With murder and mayhem on the streets of the West Midlands, what do the
law-abiding do? We stay at home and watch what one of its own stars calls the
‘disgustingly violent’ Peaky Blinders.
With gangland stabbings and shootings turning parts of the West Midlands into
no-go areas and the police incapable of getting to grips with it, we would
appear to be in the midst of a new crime-wave.
That’s why Boris Johnson’s temporary Government is promising more money for the
police, more money for prisons and a crackdown on foreign criminals evading
deportation.
Yet we are deluged with programmes like the much-hyped and widely-praised Peaky
Blinders which can best be described as televised ‘crime-porn’. It makes
the whole evil world of crooks and gangsters look glamorous and attractive even
as it is pretending to moralise about how debilitating it all is.
There's a new series of Peaky Blinders, switched to BBC1 to get a bigger audience, with all the usual stylised violence and cruelty.
The series is so well put together - great music, atmospheric lighting, Black
Country museum backgrounds and all - it invites us to look back on what
supposedly happened 80 years ago with sepia-tinged nostalgia.
Next month there’s to be ‘The Legitimate Peaky Blinders Festival’ in
Birmingham, so-called, it must be assumed, because someone has already tried to
make an illegitimate, knock-off version, which seems strangely apt really.
Helen McRory, who plays Aunt Polly in the series, admits it is so ‘disgustingly
violent’ she can’t watch it.
She goes on to defend this on the grounds that it would otherwise ‘normalise’
violence and that, in the series, these terrible crimes damage the criminals as
well as their victims.
She says: ‘It should be horrifying and you should have the people who are responsible
for the violence either unable to self-medicate or having mental health
problems, or all the things that do happen to people, if you kill other people
– because it is not a natural state of affairs.
‘And anybody who looks at the violence of Peaky Blinders and some sort
of gun slashing scheme and thinks, “That exactly is what I want to do”…I mean,
sick.’
She’s right to say anyone who wanted to copy the show’s violence might well be
sick but the malign influence of television can’t be under-estimated. And our
couch-potato willingness to embrace these shows must play a part in adding to
the sickness.
It's not as if Peaky Blinders were a one-off. The majority of shows on
mainstream television seem to involve criminals, usually murderers. And it is
rare indeed to find any straightforward division between the goodies and the
baddies.
Take Killing Eve, another widely-praised crime-porn series, where the
impossibly glamourous hired assassin, who may be called Villanelle, ends up in
some perverse relationship with Eve, the woman who is supposedly bringing her
to justice.
Not an episode passes without Villanelle bumping off someone, often with a wry
smile to camera as her victim is done-in thanks to some innovative or off-beat
method of our anti-heroine’s devising.
This is all made seductively entertaining, to the point where we are far from
horrified by these deaths and merely thrilled or excited by the audacity of the
outrageously attractive villain.
Crime on television is seen to pay. There is no ‘moral compass’ pointing out
what is right and what is not. There is a great deal of crime and hardly any
punishment.
The moral ambiguity is everywhere, even in relatively straightforward, bland
shows like Midsomer Murders or Endeavour.
Wherever you look on TV, the goodies always turn out to be baddies, the police
are invariably corrupt while ‘the system’ is rigged in favour of the rich.
The rich themselves, as well as figures of power or authority such as
politicians (especially if they are men) are always crooked.
Successful businesses are even worse - they have to be polluting, uncaring,
malign money-making machines run by unpleasant, greedy selfish people.
That means even if the business itself isn’t breaking the law - polluting
rivers, covering up blunders or something similar - it’s entirely
understandable if criminals feel the need to rip them off.
All of this is part of the fun. These shows need to keep the viewers guessing.
They have to mislead us as, in many cases, the intrigue is all about
‘whodunnit’ so there must be several plausible killers with good reasons to
want one or more of the victims dead.
Out on the mean streets of the Midlands, it’s doubtful if many of the drugs
gang members who go around knifing one another sit down quietly on a Sunday
evening for a nice episode of Vera.
Yet the constant displays of violence and dead bodies, often in grisly detail, on
our TV screens night after night must surely help to create a world in which
such behaviour is increasingly seen as normal.
At the very least, like violent video games, crime-porn makes the unacceptable
look attractive and without real-life consequences.
It's all very well for Helen McRory to write people off as ‘sick’ if they copy
the violence of Peaky Blinders. We would all agree. But this is what we
give ourselves as entertainment. Doesn’t that make us all just a bit ‘sick’ as
well?
I’m not advocating censorship. There’s no point, these days, when things like
the obscenity laws no longer apply. But must we be quite so fulsome in our
praise for these crime-porn TV shows? Could the TV companies not tone down the
violence a little? Do they bear no responsibility at all for the terrible real-life
crimes on our streets?
In the end, I suppose, we get the television we deserve. But if they must keep
broadcasting Peaky Blinders, couldn’t they at least employ a couple of
actors capable of delivering a genuine Brummie accent?
