History buried under a snowdrift of lies
I HAVE now struggled half way through the BBC’s most recent travesty of Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse. And in the same week I endured the latest episode of ITV’s Endeavour. Agatha Christie isn’t holy writ and I don’t, in principle, object to messing around with her stories if it makes them better. But this seemed to me to be a hymn of hate against the Britain of 60 years ago. It was almost as if the camera lens had been smeared with a yellowish slime, to make the era look grim and sordid. Was anyone happy? Was anyone normal? It appeared not. I am often accused of viewing the 1950s as a ‘Golden Age’, when I do not. There never was a golden age.
Much about the 1950s was worse than now, the incessant smoking, the medical care, the food which often contained actual gristle. Yet it was also a more carefree time than most of us can now imagine, when most people could afford to live reasonably well on modest pay, when children did not hide indoors, in constant fear of paedophiles, traffic and pollution. My own recollection is it was also much kinder, softer spoken and more patient, but I may have been lucky.
A time I recall in much more detail is 1970 in Oxford, my home town, supposedly portrayed in Endeavour. Last week’s episode claimed to be about events surrounding the General Election that summer.
It featured two racially motivated knife murders, which I cannot recall (odd, as such things were so rare then), and invented a political party (a sort of BNP) and its candidate who definitely did not stand for election that year.
This false plot, set in an invented past, gave an excuse for the young Morse and his boss Fred Thursday to go round lecturing everyone on how racist they were, from the smug point of view of 2020. They may have solved some crimes while doing so, but it’s the woke lectures I recall. Bit by bit the actual past is lost under a great, thick snowdrift of propaganda and falsehood. Much of it takes the form of fiction and drama.
And once they’ve persuaded us that the past was all bad, they’ll move on to the next bit, getting us to believe that the present is wonderful.