do a campaign for me (a Lithuanian organization). They peopled my adverts with a demographic not represented in our organization and when I mentioned they would need to rework the whole campaign it caused a frisson amongst the woke creative one of whom said they would not work with me in future. I told them next time to read the brief and thanks to the fellow who remove himself from my creative team. But it did not make me popular. Apparently I used my privilege to punch down. Daft.
Your experience confirms what I've always thought about advertising 'creatives'; that they are often in a parallel universe to the business that commissions them and aren't in its best interests... Gillette and Budweiser spring to mind.
Oct 17, 2023·edited Oct 17, 2023Liked by Graham Cunningham
We have spent too long as a society at the top of the pyramid of needs. This would make them think that their point of view supersedes the directions and instruction of the person who’s paying. People have forgotten / some have never experienced what it means to be at the bottom rung where food and shelter are priorities. I’m not actually advocating for annihilation of the economic health of our country, but some of these See You Next Tuesday”’s need a freaking wake up call.
Hi Graham, I totally feel the same way about television. I stopped watching main stream shows just about twenty years ago. I had a very early morning job and could not stay awake.
I retired early two years ago with more free time, the change was startling. So when I read your article I felt not so alone. I cannot stomach it. I point it out often to my adult daughter and she thinks I am narrow minded.
Interesting enough I found myself watching more and more British shows. They seem more real. I am selective though. The police and your legal system seems way more lax or forgiving than here in America.
I remember being very frightened for Vera as she chased a murderer up some very dark castle on a hill with out a gun to protect herself!
Movies and such from the Nordic countries are even more strange. The people all seem to be androgynous.
Interesting! We watch Vera as a kind of safe bet because it's the least pc and least stupid of the UK police dramas. We used to gravitate to the Nordic ones but they've tended now to become more and more gratuitously gory. The best UK drama if you can get it in the US is the stuff made ten to twenty years ago..... the Catherine Cookson feature-length ones for example are great stories, way better than anything made now.
Oh my goodness, I was just thinking about the SJW messaging of TV after watching the latest season of Unforgotten! It was a super box ticker: biracial woman beats her (much larger, very loving white) husband, and has been addicted to alcohol because she was raised by her working class, fundamentalist Christian Nigerian immigrant grandparents who resented her because her birth - to their unwed (raped by a white aristocrat [I’m not making this up!]) teenaged daughter - brought them shame. The unwed mother was so hopeless in the evil London of the ‘60s that she “threw herself into the Thames”.
The Victim biracial child of the rape confronts her aristocrat father (who grew from a rapist youth into an evil, social program slashing Tory Minister [I am not making this up!]) and blackmails him into providing her with a monthly allowance (but apparently not enough to pay for the counselling that she says at one point, her benefits don’t cover). His dirty money does not seem to improve her Victim life very much.
She has a daughter with FASD but it’s not because the paragon of virtue Victim drank any alcohol while a pregnant teen mom. Perish the thought!It’s because her fundamentalist Christian Nigerian grandfather forced her to drink a shit ton of vodka to terminate her pregnancy (you know how fundamentalist Christians love abortion?!) and it didn’t work. She gave birth to the FASD baby, who joined a cult (led by a white middle aged predator who impregnated her as a teen [I am not making this up!]) and was pretty much out of the Victim mother’s life until she became the victim of the murder which this story is about.
I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone, but it’s a beaut. Brilliant female Irish DCI and her even smarter, male Pakistani DI (who has a white fiancée, he’s no bigot!) obtain a confession from the evil Tory Minister who has lately changed his public spending habits because he sees the terrible impact that his party’s low public spending has had in the (racialized) community) that his own hidden Victim’s family lives in. But the brave and politically correct cops tell the evil Tory aristocrat that they see him! His recent public spending spree cannot atone for his Tory sins! He will pay for what he did!! And he does. Wracked no doubt by White Guilt, he confesses to a crime he didn’t commit. Because he knows that every bad thing that has happened to his hidden family is ultimately his fault. As are all the problems of everyone in Britain who is smart enough to see that they too are victims of the oppressive capitalist system in which they suffer daily.
