The Village

Billed as “an epic drama series for BBC One …, charting the life and turbulent times of one English village across the whole of the 20th century”, the first of six episodes of ‘The Village’ were screened last night, marking the beginning of what will be one of the state broadcaster’s major propaganda exercises for 2013.

Furthermore, on the Daily Mail website yesterday was a promotional pre-publicity article announcing ‘The Village’ and informing us that the BBC casting director was unable to find enough local people in the Derbyshire village of Hayfield where the series was filmed, to fill all of the parts available for ‘extras’, i.e. non-speaking supporting roles in the programme.

We were informed by the Daily Mail article that there were simply not enough local people in Hayfield and the surrounding area, sufficiently unmarked by the effects of modern lifestyles, to fill the thirty-five parts available as extras and in the end only fifteen local people took part in the programme.

Elaine Rose-Fleuriot, a former post lady in Hayfield who did land a role, was reported in the Daily Mail saying: “They told everyone they would hold a casting at the village hall. You had to take along your measurements and they took a polaroid.

“There was a huge buzz of excitement about the filming and everyone wanted to be involved. The problem was that you needed hair long enough to tie up. It couldn’t be dyed, your nails couldn’t be too long and you couldn’t have tattoos or too many piercings or be too tanned.”

Furthermore, a BBC spokesman apparently said: “There are certain criteria that don’t fit a costume drama set in 1914.

“It was important the series looked real. The things we couldn’t have included were dyed hair, piercings, tattoos, tans and plucked eyebrows.”

Now, anyone who is familiar with the BBC’s indifference to historical accuracy on other occasions, often casting non-white actors to play characters who would obviously have been in reality of indigenous White British extraction, will be puzzled by the corporation’s sudden desire for such historical accuracy of such detailed proportions where ‘The Village’ is concerned.

Furthermore, anyone familiar with the abilities of the BBC’s make-up artists and special effects departments, will be puzzled by their apparent inability; to provide wigs and hair extensions for those local women who do not have hair long enough to pin up in early 20^th century hairstyles; or to dye the un-naturally coloured hair of local people; to trim fingernails that are rather too long; or to apply make-up sufficient to hide the pin-hole marks left by piercings, or any tattoos not already hidden by the more extensive styles of clothing worn throughout much of the 20^th Century.

So ridiculously implausible are the assertions made in the Daily Mail article that one wonders what the point of the article was? To insult the intelligence of their readers, perhaps?

Or perhaps this was a clumsy attempt to create in the minds of readers a misconception, that the people of modern day Derbyshire, even the indigenous White people of modern day Derbyshire, are so changed from the people who lived there at the turn of the 20^th Century, that they hardly bear comparison and are so changed, in so many minute ways, they are unable even, to credibly play the parts of their indigenous forebears of just a generation or two ago? So changed in fact, that the indigenous White people of modern Derbyshire have no more claim to the land of their forebears than perhaps the immigrants who are now progressively displacing them?

Returning to the actual TV programme, we were told that the six part series would stretch across “the whole of the 20th century”, and yet the first episode screened last night misses out the first fourteen years of the century, taking us back only as far as the eve of World War I.

One wonders therefore just what will be included in the remaining five episodes and knowing the BBC from their past track record, I offer the following tentative ‘prediction’ of what the next five episodes will entail:

The impact and aftermath of that First World War, with the grinding poverty of the Great Depression that followed. A period that the BBC have portrayed many times before in such a way as to give viewers a very left-wing perspective of that time. One of the central characters of the series, Martha Lane, has already established her credentials as a Suffragette, and of course this Suffragette is played by a young, intelligent and attractive brunette, who will of course cross swords with the rather aristocratic ladies of the Allingham household, who have in the first episode already been positioned as bourgeois, yet morally hypocritical ‘dumb blondes’ concerned primarily with exploiting their wealth and social status.

This issue is raised not in order to suggest that this website is critical of women’s suffrage, simply that the issue of women’s suffrage is frequently used by the BBC to further perpetuate and reinforce the stereotype of the ‘dumb blonde’. What the state propaganda machine likes to do is to single out people with physical characteristics that are found only among White people – like blonde or red hair – and to portray such people as unintelligent, undeserving or in some other way unattractive. Indeed ‘gingerphobia’ and ‘dumb blonde’ jokes are the only forms or racism officially sanctioned by the state and mass media in this otherwise strictly PC age.

A further episode will probably focus on the rise of the Blackshirts and the eve of World War II, with the appearance in the village of a kindly Jewish doctor who will be the target of anti-Semitism that will emanate from the cruel (ugly) school master and perhaps some of the men of the Allingham household, with Martha Lane, the other kind (handsome) school master and the (handsome) returned war hero, Joe Middleton, championing the anti-fascist cause.

The fourth episode is likely to focus on life during World War II, with rationing, black-outs and with the arrival of the Women’s Land Army, women taking a more prominent role in the running of the farms. A scandal will probably feature, caused by one of the young women in the village getting pregnant by a black US serviceman, and this will give Martha Lane and all of the other handsome and heroic characters the opportunity of once again asserting their multiracialist moral rectitude in the face of disapproval from the old, ugly, cruel and more socially conservative members of the community.

The fifth episode is likely to feature the immediate post war period, possibly with a member of the cast returning from having witnessed at first hand the horrors of Auschwitz, and with the election of the post-war Labour government and the introduction of the National Health Service and the welfare state. Material that the BBC have used so many times before in order to condition the minds of viewers to a left-wing, social Marxist perspective.

The final episode is likely to feature the arrival in Hayfield of the first non-White residents, a ‘Sidney Poitier-esque’ black school teacher perhaps, or an Asian doctor to replace the retiring Jewish doctor, and who will sensitively administer vitally needed geriatric care to the central character of the series, the aging Bert Middleton.

One thing we can be sure of, is that this ‘epic’ drama series featuring ‘village life’ during the 20^th Century will contain most if not all of the hackneyed situational stereotypes that I describe above, with all of the liberal, left-wing, Marxist, and ethnic minority characters portrayed as young, warm hearted, kindly, intelligent, generous and attractive people, and with all of the traditionally minded, socially conservative, racially aware White people portrayed as old, cruel, uncaring, unintelligent, miserly, and ugly.

Already in Episode One, we have seen the father of the Middleton family, a man desperately struggling in order to eek out a living from the land for his family and thus enable them to retain control of the family farm, portrayed as a cruel, violent, emotionally retarded man, unable to express his desires to his sons, unable explain the importance of whole family pulling together and unable to win their willing support for his endeavours. This one character, in microcosm representing what the BBC would have us believe of the indigenous British people, fighting forlornly to retain the traditions of our forefathers and control and ownership of our own land in the face of what the BBC would have us see as the irrestistable tide of progress.

Indeed, so unremittingly grim and miserable was the first episode that it has attracted much criticism for this. What the public need to realise however, is that media pundits and their ilk actually believe Britain was like that, and that’s what they would like us to think Britain was really like  – unremittingly grim and miserable – until we were ‘enriched’  and made  ‘vibrant'[sic] by the arrival of successive waves of non-White immigrants.

Yes, we can be sure that ‘The Village’ will be an exercise in subtle and not-so-subtle mental conditioning, and that the lessons we should be learning from a study of 20^th century life in a Derbyshire village will bear little resemblance to what the BBC will present in this series.

By Max Musson © 2013

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