To Educate, Inform and Entertain

There has been much understandable anger at this evening’s EastEnders, which was staggeringly racist.

But it was also something else, not unrelated, with Mick Carter as Alf Garnett. The actor who plays him, Danny Dyer, was born, as I was, in 1977. Yet this is supposed to be working-class life.

Owen Jones’s recent How Wheldon Lecture on the changing portrayal of the working class on television tapped into something that Neil Clark and others had been quietly bemoaning for a decade or more.

Likewise, on Boxing Day, when the PM programme interviewed the Countryside Alliance’s General Sir Barney White-Spunner (and before anyone starts, the man cannot help his name), the BBC decided to prove his point by asking him about the RSPCA but not about mobile telephone coverage or about the media, both of which he had discussed in the Daily Telegraph interview that had caused him to be invited on-air.

As a former long-term Parish Councillor, from 1999 to 2013, I have also been concerned for many years about the portrayal of rural life on television. A lot of us have been, and are.

But what to do about it?

How about a competition to find the best idea for a one-off drama, and the best idea for a one-off documentary, from within the working class, most obviously defined as the social groups C2DE, in the area covered by each of the 12 ITV regions? It is just a pity that there is only one ITV region in Wales.

The winners would be broadcast in two regular primetime spots, one for drama and one for documentaries, over 12 weeks. Not necessarily on ITV. But that network does happen to have the regional boundaries in place, and, apart from the Welsh thing, those do happen to be singularly suitable to this task. It would certainly put the BBC to shame.

This exercise could be repeated annually.

As could be a competition to find the best idea for a one-off drama, and the best idea for a one-off documentary, from within the rural communities in the area covered by each of the 12 ITV regions. The ITV London region extends well into the Home Counties, so this would be perfectly feasible.

Again, the winners would be broadcast in two regular primetime spots, one for drama and one for documentaries, over 12 weeks.