be so backward-looking). No, he’s great
and all the scenes he’s in in this come alive
and make you think that this is a piece of
tendentious, race-baiting tosh you could
almost bear to watch.
But then, the moment he’s gone, you’re
back to reality. Or rather tiresome unreality.
Let me give you some examples (plot spoil-
ers ahoy; but don’t worry, I watched this so
you don’t have to): the inevitable National
Front rally where snarling skinheads, being
hatefully white, are opposed by peaceable
black folk who just want to make their views
known. Down a side street, arrayed like
Imperial Stormtroopers, a body of police-
men brandishing nightsticks are shown a
photograph of the black civil-rights leader
they must get. Which they duly do, bash-
ing him down then smashing his brains out
(you’re shown this later on the autopsy slab)
when he’s on the ground. Exactly like what
happened to black civil-rights leaders in
London in the 1970s.
Here’s another: the goody black teach-
er — who is qualified to teach at university
level but is totally unable to do so because,
like, the only jobs the racists at the racist
employment office want to consider him for
are racist menial jobs like being a driver or a
porter — realises enough is enough...
So, as you do, he and his implausibly
hot girlfriend (Freida Pinto from Slumdog
Millionaire) plan to strike a blow for the
Cause by busting another black activist out
of prison. They ask their friendly local IRA
man for his help but he says he doesn’t care
about their focking politics and that’ll be
£7,000 — or, if they haven’t got that, he can
get them a shit gun for £100. They opt for
the shit gun.
Then, also as you do, the hot girlfriend
conceals, in a very intimate part of her
person (why? Was this really necessary?),
a tube containing ground glass so she can
smuggle it into prison and give it to the
black activist, who can then swallow it and
get taken to hospital with internal bleeding.
At which point, naturally, the goody teach-
er kidnaps the ambulance driver at gun-
point, reluctantly shoots his colleague, and
off they all escape ready for next week’s
episode.
I’m sorry, but I shan’t be watching it. Why
would I — why would any halfway intelli-
gent person, black or white, want to endure
any more of this cheap, auto-flagellatory
pornography designed by and for the kind
of self-hating white liberal pillocks who sup-
port Black Lives Matter protests at airports
because climate change is racist?
It’s not just the politics that are crap, it’s
the sense of period and place. Take the party
scene. They’ve got all the joints and stuff but
Why would any intelligent person,
bl a ck or whit e, want to en dure this
auto-flagellatory pornography?no one — can you believe it? — has got a
record player. So they have someone play-
ing a hippie flute instead. Because that was
one of the things about the 1970s, it was a
bit like the Middle Ages. You’d whip out
a crumhorn here, a sackbut there, because
people were freer and more authentic back
then and also, as in Seventies London,
the poor and disenfranchised didn’t have
record players.
Amusingly — well, I think it’s amusing
— some Black Lives Matter (UK branch)activists were invited to the London
screening and proceeded to harangue the
cast in the Q&A afterwards for not being
black enough. Why was the lead female
an ‘Asian’, they wanted to know, and not
a proper actual black person? Lol. This is
what happens, I’m afraid, when instead of
trying to create art you indulge in political-
ly correct gesture politics. When even your
minuscule target audience loathes you for
what you’ve done, you really ought to know
you’ve failed.Service
I stopped believing many years ago
even in non-belief, so why sit here
this winter morning, listening
to Sunday Worship on the radio
from St Martin-in-the-Fields? And to a choir
not so much singing as inheritingthe chanted fables generations pass
each to the next, as though they were handrails
into the future and could guide
us through a lifetime in which nothing lasts
except their solace - a thought which both appals
and fascinates, for what if such well-triedharmonies say something tuned and true
about the way we can atone with age,
how we should be with one another,
how I both could and should have been with you,
and could still be even at this settled stage
of our long discord? W hat if t his cha nce encou nteris not mere chance, but one of those rare moments
which offer insight into how the world
is more t ha n all we see or hea r
or touch - some inner, outer, spiritual endowment,
an unexpected cadence overheard,
which everyone, and everywhere, could share?So let the old words comfort if they can -
they’ve done good service down the troubled years
helping us to come to ter m s
with what usually seems not just absurd, unplanned,
but a void our shocked imagination fears
and that unsung language only silence learns.— Tom Vaughan