Midsomer Murders: a suspension of disbelief

I don't suppose I have watched many more episodes of Midsomer Murders than the new BBC Chairman, Chris Patten has watched Eastenders. I know that my elderly mother is a big fan. So are millions of others

Such Midsomers as I've seen make a gentle modern example of the 'bucolic idyll', the genre of  country life fantasy directed at people who do not live in the country, showing a world that does not exist, often never existed, but which, ever since the time of Theocritus, has been satisfying and pleasurable for many.

This week the creator of the long-running series has been suspended for saying that he did not consider Midsomer parts for blacks and asians. 'It wouldn't work', said David True-May, if the illusion of the English village were broken by their presence. Most newspapers carried the story this morning.

I had never heard before of Mr True-May. If I had done, I would certainly have felt gratitude to him for the pleasure he has brought my mother. He has created a potent and pleasurable illusion that 'works', I will guess, precisely because it is illusory. That is how the bucolic always works.

Ths creation of satisfying illusion is a task, one would have thought, for which the bosses of ITV were greatly less suited than their now abused producer. When Mr True-May said that ethnic minorities in Midsomer would 'deter viewers', he was talking about a popular fiction not a place. His offending remark was precisely in that context, pointing out that the real countryside was 'cosmopolitan' and his own creation was not. 

Was he saying that his viewers would be deterred by black faces in the street? No. Only that they might easily be deterred from watching his show if it didn't work so well. 'Not working well' is a common reason why drama fails. The single most important fact about an idyll is that it is not a depiction of real life. Since Midsomer is a village with apparently some two murders a week, this should not be hard to grasp.

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Reactionary, Sir Peter. The opposite of visionary. I am reminded of a crisis (such as they are in our modest area of the world) when a black employee was shifted away from the front desk to a back room job.

Because the boss thought it might "hurt his business" if the poor man were to be seen in the flesh by the putative rednecks of our fair land.

We all (or perhaps I hope not) have friends who say: "I'm not racist, but Vancouver is getting too yellow for me." Victoria seems vaguely British, so it is deemed a good bolt hole. For the intellectually challenged.

When listening to Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, or Gnarls ("Crazy"), we might ask why the bleached-out race is so deficient in musical force. So I do not think it is a question of talent, is it?

Racism is a crime against nature and philosophy. It is an elementary error in epistemology. It is a failure of memory and language. It is indifference to the performing value of the "other" in Shakespeare. It is a tedium. A self-imposed degradation.

Only the weakly suggestible offer racist rationalizations.

[Clayton Burns]

The darkly invisible and the invisibly dark:

[Independent: Is the real Midsomer Murders really so white?...Tom Peck finds a very different picture in the town where it's filmed...16 March '11].

[Beneath an oak-beamed ceiling on a medieval Oxfordshire high street, one of Wallingford’s popular residents is preparing for a busy evening ahead. For fans of ITV’s Midsomer Murders, these 400-year-old shopfronts are downtown Causton...].

[Several of the small market town’s residents have played extras in the long-running series. But Mohammed Shah Zillur Rahman, manager of the local Indian-Bangladeshi restaurant, hasn’t...].

[Nor those (employees) at the nearby Wallingford Tandoori, nor the Turkish kebab shop, the two Chinese restaurants and the Portuguese family who run the chippy...].

["More than 100 people are from ethnic groups in Wallingford," said Mr Rahman, a Bangladeshi who came to here in 2006...].

[In the market square... one man says: "You’d have to search pretty hard to find a dark face."

Oblivious, sat on the bench behind him is Suzette Williamson, a 34-year-old Trinidadian nurse at the nearby care home...].

So, as we suspected, it is not as it seemed. Just a suspicion of fraud in the original rationalizations.

Perhaps we can come up with another story. For reasons of hygiene etc. You never know what foreigners, especially black ones, could be harboring. They might even try to insinuate themselves into the DNA of the pristine race. Here in England's fair and freedom-loving land.

Where the slaves slip their chains and star in trash dramas. In the 22nd century.

[peter stothard]

I am a bit surprised, Clayton. When I heard a worthy from Wallingford say that a fictional film shot in his town ought to match the facts of the town, including the town's ethnic composition, I heard just another poor sap whose mind has been sanded by 'reality tv'. But you too?

[Clayton Burns]

Sir Peter, You must have misread my text. Although that seems outside the realm etc. Since it has not happened before.

No. My point is that anyone who is spending time gaping at such TV trash should read some good books. Start, please, with Mark Ashcraft's challenging 2010 Canadian edition of "Cognition." It amazes me that even The TLS, by far the best book review in the world, has not gotten a grip on the powerful trends in memory and cognition research. (Much of Ashcraft's book is on memory).

Alan Baddeley's "Memory" text is very good, although its concept of "working memory" is not quite in focus (I like the idea of the "memory workspace"). The New York Times has been able to get traction in the Magazine and Book Review, including in the Podcast, for Joshua Foer on artificial memory feats.

