Interpreter of dreams

“On each blade of grass
The secret of a passing...”
From Koothey-ki-Aulaad
by Bachchoo

I had better describe what Midsomer Murders is before I tell you about the almighty row that has beset the TV show. It’s a murder mystery winner for the Independent Television (ITV) channel. A detective and his sidekick are called in to solve deaths in an English village.

Improbable though it sounds, in a village of say 3,000 people (I am making a rough estimate from having seen the houses and cars on screen for about 20 seconds in my entire life) 250 have been murdered in the last few series. The detectives have each time arrested the culprits. So one-sixth of the population is dead and another sixth has been apprehended and jailed. And yet the village continues as though nothing ever happens there. It is that hallowed place where the beer is always warm, the cricket pitch mowed and perfect in summer and there’s honey still for tea, the vicarage clock hangs about at half-past-three... and so on.
The series is extremely popular. It is repeated each year and is the best-selling detective series for ITV. It gets huge audience figures and sells to as many territories as there have been murders on the screen. I may, of course, be telling the aficionados of the series in Bhopal, Patna and Devi Ka Dera, the followers and disciples of chief inspector Tom Barnaby, what they already know. I am being cautious because such is the reputed penetration of the famous series.
The producer of the series for these last 14 years is, or has been, one Brian True-May (Yes, these English do sometimes have wondrous names!). Mr True-May was talking to the Radio Times, a broadcasting listings journal, about the new series of Midsomer Murders which is about to be launched. The interviewer asked him a question he probably wasn’t expecting: Why were there no black, Asian or other ethnic characters in the series?
Perhaps, Mr True-May should have thought a little longer about his reply. What he said was: “We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work. We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way”.
What could he have been thinking of? Didn’t he realise that in a world in which Japan has been devastated by earthquakes and a tsunami, in which West Asia is in revolt against its monarchs and dictators and hundreds are being butchered by the day, that his regard for preserving his series’ “Englishness” from ethnic minorities would cause the most unholy row in the British press?
It was as though he had demanded the construction of concentration camps for non-white folks. The reaction was not simply verbal. Mr True-May was summarily suspended from his duties. The head of ITV confessed himself “appalled” at the printed remarks and demanded action. Mr True-May’s career is, in the interests of a small fictional convention/conviction, ruined.
The fantasy village of Causton where the Midsomer Murders are supposed to take place is located in the real village of Great Missenden. It’s where Mr True-May lives. I have been through the village several times as it is on my route to a “music camp”, a weekend orchestral retreat which my son has attended since he was very young.
This retreat is a farmhouse on a hill top above the village and is host, each spring, summer and autumn to young and old instrumentalists and vocalists who camp in tents in the surrounding meadows for a few nights and play classical music of all sorts during the day — ending in a concert for friends and family on the Sunday. It is, I would have thought, a typical showcase for “Englishness” and perhaps a good location and setting for a Midsomer Murder.
One of the writers of Midsomer Murders is a good friend of mine and if I suggested the location to him it may get his mind working. I would insist that he included, at least in the background of his episode, the not-quite-white face of someone like my son who is very much part of the scenario. It wouldn’t violate Mr True-May’s “Englishness”. I very much doubt if even he would spot that a person of mixed race was amongst the viola players of the orchestra when the cops went in to check out the murder scene.
One could go further. Great Missenden is very close to the town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. It is very likely that Mrs True-May does her food shopping in the sumptuous supermarkets there. It cannot have escaped Mr True-May’s notice that High Wycombe’s population is substantially made up of Mirpuri immigrants whose children speak in a Buckinghamshire accent and probably support the local football team. Some of them pass through and work in Great Missenden and their faces, if one were doing a reality show, would necessarily be seen.
But Midsomer Murders is not a reality show. It is a fantasy of crime, detection and yes, of Englishness. It is as real as Harry Potter or James Bond and is one of the cultural constructs that England still manages to sell to itself and the world.
In a very profound sense I understand Mr True-May’s remark. It is not that he is a Nazi full of hatred for the immigrants who live on his doorstep. He is in charge of a fairy-tale, one that sells all around the world, because it purveys what is — and I am sure Mr True-May knows this — an unreal, cosy world into which murder intrudes. He is against reality. He doesn’t want some non-white youths breaking into the village and killing the Vicar. If he allowed his writers to plot that, it might cause an even bigger row than we have seen. His world is that of old postmistresses, grumbling retired colonels and lively church choirs.
When the news of Mr True-May’s dismissal broke, I phoned my writer friend Barry and asked him if, when writing an episode of Midsomer, he was instructed to keep ethnic characters out. He said he wasn’t, but while writing it and studying its enclosed fictional world it didn’t occur to him to incorporate blacks or Asians about whom he has written very effectively elsewhere.