Delingpole - "The Archers is Rubbish"

[Teddy Bear]

I agree with Richard Bacon: The Archers is rubbish
By James Delingpole

How odd to find myself in violent agreement with Richard Bacon so soon after our bloody encounter on BBC Radio 5 Live last week. But he's dead right to hate The Archers, a programme which has me reaching for my radio off button almost as quickly as the phrase "And next…Here's Peter White with another edition of You & Yours…."

The only thing Bacon gets wrong is his analysis. The Archers isn't hateful because it's about farming and nothing ever happens. It's hateful because it's not about farming and far too much does happen. In the latter category, one should definitely include the ludicrous, cruel and unfair death of Nigel Pargetter last year – allegedly as a result of falling off his roof, though, really, of course, murdered by the show's producer Vanessa Whitburn.

Vicki Woods has boycotted the show ever since. And I have too. Metropolitan bien-pensant types like Vanessa Whitburn are forever wittering on about the need to "celebrate diversity." But it's funny, isn't it, how this marvellous new "melting pot" world they wish to impose on us doesn't seem to have any place for white, upper-middle class Englishmen like Nigel Pargetter?

After Nigel's death, the England Calling blog brilliantly dissected the gag-making political correctness which has rendered a once-fine British institution so unbearable.

Ambridge is supposed to be a small English village (with a population of a couple of hundred at best) set in farming country in the English midlands, the sort of place where the inhabitants have only just taught themselves not to point at aeroplanes, at least not when strangers are present.

Into this environment the BBC has introduced in the past ten years, a homosexual couple running one of the village pubs, an Asian solicitor (whose circle of Asian relatives and friends is currently being assiduously introduced into the cast), a female vicar, a working-class male vicar whose deceased wife was black and whose teenage daughter is in modish socialworkspeak of “dual heritage”. This daughter immediately became “best friends” with the youngest and very middle-class daughter of the richest farmer in the village, Brian Aldridge. The grandmother of the vicar’s daughter, a particularly irritating caricature of a god-fearing black Jamaican, has been shoehorned into a story of drug abuse in the village, the drug abuse involving (natch) a white addict being supplied by supplied by white dealers.

One of the daughters (Kate) of Brian Aldridge, has married a black South African and has another “dual heritage” child. The stepson of the same farmer, Adam Macy, has returned and “come out” and has begun an affair with the new Grey Gables chef, a homosexual Ulsterman with a bizarre persona – think of a young and mincing Ian Paisley.

White characters introduced into the serial in the past decade or so have shown a new trend. A surprising number of them are not English. The homosexual Ulster chef is one example, the loutish Scotchman Jazza McCreadie another. Then there was the now dead beautiful Irish siren who seduced Brian Aldridge. Their love-child Ruairi (pronounced Rory) has lived for several years in England since he came to England aged four yet still speaks with a broad Irish accent. As many listeners and reviewers have pointed out, in real life he would long ago have lost his Irish accent.

However, that would not fit in with the determination of those in charge of the serial to promote their multicultural fantasy.

I myself was born and bred in Archers country, the intersect between the Birmingham conurbation and rural Worcestershire, so I know whereof I speak. The Archers does not reflect in any way whatsoever how people really think and behave in that part of the world.

Which would be fine if it was called something like The Social Workers and purported to be an ordinary story of Guardian-reading bleeding hearts and their impeccably chosen cast of friends of "all colours and creeds holding hands under a rainbow" (Copyright South Park). But it's not. It's a long running soap-opera, purportedly about typical rural folk. And if it's going to take such trouble with its agricultural story elements – with an agricultural advisor ever on hand to ensure that when a character talks about the price of pig nuts he's got the price of pig nuts to within a halfpenny of the current price on the Pig Nut Spot Exchange – why has it decided that in every other respect the storylines should have about as much verisimilitude and plausible character delineation as Spongebob Squarepants?

Some of the things that don't happen in real-life Archers country:
Middle-class parents agonising over the ethics of sending their kids to private school. (Hell no: if they've got the money, they'll do it because, bizarrely, in real-life Archers country people care about their kids' future more than they do about what someone might say in a Guardian editorial conference.)

The entire upper-middle class population being wiped out in one accident. (Nope. There are still lots of upper-middle class types in real-life Archers country. Very few of them as wet as Nigel was. They're stalwarts of their counties, pillars of the church and their local community. Wishing them away just because they don't suit your Weltanschauung, Vanessa Whitburn, just ain't going to work.)

Gay publicans, women vicars, Asian families being embraced with the kind of unabashed enthusiasm you'd expect in, say, Islington or Hackney. (Nope. It's not that people in the Midlands are bigoted, misogynistic, racist homophobes exactly. They'd be perfectly affable to all the above. But what there would be, very much, is lots of chuntering and gossip behind their backs about how bloody odd it was that so many of them seemed to be congregating in one village in one of the whitest, straightest, most unreconstructedly old-fashioned areas of Britain.

Plant trees to offset carbon emissions. (Nobody believes in that sort of drivel in the Midlands. They've far too much common sense.)

UPDATE: It gets worse. Thanks to Madeleine Teahan for pointing out on Twitter that Pip Archer has become a spokesman for the Green party.

[Teddy Bear]

Ron Liddle at the Spectator has also aired his views on the subject of the Archers.

Archers gone wrong
ROD LIDDLE

Excellent blog by James Delingpole in the Torygraph on the vexed question What Has Happened To The Archers? Under the aegis of someone called Vanessa Whitburn, the long running Radio Four serial has been turned from an amiable soap about rural people and the gentle inconveniencies with which they battle, into a vision of the countryside as a bien pensant North London tw*t would wish to see it. Hence the sudden profusion — in a village of 200 people — of hordes of ethnics, drug dealers, homosexuals, Green Party activists, children of mixed race and so on. It now has the same relationship with reality as that enjoyed by the saccharine children’s programme Balamory. I don’t mean the children are saccharine, I mean the programme is.

It doesn’t bother me particularly, as I never listened to it when it was about the sort of people who really do live in the countryside. But it is an example of the BBC’s inherent bias every bit as repellant as its more obvious affection for the European Union and various other metro-liberal political inclinations. Whitburn and the other liberals responsible for the programme actively hate the countryside, and all that it stands for, and wish to impose upon it the immense benefits which accrue from living in an inner city.

It is a little like when the otherwise excellent interviewer, Lynn Barber, came to see me in the lovely village I used to live in, Heytesbury, in Wiltshire. ‘How can you bear to live in a place which is so relentlessly undiverse, so white?’ she asked, almost immediately upon arriving.

‘Well...... er, um......... I struggle by, manfully as I can, with that burden, Lynne,’ I replied.

The horrible truth which Ms Whitburn and the BBC cannot stomach is that villages like Ambridge have virtually no ethnic minorities, drug dealers, Green Party activists, homosexuals and so on. And that’s one reason why so many people want to live there.