The evolution of the relationship between the two cops did redeem this series a wee bit. But not enough.
The bit about the Victim’s Christian grandfather forcing Vodka on her was just too much for me. Nothing could be her own fault. Every bad thing she did was attributable to another (bad, conservative) person’s actions.
And I didn’t even mention the scene with the (unattractive, selfish, old) Tory wife. You know, the one where the self righteous Victim stops the wife from “throwing in her face” the fact that the faultless Victim engaged in blackmail and did not seem to have gained anything from the money she took. The whole thing was a super victim/oppressor story.
Oh, and the “upskirting” Polish, Jewish character, who felt so horrible for the “damage” his photos did (to women who didn’t even know he had taken photos of them?!) What the heck was that?! Was it meant to be a social justice parody?
Yes our culture's got itself into a strange, sad place hasn't it? In a way it seems like masochism - middle-class white masochism. But then it's PROXY-masochism - as in you personally are a 'nice person'; its all your white peers who are 'deplorables'. Thanks for the sub by the way.
Thinking about the Polish character: another example of a semi-criminal white guy getting caught by his own weakness? also just to expand the story line and provide additional avenues of "investigation", plus provide the opportunity for pathos when the detective is on the train to Europe and learns his girlfriend miscarried, and he is too far away to comfort her? Unbelievable misfortune on all sides??!! Plus, I don't recall the details but perhaps the Polish interviewee provided some time line specifics helpful to getting the (near) final history? :-)
We watched that here in US recently, too. Once you get sucked into the story line, you just let the PC'ness and Wokeness roll over you. But it should be added to your summary that the evil white guy confessing in the end was due in part to his knowing that he would not have long to live, or serve in prison, anyway.
A brilliant article Graham. I tend to watch old dramas these days because ironically they seem less prejudiced when taken in the round. Also, there are some excellent new, foreign dramas on Netflix if you can deal with the subtitles.
Thank you. Yes we tend to gravitate towards the ones before everthing had to tick every pc box....also less gruesome murders. We also watch European dramas (on C4). Some are good but - as with the UK - the plot-line is nearly always about murder (or serial murder) these days.
Wonderful essay, Graham. I agree with the major thrust of it. But, as you might expect, I have some minor quibbles.
I’m a huge fan of John le Carré and Little Drummer Girl is perhaps my favourite book of his. The theme of it (SPOILERS) is that Charlie (the main character) is overwhelmed by ambiguity. She is a massive supporter of the Palestinians and yet she is recruited by the Israeli secret service to spy and assassinate on their behalf. The book sucks the reader into this ambiguity and half the time you don't know if you are pro- or anti- the good guys or the bad guys and you often can’t decide which is which. I thought the recent TV drama captured this ambiguity very well. Of course, it was sympathetic to the Palestinians. So was Charlie. I doubt that le Carré was woke when he wrote this. The book certainly wasn't and neither was the TV series.
The Night Manager tv series was not that great but of course the bad guys were white. To switch them to another shade would have betrayed the original story and would have been identity politics in the other direction. I still agree with the thrust of your point but you just chose two bad examples, is all.
A last point that’s more supportive of your argument: my wife does a lot of extra work for movies and TV and very often many of the other extras are people of colour. The extras all know each other and the POCs get called way more than she does - even for things like a drama set in WW1. She got her own back though when she was Black Woman Number 12 on the Windrush because they didn't have enough black extras.
I think the real problem is media-people groupthink....and that is perhaps where you and I find some common ground. In my recollection The Night Manager was dripping with it. I recall one reviewer (I think it was the leftish Nick Cohen) taking Le Carre to task for picking on the whiteys because that was the safe bet, rather than the Islamists who might have put a fatwa on him. That seemed to me well said.
