Thought and Deed: a few thoughts on bias in fiction.

Neil Craig of A Place To Stand On writes:

I have just been watching the Judge John Deed programme.

While this is not a news item I do believe that the basis of this show is corrupt – each week our hero judge, who is a radical thorn in the side of the grey suited men, goes into court to quite deliberately finesse his duty by finding for some politically correct party in the teeth of the evidence.

(This week’s was awarding ridiculous damages against a nasty company which had been producing dioxins thus leading to the birth of a disabled photogenic kid – in fact there is (as with nuclear) precious little evidence that dioxins are dangerous in small quantities let alone in the circumstances described.)

It is stuff like this which creates a background of bias. The impartiality of the law is a cornerstone of any free society. If the BBC were doing a programme in which the hero was deliberately fitting up communists, moslem fundamentalists, serbs (well maybe not them) without even a suggestion that something was wrong then it would be obvious that the BBC were undermining freedom. The same applies here.

I am far from suggesting that any work of TV drama should be submitted to an “anti-bias” editor before publication. But the extent to which certain vaguely left-wing memes dominate British TV drama can be judged by trying to imagine dramas run according to their opposites.

The results are actually funny; funny because they are so unheard of. Imagine a show with a young hero who goes to church. Imagine a show with a heroine who isn’t trying to make it in a man’s world. Imagine a historical drama where the sympathetic protagonist actually had the attitudes common in his time rather than those of a twenty-first century intellectual. Imagine a drama about a handsome campaigning journalist taking on a fat ugly politician. No wait, you’ve seen dozens of those, but imagine one where the journalist is willing to use any lie to bring down a relatively good man.

Dream on. Back in the real world the BBC describes its hero Judge Deed as “the judge who is not afraid to question the establishment.” Yawn. Who exactly is afraid to question the establishment these days?