A BBC Four programme that asks ‘Roundhead or Cavalier….Which one are you?’. B-BBC alan wonders…
“I didn’t know what to make of it at first but a metaphor soon sprung to mind that suitably encapsulates everything that this programme is about….imagine driving down the road and you look up to see a small boy mooning you from the back of a bus….amusing huh?….only on a closer look do you see that the works of Karl Marx are printed on his backside….not only is he mocking you but the mocking comes with a message attached!
Of course the young schoolboy is not to blame…it is his mate giggling alongside him who incited him to carry on in such a bawdy, rude manner….the schoolboy who grew up to be a BBC editor no doubt.
And that in essence is how this programme engineers its hidden message into our lives…..it employs one of the BBC’s favourite tricks of using ‘useful idiots’, and some knowing knaves, to say things that the BBC couldn’t say themselves…and then have them edited into a narrative that suits the BBC’s message…in this case what might that be?
Bet you can’t guess.
Cavaliers and Roundheads, the English Civil War where the fight for equality and democracy was won by the forces of Godliness and discipline against those of decadence and thoughtless self interest.
That’s right – it’s Tories against the Caped Crusaders of the Left.
It’s still playing out today and throughout the last 400 years…Whigs against the Tories, Liberals against the Tories, Socialists against the Tories.
Everyone hates the Tories you see.
The Tories, sorry Cavaliers….they don’t care about anything too much, they don’t care about details, not interested in the nitty gritty of organising life and politics, they have no overall plan, they have style but no substance.
But it’s OK….the Socialists, sorry, Roundheads, will save the day….being careful, organised, Godly(?), dutiful, professional, thoughtful, sincere, principled, purposeful and rebellious.
Who might be good examples of such virtues? George Osborn, Ken Livingstone, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Arthur Scargill and Boris Johnson, The Sun newspaper and the Guardian.
You do the maths on which is which.
The BBC don’t actually have much faith in your ability to spot their subtle anti Tory black propaganda so they slip in some pretty jarring shots and comments just to ram home the message….Tory bad and decadent, Socialist good and caring.
Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson blurted out that he laughed at Tories who dismiss the European Court of Human Rights…..so undemocratic of them…do they not realise that the English Civil War was fought for these European laws? Wasn’t it?
A Times columnist, Ben Macintyre, claimed that Cameron was a Cavalier by instinct, weaned in the Bullingdon Club with a belief that he is born to rule….a very dangerous aspect of his character he proposes.
However…Miliband is a natural Roundhead with clear and crisp ideas of where he wants to go….can’t understand why everyone hates him.
The finale was a comment overlaid with a film of Cameron…..the interviewee stating that ‘Britain is now a society that is a pyramid of snobbery and wealth.’ and then the last dig….the narrator saying ‘It now seems there’s a little bit of Roundhead and Cavalier in all of us.’…..juxtaposed against a lingering shot of Gordon Brown, Roundhead, and then George Osborn, reckless, irresponsible Cavalier.
Hang on, rewind, wasn’t it a certain ‘Gordon Brown’ who was so cavalier with our cash, destroyed our economy, and broke the Banks of England, Scotland too?
As the narrator said at the beginning of the programme….‘To understand the origins of this great divide (between Cavaliers and Roundheads) is to understand what it means to be British today.’
That’ll be right, Anne Widdicombe, David Davies, Norman Tebbit, John Redwood and Margaret Thatcher all natural Cavaliers!
The programme was a bright idea thought up by a BBC Labour lovey as a device to paint the Tories in the worst possible light by implication and association……pure propaganda from the impartial BBC. Propaganda that is supposed to seep gradually into our subconscious only fully maturing and coming into effect on polling day like the parasitic being that is the BBC leeching off our license fee money and using it to offend and attack everything most people outsie of the ‘metropolitan elite’ value.
Finally let’s have a look at what the Roundhead Puritan’s really brought us….and why they were shoved off to America to be those Bible Belt fundamentalists that otherwise the BBC hates……
‘Puritans were dissatisfied and bent on the destroying of the dregs of Popery. They were a group of literate and often highly articulate people acting like a fifth column to undermine and radically change Britain through sympathisers in and activists. Some aimed to reform by peaceful means others wanted to turn England to their religion completely and join their co-religionists in Europe. up and down the country they took over parishes and imposed a new belief…that they were the chosen ones and everyone else was excluded and was damned. Where the Godly would get a foothold in a parish they would often tear it apart. They disrupted peaceful communities with their preaching and efforts to discipline those they regarded as godless resulting in bitter divisions and denouncements of sinners.’
