Much ado about Midsomer

An interesting case, the issue of Midsomer Murders and the producer (and creator) of the show, Brian True-May, who has been suspended for saying he deliberately kept ethnic minorities out of it to preserve its sense of “Englishness”. I wonder if the real reason he kept them out is that the point of the programme is to make the audience guess who has been committing all the murders and they might not have to guess very hard if there were blacks in it. (Because of the inherent racism of the viewer, of course, not because black people are more likely to commit crime.)

The news reporters have been scurrying around the Bucks/Berks borderlands where Midsomer is filmed, pointing out that the villages have quite a high proportion of ethnic minorities – but this is a silly argument, because while the show is filmed there, it is not SET there. It is set in a fictional county where, as chance would have it, there aren’t any black people. More Herefordshire, or Cornwall, than Berkshire (where there are indeed more ethnic minorities than you could shake a stick at).

Meanwhile, ITV has said it is shocked and appalled by True-May’s comments – which begs the question, have they never seen the bloody programme?
Good sensible piece on the business by Hugh Muir in The Grauniad today. Somewhat predictable piece by Quentin Letts in the Volkische Beobachter (or The Daily Mail, I forget which).