White Girl
You knew it didn't you, just knew it. From the reaction to White Girl I can only assume that a vast number of people out there in the U.K think EastEnders is a documentary or The Archers is sponsored by DEFRA. The knives are out for Abi Morgan, the BBC and anybody else who are basically the sperm of the devil and had anything to do with this 90 minute drama.
The story of 11 year old Leah (played brilliantly by Holly Kenny) has been accused of: nursery rhyme guide to Islam, a betrayal of the working class, more evidence of the BBC pro-Islam agenda among various things. For me this was a drama about an 11 year old girl's search for something better in her life. Living with her alcoholic mother and her two step siblings she was denied access to her real father because her mother couldn't remember his name, she found her stepfather threatening and her new neighbours in Bradfords religion and way of life interesting. So far so good, except Leah's neighbours didn't go to watch Bradford Bulls play, they didn't go to concerts in Leeds by Kaiser Chiefs, no they went to the Mosque.
When Leah stormed out of the Islam assembly and demanded her own assembly on the grounds that her and her half siblings were Catholics you could see that the seeds of disenchantment with her community were already sown. A white girl in a black town, she was the outsider. Unfortunately her attempts at a Catholic assembly were met with comments of "this is boring," from her siblings and Leah was gradually seduced by the stability of her next door neighbours and found herself being enticed into a mosque.
The thing that sung out loud and clear for me from this was the ignorance of the white working class: Leah's mother, grandmother and step father. That was spot-on, you only have to visit the 5Live message boards to see the reaction to 7/7 to realise that it's not just the lower class in this country who revel in the ignorance of another culture. Islam isn't wonderful by a long way, is any religion, but to me that wasn't the point of this programme. This was about the break-up of a family that lacked morals, that lacked a coherence, a direction, a togetherness. The Muslim family next door to Leah had that, they even had milk with their cereal and didn't have to eat crisps for breakfast. That last bit wasn't an exaggeration either, I read recently a comment in the Times that one of the class definitions doing the rounds in school playgrounds is whether you have milk or coca cola to drink with your breakfast.
Had Leah been a teenager she may well have turned to drugs, drink or sex to find comfort in strangers, as it was she tried hard to explain about Islam to her mother (brilliantly played by Anna Maxwell Davies, I won't be able to watch Bleak House without expecting her to shout fuck-off every five minutes).
There was a wonderful sense of irony when I finished watching this last night, mentally predicting the response from a large number of viewers. At 8:30 on BBC4 last night there was an edition of Sounds of the Sixties covering the period 1960-1965 as a tie-in with the Mad Men season, at the end there was a thirty second clip of Mary Whitehouse addressing her flock with the words, "last night I saw the most disgusting television programme I have ever seen."
Mary Whitehouse lives it seems, in the minds of those who can't tell the wood from the trees. At a time when thousands of white British people are converting to Islam each year I would have thought there might be more concern about the underlying reasons for conversion to a religion that is apparently 'barbaric', and 'stick in the middle ages', but once again it's time to shoot the messenger, which inevitably in these over sensitive days means the BBC.
3 comments:
Back to read more later...too much rugby and football at present. Alcuin posted re this too, actually he posted the same on the MB as a reply.
My take would (if I'd seen any of it!) probably been similar to Rod Liddle's - yes, I'm predicatable
:-)
Interesting take on the 'White series in the Spectator HERE ...although it might be what you'd expect...almost fit for thr R5L Uk News MB :-)
"Instead they commissioned a bunch of programmes that said: white working-class people, we feel your pain, but unfortunately, you’re wrong. In other words, they demonstrated precisely the same mindset which infects every single news bulletin, documentary and drama we have witnessed for the last 20 years on the BBC. Can you imagine them commissioning a film about a Muslim girl who converts to Christianity, converts her mum — and by the denouement is proven right to have done so? It will never happen."
I think Rod Liddle is right in what he says. I think the BBC made a big mistake, not in commissioning the story but putting in the White season. As I and Alcuin were pointing out this had less to do with Islam than with a young girl seeking stability in her life. Of all the reviews I read only Brian Viner in the Independent came close to seeing beyond the headlines.
I also think that people have misinterpreted the season's ambitions or rather they have expected too much from the BBC. It was interesting to read the reaction on BBC's White Season MB to the programme on Peterborough and compare it with the thinking on the News MB, I think the White Season board responses were more positive.
Leah didn't convert her Mum to Islam, what she did do was hold up the idea of finding something she could feel safe with against the chaos at home. That was what made her mother change her mind.
As I said on the 5MB make the girl 14,15 or 16 and it would have been sex, drugs and rock n'roll.
I didn't know there were thousands of white British people converting to Islam every year. Does anyone know why?
Post a Comment