Off on a tangent: I think discussions about Lefties and conservatives often get bedevilled by how much these terms have come to be redefined. 50 years ago 'Left' was primarily about class inequality...nationalisation + welfare....up the workers etc. 'Right' meant Toryism, capitalism + welfare (just not too much) etc. Now 'the Left' is taken to mean a primarily middle class graduate 'social justice'-about-identity thing. And conservatives (ones like me anyway) have somewhat parted company with both Toryism and capitalism and are more rooted in an Edmund Burkean interrogation along the lines of "careful what you wish for Liberalism". Hope this makes sense.
I agree with all your points, Graham, and, in particular, I agree that social justice has been associated with the left but my agenda is to make it known that there are plenty of us old-school lefties still around.
I have some sympathy for your Burkean interpretation and share much of it.
Many of the good guys on the Night Manager were also white and at least some of Ropers customers were Arab or African. To me it was more about a two-faced system where the government pretends to be against the proliferation of arms by sponsoring an underfunded agency to combat it while all the deep state actors were actually in favor and benefiting from perpetuating it. This seems to mesh with reality a bit more, where Western governments support "Freedom fighters" in one country and bombs "terrorists" in another, meanwhile they are the same group that just crossed a border. However, this usually probably doesn't involve shady arms dealers, like someone these people would be nice to each other if the white guy didn't sell them weapons which is the really dumb part of the story. Maybe it really depends on what biases you have going in and which end up being confirmed?
I agree with all you said, Nils, but I would add that the last several of le Carré's books shared the theme of an incompetent government agent supporting some bad guys because it was too lazy and to much caught up in relativism and instrumentalism to care who was good and who was bad. I found them a bit tiring after a while.
I've only read the first half of the original "The Night Manager" book and didn't read anything else by le Carré. And I only started reading after watching the series, I don't remember why I didn't finish the book, I think some other books came out that I wanted to read more. Maybe the book just wasn't good enough.
I always try to see the adaptations for TV or movies as works that stand on their own and try not to hold them to the same standards as the books because the medium is so different. While you can read the characters thoughts in writing it's not something you can do on the screen, it's even considered hacky when characters reveal their motives in lengthy monologues. Going in without reading the books also allows you to fill in the gaps with your own imagination which is what I think makes the medium great when used well, that only works of course if you don't fill peoples heads with the conclusions that they should come to.
It sounds to me from your few words as if le Carré is trying to retcon the characters who were somewhat good and redeemable into morally ambiguous characters? Basically trying to write a different story with the same characters? That would be annoying.
Interesting idea. I’ll have to think about this some more. But I'd say that most of his books have an unquestionably good character who can do no wrong. Night Manager included — plus all of the famous Smiley books. (SPOILERS) Perfect Spy and Little Drummer Girl would be the exceptions and I’d say they are his best two books.
I do enjoy a story where good and evil are delineated properly and I don't have to think too much about the ambiguities. I used to read Tom Clancy novels to fall asleep, you can read a book like that before turning off the light and not lie awake thinking about it because the characters aren't going to surprise you, only where the story might take you. The type of book you can put down because you already know how it's going to end even if you don't know how they get there. It's predictable, it's comforting.
On the other hand I enjoy a story where everything is on the table and I'm wide awake asking myself WTF just happened and it makes me think. But authors have to stay in their lane at least somewhat unless they're very talented to flip a story in that way. The problem I have is with trying both at the same time or converting one into the other. The kind of story where the reader already knows the big surprise that the author is setting up. That's the problem with a lot of TV/movie adaptations and some storytelling in general.
The best fiction focuses more on human reality than on political programs, but politics often leaks in. Brainwashing needs either willing participants or total control. It’s pretty easy to turn off the television or set aside rank propaganda, I think. But I agree it’s annoying, no matter what soap they’re selling. Thanks for writing this.
I also knew it was going south circa 2005 when Guenevere was played by a black actress in Merlin. I liked her well enough - but - "Gwenhyfar" means "fair and white."
