BBC's White Season - 'White Girl'
“Cruelty is in theory a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd” - Bertrand Russell
The BBC is midway through its 'White Season', a series of programmes created to address the increasing marginalisation of certain sections of British society. As Roly Keating, Controller of BBC2 says, "The White season is a complex look at how life has changed for the white working class in Britain".
Many people, including myself, assumed the 'white season' would be focusing solely on the white British working class and their views on life in the 21st century, their concerns, their joys and the uncovering of the deep and fascinatingly varied structure of their existence. For a Middle Class person like myself, this promised to open up a goldmine of information and endearing stories about my fellow countrymen without the politically correct adage of immigration. For once, religious indoctrination and positive discrimination would be put on a back burner.
How wrong I was.
Based on the drama, 'White Girl', shown last night on BBC, the white working class are a load of drunken, drug addicted, wife-beating, illiterate, swearing, hate filled, cultureless, child abusing, intolerant, racist thugs who can only be saved through conversion to Islam. I'm not joking! This was the exact thread of the storyline.
The plot begins with a mother and her three children fleeing an abusive husband and eventually settling down in the suburbs of Bradford. To their disgust and horror, they have been placed by the council in a completely Islamic neighbourhood. Their neighbours walk around in religious garb, some of the women showing only their eyes underneath black all-body clothing. There is the usual stereotypical racist rant from the mother and her eldest daughter followed by an array of examples of the above mentioned vices.
The eldest daughter eventually moves out and lives next door with an extremely compassionate and overly pious Muslim family who teach her Islamic values and aid her eventual conversion to Islam. All this time, the father, who has returned to the mother, engages in outdoor fights with his partner, only being broken up by concerned and peaceful men in South Asian clothing. At one stage the mother beats her son in the alleyway in full view of everyone else.
The 'happy' ending is of course predictable, with the father running off for good (albeit with all their furniture) and the mother and her children making do with what they have left and indeed, their new religion of hope. The wailing of the call to prayer can be heard on and off throughout the entire drama.
The acting was good, especially that of the eldest daughter but I am rather at a loss as to how and why this has anything to do with the supposed 'white season'. The BBC seem to have purposefully shown a drama that will wedge a large boot into the mouths of the white British working class. The Muslim Council of Britain could not, even in their wildest fantasies, have portrayed British Muslims as more saintly, compassionate and morally superior as the writer of this programme did.
In my view, this drama's aim and message can be summed up in one sentence. "White working class scum should save themselves by converting to Islam". Am I mistaken?
The BBC has unleashed a very cruel portrayal of probably the largest section of British society and has played right into the hands of the Islamist agenda.
Here is a Times review of 'White Girl'.
12 comments:
do you know any other information about this subject in other languages?
Yurtdisi: Not that I know of. The BBC does have foreign language pages but I'm not sure if they would mention a domestic British programme necessarily.
I agree. To make this programme part of white season was absolutely bizarre. Was expecting something more like this is England.
In the modern sociopolitical (self-hating) climate of Western societies, the important, worthy progress made in protecting rights and liberties is sometimes coupled with a deadweight of superfluous, if well-meaning, guilt. I see it as an inversion of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden. It is the moral equivalence, multiculturalism, political correctness, and relativism of the left.
This inane, and ultimately harmful, mind-set has flourished here in America among academia, artists, and the pathologically stupid. While it is praiseworthy to endeavor toward greater equality for all humanity, and to redress wrongs, it is utter folly to go to the extreme of self-hatred and distortion of the whole picture because of any unseemly blemish. It is wrong-headed to atone for sinful behavior long condemned and abandoned, and it is disgraceful to denigrate the truly excellent achievements of a free people—achievements which have been paid for with the blood of great men.
This hyperbolic sense of guilt, contempt, and shame of self is typified in the ethos of the defeatist, negative left. It’s not un-natural to presume that your good fortune might be founded upon the suffering of others. You measure the prosperity of your society against that of third world tyrannies, and you assume that your society is somehow at fault for this disparity. The tragedy of such a myopic outlook, beyond the stultifying effect it has on the mind, is that it allows for the sanction of all manner of base acts against the perceived oppressor, and it often abets the continuation of the real causes of the human suffering being considered. It's very romantic in a youthful, quixotic way to imagine that one is heroically standing up to ones authority figures after deciding that they're evil, imperialistic, fascistic, repressive, et al. But in the end, it's just really dumb, and it can result in much suffering and death, sometimes on a grand scale.
