Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Boris’s main opposition is his party’s ageing demographics

If you want to see why Britain’s future will be so decrepit, look at the dramas on ITV. Unlike the BBC or Channel 4, ITV receives no state protection. It must compete in the market, and is targeting the most powerful audience in the country: the elderly.

ITV has old soap operas: Coronation Street (first broadcast in 1960) and Emmerdale (1972). Agatha’s Christie’s Marple and Poirot always feature. Unlike the BBC with its colour-blind casting and willingness to tear-up and rewrite Christie’s stories until they suit modern sensibilities, ITV’s adaptations are traditional and its casts are typically white.

The Christie stories, like The Darling Buds of May, The Durrells, Endeavour, Foyle’s War, Grantchester, and Maigret are set in the past. Most were made years, often decades ago. Yet Morse and Midsomer Murders are so popular traditional viewers never weary of them, and the station runs them on a continuous loop. Morse on its own was so popular ITV commissioned two spin-offs: Lewis and Endeavour.

The typical ITV drama oozes an old dream of Englishness. It is set in a chocolate box village, country house, Oxford college or grand Edwardian hotel. Multiple murders ensure that not every character is pleasant. Indeed, it says much about the viewers’ tastes that often Morse, Foyle or Miss Marple are the only well-meaning characters on display. But however wicked they are, the characters, like the places, are familiar to the point of being stereotypes. The writers of Midsomer Murders, for instance, delight in turning every feature of imagined country life into a crime scene: the parish church, the village fete, the amateur dramatic society, the birdwatching club. The plots rarely make sense, but then the plots are nothing and nostalgia is all. English viewers, who look at the National Theatre or BBC and feel their own anger at cultural appropriation – “these characters aren’t meant to be black,” “that’s not how the story goes” – can wallow in a world they fear they are losing.

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