In the 90's, I dated a fella from England. When I listened to his views I thought how gentle, liberal, open, accepting, etc. they were. They were refreshing compared to the American propaganda at the time.
I went to visit him. I experienced the BBC firsthand, licensed in the living room (they make you pay to propagandize you!) - and realised, that every political or social viewpoint which had come out of my lover's mouth had been spoon fed him by that box.
Eye opening. (especially since I was leaning socialist at the time)
So - a decade later, I've moved to Australia, where I got indoctrinated into Dr. Who. Alrighty then. Until Matt Smith, it was "normal" fun sci-fi. But the Russell Davies thing - started with Torchwood - making sure that there were plenty of "diverse" types in the cast, and pedestaling those differences (which we never see in every day life). Dr. Who soured for me. Sigh. In the newest version - "The Maestro" - I had to stop.
Nothing more annoying than to sit down to be entertained by a good drama... only to become painfully aware of the ‘ticking of the boxes’!
Thanks Lisa. So does this get me a free sub to: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ ?
It all helps.
Exactly as you said here in America....you can accurately without fail predict how the plot of any randomly chosen TV drama will progress by skin color, sex, perhaps income levels etc...dreary crap which I've long ago given up watching.
Here's a tiny, insidious one, I've been noticing:
Only villains vape.
Late to this, but making my way through your posts. Everywhere we see victim narratives constructed to obtain unearned resources, and the wilfully stupid or strategically ignorant don't care about real statistics. So glad to see your substack. You'll laugh at this: I work in marketing and had an agency do a campaign for me (a Lithuanian organization). They peopled my adverts with a demographic not represented in our organization and when I mentioned they would need to rework the whole campaign it caused a frisson amongst the woke creative one of whom said they would not work with me in future. I told them next time to read the brief and thanks to the fellow who remove himself from my creative team. But it did not make me popular. Apparently I used my privilege to punch down. Daft.
Your experience confirms what I've always thought about advertising 'creatives'; that they are often in a parallel universe to the business that commissions them and aren't in its best interests... Gillette and Budweiser spring to mind.
We have spent too long as a society at the top of the pyramid of needs. This would make them think that their point of view supersedes the directions and instruction of the person who’s paying. People have forgotten / some have never experienced what it means to be at the bottom rung where food and shelter are priorities. I’m not actually advocating for annihilation of the economic health of our country, but some of these See You Next Tuesday”’s need a freaking wake up call.
Apparently we all use our privilege to punch down. Amazing how we do that.
Hi Graham, I totally feel the same way about television. I stopped watching main stream shows just about twenty years ago. I had a very early morning job and could not stay awake.
I retired early two years ago with more free time, the change was startling. So when I read your article I felt not so alone. I cannot stomach it. I point it out often to my adult daughter and she thinks I am narrow minded.
Interesting enough I found myself watching more and more British shows. They seem more real. I am selective though. The police and your legal system seems way more lax or forgiving than here in America.
I remember being very frightened for Vera as she chased a murderer up some very dark castle on a hill with out a gun to protect herself!
Movies and such from the Nordic countries are even more strange. The people all seem to be androgynous.
Interesting! We watch Vera as a kind of safe bet because it's the least pc and least stupid of the UK police dramas. We used to gravitate to the Nordic ones but they've tended now to become more and more gratuitously gory. The best UK drama if you can get it in the US is the stuff made ten to twenty years ago..... the Catherine Cookson feature-length ones for example are great stories, way better than anything made now.
We went Nordic, but - gratuitous sex & violence - I often have to look away.
Catherine Cookson = awesome. We seem to be fine with period pieces, like Endeavor.
Watching "Call the Midwife" feels like a slow sip of whiskey, so gentle & smooth.
Recently watched a series from the UK called "Euphoria." I wanted to know what the young people are thinking about.
Yeah, they're "mentally ill," "addicted" "gender confused"
But it was well acted. And did teach me some things about the up-and-comings (we're in trouble).
