More cultural doublethink

I'm greatly enjoying the second season of Life on Mars, which I've just started watching. I marvel at the writing of Philip Glenister's character DCI Gene Hunt, for sometimes it seems as though these days the BBC is the kind of place where you'd get excommunicated for even thinking up lines like Hunt's. Despite the fact that they are delivered as it were ironically, through the prism of early 21st Century mores, with a knowing wink to the audience for whom the humour derives (or is supposed to derive) from the exquisite agony of remembering there was ever a time when people were so "unreconstructed", and certainly not from any empathy with the character; despite, in other words, the seal of modern, progressive disapproval being stamped all over Hunt, Glenister has managed to make him a genuinely likeable character whose bluntness merely defines and characterises rather than condemns him. It is not clear to what extent the writers wanted to ignite the audience in a fervour of "progressive" zeal, but to whatever extent it was their intention, they have failed. Audiences like Gene Hunt because he reminds them of a time when the everyday processes of life weren't so stultifyingly micro-managed by the paranoid rigours of political correctness, a time when the police "service" was a police force and a joke was a joke. They have embraced the programme without buying into the myriad PC pieties which pervade it. (Most of them, at any rate: this chap has a different take on thinly-veiled progressivist TV/film.)

But you just can't keep a good progressive agenda down. There have been at least three references to Margaret Thatcher so far, which for a show set in 1973 can only be to provide dramatic irony-derived humour for the 2007 audience. The first two (that I can recall) one might be tempted to let pass: both were essentially the same, that is to say a 1973 character voicing disbelief or disapproval. Hunt scoffs at the general notion ("there will never be a woman Prime Minister as long as I have a hole in my arse") and later his boss, Supt. Woolf, is more specific, reacting with horror when Tyler says "by the time Maggie Thatcher becomes Prime Minister". So far, so what: Hunt is casually sexist and Woolf, for all we know, may be a socialist red in tooth and claw. Neither of them knows the future so their reactions are entirely understandable, even if the writing is somewhat uninspired.

The third time is different. WPC Annie Cartwright, who might as well be a representative figure called Emancipation, recently groundbreakingly (of course) promoted (of course) to WDC by Tyler (of course), reflects, after someone mentions that pretty soon she'll be Commissioner, that she might even become Prime Minister - after all, a woman couldn't do a worse job than the blokes have been doing. Cue laughs all round, then Tyler, the only person in the entire 1973 world who actually knows better, tells Annie that she might live to regret saying that. In other words, Tyler affirms to the expectant audience that yes, in fact, the woman did do a worse job than the blokes had been doing.

This kind of cognitive dissonance is astounding. The entire premise of the show is to highlight the differences between 1973 and 2006/7, to show the degree to which British life has changed in the intervening three decades. The person most directly responsible for those changes is Margaret Thatcher, in the teeth of opposition from almost everyone, including many in her own party. That Life on Mars can present those changes as overwhelmingly positive (as it does when it invites us to disapprove of all the aspects of life which are now gone forever) yet have its protagonist, the only person who knows what changes are coming and why, state that the woman Prime Minister will be the worst of the lot, is simply unfathomable. Nothing may be permitted to infringe on the cultural assumptions of the progressive agenda, prime among which is the caricature of Maggie as the Great Satan, not even when writing a show that highlights all the positive changes she wrought.