In praise of Netflix

All this week I have been trying, with considerable success, to avoid being bludgeoned by TV programmes telling me in various sensitive and imaginative ways just how brilliant, heroic and historically maligned homosexual men are. I achieved this by sticking to Netflix.

One of the great things about Netflix (whose annual subscription costs just half the BBC licence fee, by the way) is that though it’s probably run by lefties it doesn’t try to ram its politics down your throat. Maybe this is one reason why its 100 million-plus subscribers are so much less resentful than BBC viewers: they’re being offered choice, variety, entertainment — not worthiness, race, gender quotas and compulsory indoctrination.

This week Netflix helped me catch up — under Girl’s instruction — with an addictively trashy series from 2012 about spoilt rich kids in New York called Gossip Girl; and also with a gripping documentary series — Captive — about how horrible it is being taken hostage. Best of all, though, was Daughters of Destiny — a four-part series telling the delightful true story of the Shanti Bhavan school in India’s Tamil Nadu province.

It was founded by an Indian tech billionaire called Abraham George who, having made his fortune in the US, decided he wanted to give something back to his home country. He did this by establishing a free school, outside Bangalore, for children of the lowest of the low: untouchables who would otherwise get only the most rudimentary education and would be destined for a life of toil, squalor and penury.

Children — only one per family, sadly — are brought to the school as boarders aged four, with just two holidays a year, and are supported for 17 years until their first day of work.