However, in America (too much TV, perhaps), the philosophy of memory seems to have eluded notice. Paul Ricoeur's "Memory History, Forgetting" contains a brilliant chapter: "The Exercise of Memory: Uses and Abuses." That is, memory palaces are artificial. Absorbing the verb elements of the past and adverbial subordination on memory pages--in line with the metaphors of Plato and Hamlet--would not be.

We need to refocus our fundamentals in IT, English, and Psychology (memory, first of all.) I would not discount IT--my student has bought the entire new Adobe Creative Suite, and even better, he has figured out how to use it without needing a tutor.

In English--the world language that is not about to fade away in the next 1000 years--it is an international disgrace that IELTS is effectively pushing out the COBUILD English Grammar. I know that at The New York Times (witness the failed and dropped "On Language" column in the Magazine), it is impossible to respect and nurture the English language, but at The TLS?

Adobe, COBUILD, Ashcraft--all ultimately foundational, all being shuffled aside by trash TV. As to my mind having been sanded down, there is one bit of evidence that runs counter to that. I never watch "reality TV."

[Clayton Burns]

Sir Peter, I recommend that as the Editor you encourage a slightly better information cycle at The TLS. This is my email to Clive Wilmer, about his comments on the history of poetry, in particular on Keats's lyric. I would like a response. I am not singling out The TLS, because not responding is habitual--at Cambridge, for example, where IELTS seems to be an unmentionable. In certain contexts.

Clive Wilmer: It is always enlightening when people discuss poetry as if it were not poetry. I would include Keats's sonnet, as no doubt you would, as one of the 10 most valuable lyrics for students to commit to memory, and for professors in phonetics and phonology to employ to teach the sound system(s) of English. However, they would rather not. Instead of employing "Macbeth," Book IX of "Paradise Lost" and an Internet database of 30 lyrics to teach IPA (and even sound symbolism), they would rather languish in their narrowly technical universe.

I would begin the lyric database with Shakespeare's sonnets 97-99, the most fascinating micro-cycle in his sonnets. (Probably the best little cycle within any English sonnet sequence). If you were to ask linguistics professors how to teach sibilants, they would be dazed. What about the s/z patterning in "The Sick Rose," where the /z/ sounds to the left and the /s/ sounds to the right lend a "sinister urgency," yet are hard to grasp globally? Students have given me any number of contorted explanations of this s/z (z/s) pattern in Blake's lyric, except for the obvious one. (Slightly broken by "crimson," a delicate asymmetry in asymmetry that just fixes the pattern).

What I find most striking about Keats's sonnet is the inspired inverted and uninverted lines: the first four lines are all grammatically inverted, 5 and 7 are dramatically inverted, and 6 and 8 not. (To me, the inversions stress the ego of the speaker, and the formalism of his commitment to literature). The objective world of Homer and Chapman (lines 6 and 8) intrudes beautifully and forcefully. Line 9 emphasizes the speaker's reaction, and 10 is objective again.

The final four lines are uninverted, except for the slight breakage of "with eagle eyes," which, like Blake's /z/ in "crimson," only varies the pattern a little to fix it.

For the role of grammar in lyrics, we could not find a better example than Keats's. Vowel gradation on "e" is also interesting here, even if not quite as pronounced as in Shakespeare's sonnets 97-99 and in "After Apple-Picking:"

"realms," "many," "goodly," "seen," "western," "been," "fealty," "been," "deep-," "demesne," "Yet," "never," "breathe," "serene," "speak," "Then," "felt," "When," "ken," "when," "eagle," "He," "men," "each," "peak," "Darien."

Strangely, no critic has extrapolated from the many instances of vowel gradation in forming pasts and past participles in irregular verbs ("bleed, bled, bled") to noting it as a subtle form of assonance: "bed," "speak," "clear." (The King James "Daniel" has some nice "e" gradation).

I guess that these are matters beyond the ken of the laborers in the vineyard of the academy.

Clayton Burns PhD Vancouver 604 222 1286.

[Rebecca Stanton]

I'm afraid neither Mr. True-Mays comments nor Mr. Stothard's defense of them stands up to a rudimentary critical examination. I absolutely take the point that Midsomer Murders is a "bucolic idyll" and thus not bound to resemble real life (indeed, rather bound NOT to resemble it). But who are these viewers who would be "deterred" by seeing black or Asian faces among the cast? Surely not black or Asian viewers. Which means that Mr. True-May (and apparently, Mr. Stothard too) understand Midsomer Murders to be a series by white people, for white people. Therein lies the failure of imagination that, in the absence of a more subtle or polite word, we call "racism."

I do not accuse Mr. True-May of disliking or actively discriminating against non-white Britons. He has simply failed to include them in his imaginary audience -- but it is worth calling his attention to the fact that that blind spot is, in and of itself, a problem.