Oh my goodness, I was just thinking about the SJW messaging of TV after watching the latest season of Unforgotten! It was a super box ticker: biracial woman beats her (much larger, very loving white) husband, and has been addicted to alcohol because she was raised by her working class, fundamentalist Christian Nigerian immigrant grandparents who resented her because her birth - to their unwed (raped by a white aristocrat [I’m not making this up!]) teenaged daughter - brought them shame. The unwed mother was so hopeless in the evil London of the ‘60s that she “threw herself into the Thames”.
The Victim biracial child of the rape confronts her aristocrat father (who grew from a rapist youth into an evil, social program slashing Tory Minister [I am not making this up!]) and blackmails him into providing her with a monthly allowance (but apparently not enough to pay for the counselling that she says at one point, her benefits don’t cover). His dirty money does not seem to improve her Victim life very much.
She has a daughter with FASD but it’s not because the paragon of virtue Victim drank any alcohol while a pregnant teen mom. Perish the thought!It’s because her fundamentalist Christian Nigerian grandfather forced her to drink a shit ton of vodka to terminate her pregnancy (you know how fundamentalist Christians love abortion?!) and it didn’t work. She gave birth to the FASD baby, who joined a cult (led by a white middle aged predator who impregnated her as a teen [I am not making this up!]) and was pretty much out of the Victim mother’s life until she became the victim of the murder which this story is about.
I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone, but it’s a beaut. Brilliant female Irish DCI and her even smarter, male Pakistani DI (who has a white fiancée, he’s no bigot!) obtain a confession from the evil Tory Minister who has lately changed his public spending habits because he sees the terrible impact that his party’s low public spending has had in the (racialized) community) that his own hidden Victim’s family lives in. But the brave and politically correct cops tell the evil Tory aristocrat that they see him! His recent public spending spree cannot atone for his Tory sins! He will pay for what he did!! And he does. Wracked no doubt by White Guilt, he confesses to a crime he didn’t commit. Because he knows that every bad thing that has happened to his hidden family is ultimately his fault. As are all the problems of everyone in Britain who is smart enough to see that they too are victims of the oppressive capitalist system in which they suffer daily.
The evolution of the relationship between the two cops did redeem this series a wee bit. But not enough.
Thanks for this....quite a SJW tick-box jamboree that!
Hope this will persuade you to add STB to your free Substack subscriptions.
Subscribed!
The bit about the Victim’s Christian grandfather forcing Vodka on her was just too much for me. Nothing could be her own fault. Every bad thing she did was attributable to another (bad, conservative) person’s actions.
And I didn’t even mention the scene with the (unattractive, selfish, old) Tory wife. You know, the one where the self righteous Victim stops the wife from “throwing in her face” the fact that the faultless Victim engaged in blackmail and did not seem to have gained anything from the money she took. The whole thing was a super victim/oppressor story.
Oh, and the “upskirting” Polish, Jewish character, who felt so horrible for the “damage” his photos did (to women who didn’t even know he had taken photos of them?!) What the heck was that?! Was it meant to be a social justice parody?
Yes our culture's got itself into a strange, sad place hasn't it? In a way it seems like masochism - middle-class white masochism. But then it's PROXY-masochism - as in you personally are a 'nice person'; its all your white peers who are 'deplorables'. Thanks for the sub by the way.
Thinking about the Polish character: another example of a semi-criminal white guy getting caught by his own weakness? also just to expand the story line and provide additional avenues of "investigation", plus provide the opportunity for pathos when the detective is on the train to Europe and learns his girlfriend miscarried, and he is too far away to comfort her? Unbelievable misfortune on all sides??!! Plus, I don't recall the details but perhaps the Polish interviewee provided some time line specifics helpful to getting the (near) final history? :-)
We watched that here in US recently, too. Once you get sucked into the story line, you just let the PC'ness and Wokeness roll over you. But it should be added to your summary that the evil white guy confessing in the end was due in part to his knowing that he would not have long to live, or serve in prison, anyway.