Blimey, I must reread my Horrid Histories to get the notion of a foppish Gordo as a gay cavalier (ok, other than with our money; and the first bit tbc via ‘sources’) into my head.
He seems the epitome of the colourless, dour Roundhead more. With the shrewish Witchfinder generals of the BBC/Graun/Every ‘guest expert’ they have on as the fingerwaving spoilsports to the lower orders… until back indoors and getting jiggy wid dat hypocrisy.
Me, tonight… Wetherspoons! And a pox on all their houses.
So I am torn.
On the plus side, be it Chas One or Olly C, no matter what autocrat messing with da hood, the end result seemed pretty much heads on poles, so a result there eventually for those in pleb central with Patience (the barmaid from Ye Olde Causes Liver Damage So Just Stop pub
My wife and I guffawed all the way through this it was so ludicrous. Do they ever read through the scripts before broadcasting?
I shudder to think what te roundheads wouldhave made of gay marriage. As I remember it the right but repulsive roundheads represented the wealth creating industrious section of society while the wrong but wromantic cavaliers stood for an un-elected,, unaccountable metropolitan cultural elite who ran up huge debts they couldn’t pay.
While it’s fun to stigmatize the US by association with the Puritans, in actual fact some of the people most responsible for founding the United States of America and producing the documents and championing the ideas which make this country great were the Virginia planters descended from the Cavaliers who fled here after the end of the English Civil War: George Washington, James Madison, George Mason, James Monroe, and Thomas Jefferson (on his mother’s side). Funny, that.
And by a long chain of improbable circumstances, you have ended up with a President who is cavalier with the truth.
Well, plenty of Presidents have been that way with the truth from time to time, but we’ve never had one so disconnected from those founding principles. It never ceases to amaze me that He gave lectures on Constitutional law at the university level.
I saw this programme. To be honest, it was all over the place to such a degree, with attempts to shoe-horn so many different characters and events into the two narratives, that I’m not sure it was possible to detect any firm overall bias. It was far too muddled and presented too many contradictions to it’s premise, in all manner of directions.
The bit that did stand out was the final part with that quote that “Britian is now a society that is a pyramid of snobbery and wealth”. This clearly had the sole purpose of ramming home the BBC’s theme of those ‘out of touch toffs’ in government at the moment. Otherwise, a thoroughly confused mess, not to be taken seriously.
It’s only now that way? Is history really just a plaything to these people?
The Roundheads ended up by running a despotic military dictatorship, which was loathed by the population, and resulted in the restoration of the monarchy, which was I believe rather well received by the population! I haven’t heard the programme, but I’ll bet they didn’t dwell on this bit!
“Some contemporaries described the Restoration as “a divinely ordained miracle. The sudden and unexpected deliverance from usurpation and tyranny was interpreted as a restoration of the natural and divine order”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Restoration
I expect the day we regain our sovereignty from the dictators in Brussels that too will be remembered as a “deliverance from usurpation”.
I doubt Cromwell would have found the BBCs “edgy comedians” or their “same sex” loving presenters as acceptable Most, I suspect would have ended up in the Tower.
The BBCs view of history is an absolute joke. They live in a different universe.
The BBC view history as propaganda. All of it leading to the glorious sunny uplands of the future where the bunny rabbits inherit the earth. Or some such drivel.
The bBC is full of leftwing gay wankers who love to insert their gay bias onto us all.
Read up what ‘Roundhead or Cavalier….Which one are you?’. Means to the gay community.
First of all Hello, Hello! and thank God I can connect again, I’ve missed you guys.
As a history major I’ve got to say both Cavaliers AND Roundheads had their attractive and unattractive sides. While the Roundheads had some damme good points as far as the political process went (popular assembly vs. absoulte monarch) their social ideals were more than slightly oppressive – remind you of anybody? – which of course led to the Restoration. After a few decades of austere godliness the British people were ready to *party*!