I like Brassic but the reason it’s getting such glowing notices is depressing

Brassic (Sky One) feels like the sort of TV comedy drama they last made about 15 years ago but would never get commissioned now, certainly not by the BBC. Almost all of the main characters — apart from love interest Michelle Keegan — are white, male and heterosexual. And it’s set in the kind of Lancashire market town surrounded by rolling sheep country where the opportunities for plausible diversity casting are really quite limited. So how come it has been getting such glowing notices from all the previewers and reviewers?

You’ll be depressed when I tell you. Well, it has depressed me anyway. The main character Vinnie — played by Joe Gilgun — is bipolar. Not only that but Gilgun himself is bipolar and, as one of any number of tedious articles by online scribblers cannot wait to tell you, he is very open and candid about it, unlike most men, who struggle to talk about their feelings.

Come, kindly asteroid: strike us now. Being obliterated alongside my friends and family will be a small price to pay for the satisfaction of knowing that in the same purgative explosion will be eradicated all those woke little pillocks and their idiot notions that the primary purpose of a TV comedy drama is to enable viewers to empathise with ‘disabilities’ such as mental illness.

Gosh, do you think that was what Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote his ‘To be or not to be’ speech? ‘So I’ve put in lots of sexual intrigue and killing: that should keep the groundlings happy. But there will come a time about 420 years hence — I know this because I am a visionary seer — when audiences won’t care about my wordplay or my intricate plotting, still less about the fortunes of a white cisgendered royal.