Good addition
A brilliant article Graham. I tend to watch old dramas these days because ironically they seem less prejudiced when taken in the round. Also, there are some excellent new, foreign dramas on Netflix if you can deal with the subtitles.
Thank you. Yes we tend to gravitate towards the ones before everthing had to tick every pc box....also less gruesome murders. We also watch European dramas (on C4). Some are good but - as with the UK - the plot-line is nearly always about murder (or serial murder) these days.
We are lucky in Australia to have SBS - Special Broadcasting Services. Free-to-air & digital.
If you watch Bollywood, you don't have to worry about Woke PC. (for example)
Oh! Fauda is excellent!!
Sounds exactly like American entertainment.
Wonderful essay, Graham. I agree with the major thrust of it. But, as you might expect, I have some minor quibbles.
I’m a huge fan of John le Carré and Little Drummer Girl is perhaps my favourite book of his. The theme of it (SPOILERS) is that Charlie (the main character) is overwhelmed by ambiguity. She is a massive supporter of the Palestinians and yet she is recruited by the Israeli secret service to spy and assassinate on their behalf. The book sucks the reader into this ambiguity and half the time you don't know if you are pro- or anti- the good guys or the bad guys and you often can’t decide which is which. I thought the recent TV drama captured this ambiguity very well. Of course, it was sympathetic to the Palestinians. So was Charlie. I doubt that le Carré was woke when he wrote this. The book certainly wasn't and neither was the TV series.
The Night Manager tv series was not that great but of course the bad guys were white. To switch them to another shade would have betrayed the original story and would have been identity politics in the other direction. I still agree with the thrust of your point but you just chose two bad examples, is all.
A last point that’s more supportive of your argument: my wife does a lot of extra work for movies and TV and very often many of the other extras are people of colour. The extras all know each other and the POCs get called way more than she does - even for things like a drama set in WW1. She got her own back though when she was Black Woman Number 12 on the Windrush because they didn't have enough black extras.
I think the real problem is media-people groupthink....and that is perhaps where you and I find some common ground. In my recollection The Night Manager was dripping with it. I recall one reviewer (I think it was the leftish Nick Cohen) taking Le Carre to task for picking on the whiteys because that was the safe bet, rather than the Islamists who might have put a fatwa on him. That seemed to me well said.
Off on a tangent: I think discussions about Lefties and conservatives often get bedevilled by how much these terms have come to be redefined. 50 years ago 'Left' was primarily about class inequality...nationalisation + welfare....up the workers etc. 'Right' meant Toryism, capitalism + welfare (just not too much) etc. Now 'the Left' is taken to mean a primarily middle class graduate 'social justice'-about-identity thing. And conservatives (ones like me anyway) have somewhat parted company with both Toryism and capitalism and are more rooted in an Edmund Burkean interrogation along the lines of "careful what you wish for Liberalism". Hope this makes sense.
I agree with all your points, Graham, and, in particular, I agree that social justice has been associated with the left but my agenda is to make it known that there are plenty of us old-school lefties still around.
I have some sympathy for your Burkean interpretation and share much of it.
Many of the good guys on the Night Manager were also white and at least some of Ropers customers were Arab or African. To me it was more about a two-faced system where the government pretends to be against the proliferation of arms by sponsoring an underfunded agency to combat it while all the deep state actors were actually in favor and benefiting from perpetuating it. This seems to mesh with reality a bit more, where Western governments support "Freedom fighters" in one country and bombs "terrorists" in another, meanwhile they are the same group that just crossed a border. However, this usually probably doesn't involve shady arms dealers, like someone these people would be nice to each other if the white guy didn't sell them weapons which is the really dumb part of the story. Maybe it really depends on what biases you have going in and which end up being confirmed?
I agree with all you said, Nils, but I would add that the last several of le Carré's books shared the theme of an incompetent government agent supporting some bad guys because it was too lazy and to much caught up in relativism and instrumentalism to care who was good and who was bad. I found them a bit tiring after a while.
