Wednesday, November 21, 2007

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/21/television.bbc

'Marginalised working class' a focus for BBC2


White working-class life in modern Britain is to be the focus of an "unflinching and provocative" BBC2 season.

The "white season" will explore issues around immigration and the "complex mix of feelings that has led some white working-class people to feel marginalised", the channel said as it unveiled its schedules yesterday.

Highlights will include White Girl, a drama by Abi Morgan, which features the Bleak House actor Anna Maxwell Martin as the mother of 11-year-old Leah and her siblings, who are the only white children at their new school in Bradford; a documentary, All White In Barking, exploring relationships in east London; and The Poles Are Coming, about the effects on the economy if recent Polish immigrants returned home.

Roly Keating, the BBC2 controller, said: "The white season is a complex look at how life has changed for the white working-class in Britain."

The documentaries also include Last Orders, the story of the Wibsey working men's club in Bradford, Rivers Of Blood, which examines the impact of Enoch Powell's speech 40 years on, and Wonderland, a set of real-life stories.

Other highlights include the drama series House of Saddam, set in Iraq, and BBC2 will broadcast the Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood. The channel has also commissioned comedy shows, including Lab Rats and Taking the Flak, about a small African war as viewed by journalists. In Alternative Therapies Kathy Sykes explores meditation, hypnotherapy and reflexology, and Monty Don, in Around The World In 80 Gardens, visits some of the world's most celebrated gardens.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was telling a friend the other day that, the best places to live now are high ethnic areas where you are guaranteed rubbish and graffiti removal, regularly swept streets and police stations that man their desks 24hrs a day with more than 2 officers on duty. Councils are pouring millions into regeneration although some of it is undesirable and a blot on the landscape, millions are also being spent on the roads.

When I compare this to the White Working Class sink estates that I have visited regularly it is blatantly obvious where the money is being spent and where it is not. Ethnic businesses also receive a higher percentage of grants and they literally hog the chambers of commerce as though it were their own living room. Ethnics also have the advantage of interpreters and personal officers who ensure they get ALL the benefits available and they will also fill out the forms for them. No one does this for the indigenous British and the proof is in the billions of benefits and grants that go unclaimed each year by pensioners and British families.

White children are also suffering in schools where they are overlooked by teachers forced to educate those who cannot speak a word of English or are disruptive in class and I believe this failure to educate properly will bear its fruit 10yrs from now. This government may well have thought it ok a 100yrs ago to have an ignorant and uneducated White working class because there was always factories they could work in and employment that didn’t require that you read and write but those industries have been destroyed by sending the work overseas to be done by cheap labour while any work left here sees more than 500 foreigners a day arrive to do it at a cheaper rate. Immigration isn’t needed in Britain, Britain needs to educate the people it’s responsible for, I look around and all I can see is a generation failed by one of the wealthiest countries in the world while it happily spends billions on arseholes like Mugabe and any other murderous regime that for now looks after its foreign interests.

The left enjoy bleating when you mention the millions who died in the war for a better and safer Britain but thanks to the left, Britain is no longer better and it certainly isn’t safe. Immigration has stressed housing, education, employment and health care, these being the very corner stones of Britain and what made it the envy of the world. Now we have pensioners dying in hospitals because they have no family who visit. ‘NIL BY MOUTH’ conveniently placed above the bed while they starve and dehydrate them to death. These people who worked to make this country and some who fought in the war and in another bed a well attended Asian pensioner surrounded by family receiving good treatment because they have their families watchful eye. What of our families? And, the families of the future born into a country where there is no hope and no future unless you count flipping beef burgers for McDonalds, serving Pizza, turning down a bed in a hotel room or watching over the soon to be built mega casino tables where people can spend money they don’t even have. Who can blame people for getting drunk and wasted on drugs if that is their future? And, what will such a generation be capable of once it finally sees that they have no future? Britain was once a country that created and in order to create once again it will need to destroy what it has now.