Period Drama and Prejudice

“Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,” one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September.

Erik Eckholm, ‘In Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda,’ New York Times, 6 November, 2010.

In Britain and America we live in societies where homophobic, racist, sexist and similar discriminatory abuse is believed to be defeated, or at least it’s generally professed as being so. All of these kinds of abuse are clearly wrong and despicable, out of date, the acts of dinosaur comedians and why the ‘70s were bad. This is suggested in the way that any examples of homophobic, racial or sexist abuse/violence reported in the media are presented as departures from the tolerant norm and as thoroughly shocking – particularly when celebrities and politicians are involved. The daily, street ubiquity of all these types of abuse is denied, or at least largely invisible on TV and in the media generally.

When Alan Davies gave us a tour of his teenage years a couple of months ago he admitted to the racism of his past, and that of Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s. He met with the Pakistani shopkeeper that he and his school friends had jeered at and shoplifted from, and later talked with an ex skinhead, who discussed racism and Paki bashing, again in the past tense. While the programme called for them to be talking only about their pasts, there is also a suggestion that ‘it’ doesn’t happen like that anymore. In dramas, BBC-safe ensemble casts of straight, LGBT, female, male, black and white characters all get on without batting an eyelid in the portrayed present – or maybe with a few lovely ‘ironic’ examples of knowing abuse. Any actual arguments they might have are strictly non race, gender or sexuality – that could be a Saturday night show. It’s only when such a mix of characters inhabits Life on Mars, Downton Abbey or Agatha Christieland that they will get nasty with each other’s identities – period drama and prejudice. ‘The days before political correctness’ – how’s that for nauseating understatement? Mad Men can show racial abuse because it’s set in the ‘60s, and that’s when people were racist.

Time travelling Doctor Who is good for this, or at least the 2005 onwards incarnation is. When set in the present or future, a character might make some remark about having ‘struggled through the ranks’ or some similar allusion to having had a hard time because of their gender, sexuality or colour. It is only when the stories are set safely in the past that descriptions and experiences of discrimination are more explicit, such as responses to homosexuality ‘1926, it’s more like the Dark Ages’ (The Unicorn and the Wasp, 2008) and racial abuse ‘with hands like those, how can you tell when something’s clean?’ (Human Nature, 2007).

If people do discriminate in the televisual present - and this is true for British and American shows - they are shown to be abnormal in some way. Desperate Housewives’ Bree Van de Kamp might have wanted to ‘correct’ her son’s homosexuality, but then she’s presented in a context of neurosis and comically exaggerated small c conservatism (from Live Alone and Like It, 2005). In The Bill the only people who had problems with the black and female police officers were the criminals, particularly those of the nasty, sell their own grandmother, psycho-thug kind.

This combination of down playing and fencing off discrimination and abuse owes either to media and political ignorance/wishful thinking, or else it’s some attempt to deny it into extinction – if we are told that no one is racist anymore, then we will stop being racist, or homophobic or sexist or…

The focus on successful, established diversity is not necessarily wrong of course, but it does create an offshoot problem, asides from the false Mission Accomplished assumption. The problem with this common mantra of diversity - that homosexuality isn’t wrong or something to be ashamed of, that men and women of all colours and cultures are equal, that people are tolerant, that employers are tolerant - is that people tend to get ‘sick of it’, imagining that they are putting some level of effort into all of this tolerance. Then they will say things like: yes, sure, gays are fine, they make their choices and I accept that, BUT….

It’s all right to be a little homophobic, sexist and racist in a society that’s defeated sexism, racism and homophobia. There’s a sense that people are no longer kicking these groups when they are down – not now that legislation and tolerance is on ‘their side.’ Now they have got want they wanted we can re-introduce some common sense. It’s a neatly polarised assumption that the violence and discrimination of the past – the past of lynching, the past of the AIDS (cures gays) scare/celebration, the past of the un-voting and housebound little woman - is incommensurable with today. Today there is ‘none of that’ and there are certainly no modern parallels. Any groups or persons continuing to suggest otherwise are wearing a bit thin.

Somehow the same people who profess a tolerance of homosexuals can still criticise things for ‘promoting acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.’ Homosexuality isn’t wrong? Fine, but accepting it as normal, as a valid alternative, is wrong. There is a contradiction there that people don’t like to have to deal with. I suppose the level of tolerance we have achieved, barring examples of intolerance and violent intolerance out there, is one that says: being black, gay or a woman is fine and I won’t judge you for it - you can’t help it. But for Chrissakes let’s not encourage any more of them. For gender, race and sexuality there are similar sets of ideas and voices that say we can take equality too far. Cutting to it: I still don’t think you’re normal - homosexuals, black people and black culture, women who work in industries that surprise me - but I won’t attack you because of that. That’s unless you start attacking the things I like and claiming that they suppress you and your sort. The things that I like are all part of what I view as normal.

So the parameters and definitions of tolerance remain in flux, malleable whether in politics, media, the workplace or in individuals’ lives and consciences. As America sees the debates surrounding don’t ask, don’t tell go on, the right of openly gay troops to serve remains a controversial possibility. The BBC continues to fight its own sexist and ageist demons, and depending on which paper you read, Britain’s most popular boy’s name is either the sum total of various spellings of Mohammed (Mail, Express, Telegraph) or Oliver (Guardian, Sun, Times, Independent). Who knows, perhaps in twenty or thirty years we’ll be watching the future’s equivalent of those BBC Four productions – historical biopics that will look back at today’s shows and their stars and reveal the discrimination and human dramas underlying the onscreen diversity of the 2000s and 2010s.