I've only read the first half of the original "The Night Manager" book and didn't read anything else by le Carré. And I only started reading after watching the series, I don't remember why I didn't finish the book, I think some other books came out that I wanted to read more. Maybe the book just wasn't good enough.
I always try to see the adaptations for TV or movies as works that stand on their own and try not to hold them to the same standards as the books because the medium is so different. While you can read the characters thoughts in writing it's not something you can do on the screen, it's even considered hacky when characters reveal their motives in lengthy monologues. Going in without reading the books also allows you to fill in the gaps with your own imagination which is what I think makes the medium great when used well, that only works of course if you don't fill peoples heads with the conclusions that they should come to.
It sounds to me from your few words as if le Carré is trying to retcon the characters who were somewhat good and redeemable into morally ambiguous characters? Basically trying to write a different story with the same characters? That would be annoying.
Interesting idea. I’ll have to think about this some more. But I'd say that most of his books have an unquestionably good character who can do no wrong. Night Manager included — plus all of the famous Smiley books. (SPOILERS) Perfect Spy and Little Drummer Girl would be the exceptions and I’d say they are his best two books.
Preface: I'm veering off-topic a lot here.
I do enjoy a story where good and evil are delineated properly and I don't have to think too much about the ambiguities. I used to read Tom Clancy novels to fall asleep, you can read a book like that before turning off the light and not lie awake thinking about it because the characters aren't going to surprise you, only where the story might take you. The type of book you can put down because you already know how it's going to end even if you don't know how they get there. It's predictable, it's comforting.
On the other hand I enjoy a story where everything is on the table and I'm wide awake asking myself WTF just happened and it makes me think. But authors have to stay in their lane at least somewhat unless they're very talented to flip a story in that way. The problem I have is with trying both at the same time or converting one into the other. The kind of story where the reader already knows the big surprise that the author is setting up. That's the problem with a lot of TV/movie adaptations and some storytelling in general.
The best fiction focuses more on human reality than on political programs, but politics often leaks in. Brainwashing needs either willing participants or total control. It’s pretty easy to turn off the television or set aside rank propaganda, I think. But I agree it’s annoying, no matter what soap they’re selling. Thanks for writing this.
Thanks...for the 'Like'. Hope you will maybe also press the 'Subscribe'? and add STB to your other free reads.
An OUTSTANDING essay!
Thank you!
Good news!! The movie “Quiz Lady” is just plain funny and also sweet, without being sappy. It
also pokes a bit of fun at grievance culture and ubiquitous false claims of racism. And it has Will Ferrell in it. Highly recommend!
I also knew it was going south circa 2005 when Guenevere was played by a black actress in Merlin. I liked her well enough - but - "Gwenhyfar" means "fair and white."
In the 90's, I dated a fella from England. When I listened to his views I thought how gentle, liberal, open, accepting, etc. they were. They were refreshing compared to the American propaganda at the time.
I went to visit him. I experienced the BBC firsthand, licensed in the living room (they make you pay to propagandize you!) - and realised, that every political or social viewpoint which had come out of my lover's mouth had been spoon fed him by that box.
Eye opening. (especially since I was leaning socialist at the time)
So - a decade later, I've moved to Australia, where I got indoctrinated into Dr. Who. Alrighty then. Until Matt Smith, it was "normal" fun sci-fi. But the Russell Davies thing - started with Torchwood - making sure that there were plenty of "diverse" types in the cast, and pedestaling those differences (which we never see in every day life). Dr. Who soured for me. Sigh. In the newest version - "The Maestro" - I had to stop.
Over the past 50 years the BBC has been a bigger political force (Lefty of course) in Britain than all the politicians but together!
A podcast dive into the article: https://freedomrevealed.substack.com/p/a-look-at-graham-cunninghams-article
Excellent article.
Thank you
Great guns, bang on the money, even .ore so for today 2024