The linked story is the worst kind of pandering and it’s exploitative. There’s nothing noble or praiseworthy about a politico-religious ideology (islam), that is misogynistic and self destructive.
Very interesting to see what you watch over there! Perhaps, like here in the US, the British version of "Hollywood producers" don't quite have their finger on what the REAL society of middle class is like... only their "imagined" version - placing just a few truths within the context of their fabrications.
Having European roots (English, German) I can only hope to visit there some day and see for MYSELF what it's really like!
Louis: Indeed.
Ruggedtouch: I largely agree with your sentiments. The relativism of the Left I feel is a particular damaging factor. You put across the facts very well.
Kimba: The trouble is that the BBC is either ignoring the working class or, when not the former, intentionally belittling them.
What particularly annoys me is the casual linkage by the BBC of the white working class to disgusting groups like the BNP and National Front. The white youths they have interviewed in the last two documentaries have all been either the worst of lay-abouts or a skinhead sitting in front of a British Flag with a swastika in the middle.
Most likely it is pure propaganda for certain consumption or tv missionary work. Example - It is a tough sell to a culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, The Beatles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Warhol does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute gays and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate. Or the self perpetuating tv shows that tend to diminish and demean gracious Western host nations that threaten to absorb, marginalize and assimilate.
This TV show could be interpeted as a desperate effort to counter fun, free choice and self worth.
When the opening salvo to the prelude of this alleged “white week”, was seen to be a white man being progressively covered in foreign language until he was white no more, didn’t that send the alarm bells ringing in your living room?.
Next came the BBCs “marketing question”, “are the white working classes being ignored”. That was to drag the errrmm - white working classes into the trap.
And for what?.
So that they could be both scolded and derided by an organization that has nothing but contempt for them all. The BBCs initial question must surely have been an ironic one, for that is exactly what they have preceded to do - ignore the white working classes, and then openly treat them with the outright contempt, that only the highly self-righteous could ever dream to do.
I understand that the final programme in the series “All white in Barking” is an outright tirade, where the BBC are of course taking the moral high ground, and lecturing white Britain as to why we are truly the scum of the earth.
Perhaps they thought that at this point in time, and after seeing the rest of their “right on” series, we might indeed agree with their leftist outlook of Britain and be ready, neigh pleading, to all change our ways.
In Nineteen twenties Russia, the unspeakable enemies of the state were the bourgeois. In naughties Britain, for nu Labour and their faithful minions at the BBC, it is undoubtedly the white working classes that have to be slain.
I can honestly conclude, that the BBCs motives for this series have been utterly shameful to say the very least.
Wow Beaman! I wish I could watch that show. I hope to do some traveling in the next few years and Britain is a place I'd love to visit. From reading your blog, I see how different our countries are. A show like you described here would have little chance of making it on American television; however, I would watch it! The normal folks from the middle class of any country certainly don't need such negativity.
BTW, I did a small review of your poem "Hunger" which is one of my favourites. I'm looking forward to a new one or even a short story from you:)
I would like to bring forth another idea. What would happen if this exact same program was turned on its head? I.e. White family moving to an "Islamic" area only to find, terrorists all around them plotting to kill and slaughter every white person they see.
As well as “crazy hijaab laden", "oppressed and marginalised women", "crazy terrorist cells" in the midland of England. I wonder how this would be received. Would this take from the BBC raise the same eye brow? Or would it be accepted as a masterpiece!!
GSG: I completely agree!
sowhatdidimiss: Indeed. I can only call it a very cruel practice carried out by the BBC.
Bobby: It's the working class that are facing the BBC insults. I think I'd rather have the American way of programming than this BBC tosh.
Thank you for the review of 'Hunger'. :) And yes, my short stories and poems have been severely lacking lately. :(
Anonymous: If that was the case, then the BBC would be facing a barrage of death threats, flag burning, bomb attacks and Liberal condemnation. I can understand why those with a family would not want to provoke such a scenario. However it makes our values and freedoms, that so many have fought and died for, utterly mute.
The BBC will not show the truth.
I think it's a real shame that 'White Girl' was taken so badly. I'm a young devout Catholic yet I loved it. It helped me see another side to Islam. All we usually see is terrorism. A girl seeing another way of life - great! We need to see more youngsters changing their lives. It is unfortunate to see a white family hurting eachother but this is one programme. If the person who wrote it just had a working-class family full of love for eachother, which is hardly ever the case anyway with people in general, the programme would not have been so dramatic and powerful.
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