Archers gone wrong

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.