TV producer is another victim of the intolerance of the "liberal" elite

Wednesday March 30, 2011

The reaction to Brian True-May’s comments about Midsomer Murders reveals the depth of the contempt the liberal elite has for the programme’s conservative audience, says Patrick Hayes

The US comedy South Park has long featured an African-American character called Token Black, introduced to ridicule the tokenism that many TV programmes feel obliged to engage in, where ethnic minorities are written into the script to demonstrate multicultural credentials.

You could be mistaken for thinking the lack of controversy around this means the culture is slowly changing and TV is moving into a post-PC era where producers care left to focus on creating characters best suited to the show, rather than having to introduce an ethnically diverse mix of characters.

Indeed this may well have been mistake of Brian True-May, executive producer of ITV drama Midsomer Murders, in a recent interview with the Radio Times where he claimed: ‘We don’t have other ethnic minorities involved because it just wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work… We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.’

As you can tell from a recently-released audio recording of the interview, True-May follows these comments by emphasising that he thinks Englishness ‘should’ include other races but that he realises he might not be ‘politically correct’. However this qualification did nothing to temper the ‘race row’ that has taken place in the media over the past fortnight.

Even if you interpret True-May’s comments in the most uncharitable way, he hardly sounds like he’s an ardent white supremacist on an ideological mission to fill the airwaves with his propagandistic vision for society. Despite this, True-May has been widely attacked for being a ‘racist’ to the point that he is to step down from his position at the helm of the show once the season ends.

It’s been heartening to see that True-May has had a number defenders in the national media saying that he shouldn’t be persecuted for speaking his mind, pointing out that most people who live in rural English villages actually are white, and attacking the idea that Midsomer Murders should feel a mandate to accurately reflect the social make-up of 21st century Britain when it hardly accurately reflects anything else.

Regardless of this, however, True-May lost his job, with a wide range of shrill left-wing activists, equal opportunities’ campaigners and politicians making his position untenable. As MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the Ethnic Minority Taskforce, argued: “The decision to exclude ethnic minorities from Midsomer Murders not only misrepresents modern Britain, but also dismisses the valuable role ethnic minority’s play in enriching our country.”

Vaz’s comments reflect a commonplace attitude amongst the political and media elite today: it’s not enough to simply create TV programmes for their own sake, because the audience enjoys them, there must also a moral imperative to try to socially engineer the audience, presenting them with an ideal of Multicultural Britain that they will then hopefully imitate in real life.

Indeed the reaction to True-May’s comments also reveals the depth of the contempt the liberal elite holds for the Midsomer Murders audience: the aging Middle Englanders who read the Daily Mail, tune in to whitewashed programmes featuring quaint English villages and period dramas as escapism, and hide away from the realities of the ethnically diverse Multicultural Britain in backward pockets of rural England.

As TV comedy producer Ash Atalla has put it on BBC Radio 4’s Today, “The audience of Midsomer Murders are an extremely conservative audience. [True-May’s] comments are that people don’t like change. I think that is probably true of his audience. But the thing about things that don’t like change is that they eventually die out, don’t they?”

Never mind trying to win the debate with these reprobates (or even socially engineer them, given Midsomer Murders has been screening for almost 15 years without controversy), they just need to be kept away from polite society and left to go the way of the dodo. But as soon as one of these ‘things that don’t like change’ says something that’s seen to go against the ethos of Multicultural Britain, they can’t just be left to die; they must be silenced.

Regardless of whether he decided to fall on his sword, or was forced to leave his position as executive producer, one thing is certain: having committed the heresy of challenging the conception that all TV programmes should conform to an ideal of 21st century multicultural Britain, True-May had to go.

Patrick Hayes works at the Institute of Ideasand is a reporter for the online magazine spiked. Visit his personal website here.