[peter stothard]

Just to be clear: I do not see Midsomer Murders as 'a series by white people for white people'. I am not concerned about the audience at all, merely pointing out that the creator of a country idyll (now as at any other time) is likely to be the best judge of what works and what does not within a traditionally delicate genre. It is so easy to wreck fiction with well intentioned comparisons with fact, so hard to make it successful. If the show is as successful in its response to Mr True-May's departure as it has been in the past, good luck to it.

[Lord Truth]

The last line of this blog says that its clear from the village having two murders a week that the programme is not based on reality. This perfectly reasonable observation should be elaborated .If the ^Two murders per week^-after week after week- in a small beautiful English village full of rich educated upper middle class people was in fact intended to be true then the people would be living in an appalling state of terror-as we know from instances of serial killers-indeed the population would have largely left….If the producers did in fact ^realitise^ the programme –not very difficult to do –with various Asians blacks Poles Romanians, juvenile drug dealers and teenage vandals etc ,then the more accurate it became the more absurd the basic situation would become until it was being watched only as a comedy show. In fact the producers could then hand over the scripts to comedy writers who would then turn it into the English Murder Village version of Allo Allo that so brilliantly transformed a horrific and terrifying situation into comedy.-…….But there is more to be said which is perhaps not so pleasant…..Because it could be said that bringing in ^non white^ elements could be said to actually dilute the power of the underlying - though never stated premise- which is that the British are, underneath their simpering sweet smiles the most vicious evil spiteful back stabbing class ridden perverted racist and generally screwed up people on earth . The detective story despite its early French origins is really a wholly English creation and its presiding genius was Agatha Christie-who it is sometimes forgotten –was half American.One wonders what traditional British viciousness this produced in her school….Of course you are some kind of Yankee aren’t you Why do you speak with an English accent when you are not British? Agatha..is your father a cowboy..etc etc Its not unnatural that she should have viewed British society with a sharp detached and ruthless clarity.While recognizing the devil may care ability for the Englishman to fearlessly go for the jugular she recognized that in detective work the little grey cells are needed and that required one of those greasy garlic chewing big browed foreign creatures.And here we actually come round to the initial question because could anyone be more of an alien presence in English society than Poirot ?.In an age when wogs begin at Calais here was one actually prowling about ones house…What unwritten unmentioned racist insults the poor man must have ceaselessly endured…Oh my God,.. theres that dreadful wog thing at the door..what was his name darling-Po-rot or something?...And I do hope you never bring that foreign creature friend of yours here ever again Albert Japp ..I dont know what the neighbours must be saying…..You know seeing those patent leather shoes,I nearly vomited….I don’t think the Poirot kind wash do they-they just splash on some of that stinking eye tye stuff…I simply cant stand being even in the same room as that creature…We kept the windows open all morning after he left and the smell still hadn’t gone….. But there is yet more..because the main reason for the success of MM is like Inspector Morse connected with a particularly strange aspect of the British Class.Structure They provide lesser mortals not merely with dream houses and lifestyles but a sense of glee-I suppose one must call it schadenfreude that those whom we envy- especially intellectually envy are in fact thoroughly vicious thugs and perverts-just like us in fact! The Inspector Morse series as Ive indicated above veers almost to farce in the horror of its murders-again two or three week after week-and always committed by the most intellectual of individuals- among elegant settings and highbrows living in another relatively small area I am no follower of newspaper murders but of the hundreds of murders I must have heard of only two come to mind that were committed by people other than the ^lower classes^ and they were Crippen -1911-a pretty miserable creature and Lord Lucan 1965-and he comes into the class of professionals who do indeed kill their wives etc but then kill themselves immediately after so that doesn’t really count .Of course if you have any real problems with these programmes the best thing to do is switch off the sound and just immerse yourself in them to enjoy them for their other quality -pretty pictures. Ive watched many of them but never understood a word of the plots as they were all in Hungarian-a language I don’t understand…..

[Clayton Burns]

[The earliest honorary degree on record was awarded to Lionel Woodville in the late 1470s by the University of Oxford.[2] He later became Bishop of Salisbury.]

Facts before fiction. Sir Peter, there is a certain warped logic in your devious rhetoric. Congratulations on that. (Never discount the power of words.)

However, is the idyllic our priority?

1.When Oxford needs to consider if it should grant an Honorary Doctorate in Murder to Father Gaddafi?

2.When Cambridge wants to know if it should continue with its highway robbery of foreign students with the IELTS?

3.When I have to solve the Checker Board Illusion so as to be crowned Grandmaster of Shadows?

[Rebecca Stanton]

The problem is not that there are no non-white faces in Midsomer Murders. (At least, having never seen the programme, I can't say whether the absence is palpable or not, or whether it's idyllic or grotesque.)

The problem is that Mr True-May thinks including non-white characters would "deter viewers." Again I have to ask: who are these imaginary viewers who would turn off the television if black or brown faces showed up on Midsomer Murders? Or to put it another way, Mr Stothard: why can't an idyll have black or brown people in it?

Isn't it a failure of imagination to suggest that certain kinds of stories simply won't "work" if the actors are not uniformly pale?

[Barbara Albu]

There are three murders per week in
Midsomer, not Two.