How is it that the BBC can produce, on the one hand the quite outstanding 'Call the Midwife' and yet follow it with the quite dreadful 'Ripper Street' ?
'Call the Midwife' is so real as to be almost creepy; it shows some of the true horror of post-war life in a deprived area of London and is beautifully acted by a quality cast.
'Ripper Street' is so unreal as to be risible. It shows English police running around with a shady American, gun-toting, ex-Pinkerton detective who has a penchant for prostitutes. In today's episode this character engages in a gunfight on a London street, in front of an assembled crowd, which ends with him walking up to within a couple of feet of his opponent before shooting him in the head. The implausibility of this storyline seems to have been ignored by the programme makers, possibly because they think that very few of their audience will have any knowledge of how life was really lived at that time, the late 1880s.
In the US, it has long been the case that programmes and films have been produced which fly in the face of reality and history; films such as the 'Die Hard' series take implausibility to the very limit in pursuit of anything that will hold the attention of an increasingly puerile and simplistc audience. They think nothing of re-writing history and lauding the shocking behaviour of those who committed a genocide against the indigenous population of their land. The myth of the heroic gunfighting US marshall, à al Wyatt Earp, is all-embracing; the fact that such people were little more than terrorists and murderous is brushed under the carpet.
Such figures did not exist in the London of the 1880s; why the BBC finds it necessary to invent them is a mystery. This is not dssimilar to their ridiculous, though apparently successful amongst the unwashed masses, approach to the re-invention of Sherlock Holmes. We now seem to have entered a world in which historic costumes and sets are simply a means of providing an environment in which modern day fantasy, and rehashed storylines, can be acted out in a variety of different settings, conning the gullible public into believing they are seeing something new, revealing and wonderful.
If the public really are that gullible, what does it say about our vaunted education system ? "Not a lot", is the only possible answer.
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