It's not often I see dramas on TV that make me angry. Indifferent, yes. Depressed, sometimes. But angry? Rarely. However, White Girl, the BBC single drama by Abi Morgan just had me yelling 'Fuck off!' at the screen. And I haven't done that since the 80s.
The irony here is that in the 80s I was yelling at all the things I found politically incorrect. Whereas this week it was the opposite. I'm not one to utter the phrase 'political correctness gone mad', but this was... erm, political correctness gone mad.
There's a place for political correctness and drama is the last place I want to see it. It reeks of proletkult and statues of idealised workers with high cheekbones scything wheat . It's not the job of dramatists to be politically correct. It's our job to question and subvert (and entertain, let's not forget that), even if that means questinioning and subverting what we nod about every day with our Guardian-reading friends.
But for those who didn't see it, White Girl was so depressingly politically correct it could have been dictated directly from a government thinktank on community cohesion.
It concerns a poor white trash family being dumped in an Asian area. The white family are, of course, the scum of the Earth, whereas all the muslims are really ace and totally together. Despite initial racist misgivings, the daughter comes to see how brilliant Islam is and how much of a haven it can be from her awfully crap secular white trash existence. She even starts wearing a hijab.
I eagerly await the sequel where they all go and live in La La Land.
Of course, this is part of a modern malaise where the liberal left have abdicated all sense of political realism and prefer to flirt with outmoded, fascistic belief systems in the misguided notion that because they challenge 'the West' (but mostly those evil Yanks) they must be forward thinking and progressive. See Ed Husain's superb The Islamist
I'm not against political writing. There's a place for drama that challenges, drama that rages against injustice. But there's no place for drama that tries to paper over the cracks of society and present us with this idealised bollocks while proclaiming itself to be radical. This is Stalinist state-sponsored art-by-dictat and I piss on its shoes.
I'm from a white working class family, the product of a multicultural education and live in inner city Birmingham. I've lived and worked with people from all corners of the globe and encountered racism and prejudice in black people as well as white. I've met Barbadians who hate Jamaicans, Jamaicans who hate Asians, Muslims who hate Sikhs and one Indian woman who, to my utter shock, delighted in telling me how much she hates 'the Pakis'.
To anyone who actually mixes with real working class people from all races, the real world is extremely complex when it comes to prejudice and not a bit, er... black and white.
But in the world of TV drama, only white people can be prejudiced. Those are the rules. UK drama is so depressingly politically correct that theatre directors are now begging for 'right wing' plays; anything that challenges the 'right on' status quo.
We are dramatists and it's our responsibility to debate any restrictions on what we can and cannot say, whether those restrictions come from the left or the right.