If you like being lectured by smug liberals, watch BBC crime series, "George Gently" - otherwise, skip it

DI Simon Smugly

Has the BBC ever, at any point in the last 50 years, made any attempt whatsoever to treat the fears of large swathes of the indigenous population regarding mass immigration and multiculturalism with any sort of sympathy and understanding?  I ask because last night’s episode of the detective series, George Gently – set in Durham in the late 1960s - dripped with contempt for anyone who expressed the slightest reservation about the influx of West Indians at the time.

Not, of course, that the drama was in the least bit loaded. The black girl who was murdered at the start was lovely. Her bus driver dad had fought in the war (he’d made that up actually, but we were told that lying about his war record was actually a brave thing to do, because, I presume, he was black – or something). The dead girl’s brother was a bit of a hot-head – a supporter of the Black panthers – but turned out to be a decent sort in the end.

The white characters, by contrast, were, with one main exception, deeply racist. The young detective sergeant assumed the dead girl was a prostitute and that she’d been dealing drugs.  The local gangster boss loathed all non-whites, and regularly set his goons on them. One of his sons organised Northern Soul all-nighters, but considered it “jungle music”. The uniformed police were shown listening approvingly to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech on TV. A virulently racist middle-class landlady wrote a poison pen letter to the dead girl’s father telling him his daughter had got what she deserved, and she had a “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” sign in her window (noble George Gently made her take it down, priggishly warning her that the Race Relations Act would soon make it illegal, but she put it up again after being inflamed by Powell’s speech – see the trouble that dreadful man caused?). Oh, and the people living opposite the black family had a Union Jack in their window. Imagine! A Union jack! In Britain! The filthy swine!

Needless to say, the whole thing was dreadful – semaphore acting, ridiculous "message movie" dialogue, stock characters, creaky, clichéd plot etc. (The soul music was good – I’ll give it that.)

The George Gently character is an example of that much-loved television drama figure – a person from the past who, mysteriously, has all the right-on attitudes of a modern Islington liberal (i.e. a sort of prototype of the Sir Ian Blair breed of New Labour non-cop policeman). This allows the programme-makers to signal their lofty disapproval of primitive state of reactionary unenlightenment in which we apparently all lived in the Sixties. At one point in last night’s episode, Gently, spotting a portrait of Martin Luther King in the bus driver’s home, informs the man that he too is an admirer of the secular saint. The driver is naturally astonished to meet such a highly-evolved human being working for the police. (It was extraordinarly toe-curling, especially as it so perfectly echoed David Brent praising the acting of “Mister" Sidney Poitier to a black colleague in The Office.)

DS Nigel Neanderthal

Gently, who allows us to view the past through the unforgiving, prejudiced, myopic eyes of a 2012 Guardian, reader, is given an unevolved, viscerally right-wing Geordie side-kick whom he can steer towards the liberal path of sweetness, light, compassion and social justice - all of the things provincials knew nothing about back then. (This is doubly annoying, because, while Martin Shaw is an extremely limited actor, his young sergeant is played by the excellent Lee Ingleby, who tries his best, but who deserves much better material.) Significantly, Gently is a Londoner who has had to head oop North because, blow me down!, he’s made himself unpopular at home by exposing corruption amongst his colleagues (bet they’re all racists too).

If mass immigration had been an untrammelled success, and if we were all sitting here now wondering how we managed to get along without it back in the Dark Ages, there might be some excuse for sneering at Enoch Powell and painting old-style Brits as hate-filled knuckle-draggers. But given that immigration – and, more specifically, multiculturalism - is a far greater issue now than it has ever been, why can’t the cultural gauleiters of the BBC stop contemptuously dismissing people who worried back then that parts of the country would be taken over by immigrants (have they been to Leicester or Bradford or Tower Hamlets recently?) and admit – for once – that not every doubt about the benefits of immigration was misplaced, and that not everyone who harboured those doubts was a violent, moronic, xenophobic Neanderthal. They might even try to grasp the rather obvious point that it was actually Enoch Powell’s job - as an MP - to acknowledge his constituents' concerns rather than ignore them, as practically every other mainstream politician has done since 1968.

I don’t watch detective series in order to be lectured on social issues by smug, self-righteous liberals – so I won’t be watching George Gently again. If you haven’t seen it, take my advice and steer well clear.