RSS

Contact us

Thursday 4 December 2008

Campaign trail

Classic Serial (BBC Radio 4)

Move forward 50 or so years to 1958 and the Guyanan writer E.R. Braithwaite (best known for his novel To Sir, With Love) was writing about his experiences of working as a child welfare office with the London County Council. His brief was to organise the fostering of non-white children. Paid Servant is the memoir inspired by what he saw on his visits to council estates and the capital’s underground network of the economically poor and educationally deprived. He meets the matron of a children’s home who needs to foster a young mixed-race boy whose father is unknown, and his mother ‘thought to be a prostitute’. The matron, needless to say, is white and bigoted. It doesn’t make for comfortable listening, in our supposedly enlightened times. But did we really need Jane Garvey to give a Health and Safety disclaimer before it began?

‘This drama uses language and reflects attitudes current at that time,’ pronounced Garvey, gravely, at 10.45 on Monday morning. It almost makes one weep. Does the BBC really imagine that we have moved on so far that those attitudes no longer exist? Has the producer/editor who insisted on broadcasting such a mealy-mouthed proviso been listening to the latest racist thread running through The Archers? In a way that’s a far more shocking use of dramatic time because it sounds so calculated and written to cause a stir.

May the Lord save us from the PC zealots. And give us more writers like Braithwaite, whose book has been dramatised for this week’s Woman’s Hour serial by Anne Edyvean. The Great Kwame (Kwei-Armah) plays Braithwaite, faced with the woman who insists that the mixed-race child he needs to foster cannot be placed with a white family because it might lead to ‘a sex-motivated problem’. There! I’ve written it in black and white, and its brutal shockingness should I hope provoke a sharp intake of breath. Reading this through myself, I almost feel I should withhold that last quotation, just in case it doesn’t have the desired effect.

Braithwaite, however, didn’t write to shock, but to enlighten; not from a narrow PC focus but from a broad understanding of life and human behaviour. He doesn’t judge, but rather illustrates. That’s why nothing he says sounds dated, or needs to be wrapped around with cotton wool. He doesn’t forgive the matron; nor does he pretend that her attitudes are solely of their time. He knows too well the barren wastes behind those friendly masks.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved