Bias, balls & the Beeb........

Just to prove that it sticks by its lefty, PC, right-on bias in all things, not just its news reporting, the BBC has just started a new season of a ‘tec series called, imaginatively, ‘Inspector George Gently’.

 

The first series was undemanding entertainment for the brain-dead, but it passed a couple of harmless hours. It was supposed to have been set in the late 1950’s or early 60’s (the writer and director clearly were unsure, but clearly thought that such ancient history, years before they were born, had been forgotten, so attention to fact and detail was not important.

 

Our hero leaves the Yard to join the northern plod in pursuit of a criminal who murdered George’s wife.  Of course he nails the villain who is duly topped – a bit harsh considering that capital punishment had been abolished by that time. Another episode featured nasty goings on by the IRA several years before the ‘struggle’ actually began. And the Sergeant has a Beatles haircut long before John, George, Paul and Ringo, not that a copper would have been allowed such an extravagance unless he was Drugs Squad or Special Branch.

 

The new series is very socially-aware. The first episode was a murder that wasn’t of a black girl. Actually she was the victim of a hit-and-run, a fact that would have been noted by the Police Surgeon within minutes of discovering the body.

 

The entire programme was reprise of just about every anti-racist cliché ever heard – the landlady with ‘No coloured, no Irish, no dogs’ in her window, the Enoch Powell stuff, the whole bag.

 

And the accustomed sloppiness was ever-present. The dead girl’s father was supposed to have served in wartime RAF, and duly appeared in what purported to be uniform. Servicemen wore battle-dress throughout the War. This was supposed to be service dress only it wasn’t.

 

Everything was wrong, including the presence of a large population of West Indians in the north-east in the early 60’s.

 

But what did that matter when there was a captive audience for a major rant against fascist, racist pigs?

 

I hoped that it was a one-off and that the second episode would have got back to a bit of detective work fronted by an actor of limited range but OK for this light-weight stuff.

 

Boy, did I get that wrong.

 

Next was class. Every stereotype was there; the elderly eccentric aristo who consorted with the peasantry in the village pub and played with motor bikes (how plebeian), his much younger bitch of a second wife who insisted on being addressed as ‘your Ladyship’ and constantly ranted about the lower orders really being governed by the aristocracy, the layabout son sent down from Oxford and chucked out of the Guards whose upturned car was found in a river with a dead girl inside, Chappaquiddick-style. She would have been ’beneath him’ if you get my drift.

 

I gave up part-way through and went over to Johnny Cash.

 

Now, I have nothing against bias. We are all biased one way or another. It adds colour and debate, and life would be very dull without it.

 

What I won’t accept is a public broadcaster being outrageously biased and always one-way, of ludicrous  plot-lines, unbelievable stories, and sloppy production that suggests a total contempt for the viewer or professional incompetence or, more likely, both.