Colin D. Robertson says Hello Donna,
You said:
"the ridiculous and utterly misplaced rant against a supposed effort at "Social Engineering" (whatever that may be!) is downright blameworthy. The decision to cast a woman of color as Guinevere is a casting choice. It requires no comment at all given a suitable attitude to the color-blindedness which ought to characterize the attitude of any decent person."
Oh contraire. I think you'll find the BBC is very far from colour-blind, being obsessed with casting ethnic minorities no matter how inappropriate.
Producers get paid yearly bonuses if they hit a certain target for casting ethnic minorities. It is not, therefore, accidental that such casting takes place. The producers are doing it for the money, their superiors are doing it for PC streetcred.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6240208.stm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1202787/TV-bosses-face-sack-dont-hit-diversity-targets-says-BBC-executive.html
http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2006/no1_campion
So while it is technically true that casting a woman of colour as Guinevere is "a casting choice", the choice is politically-loaded and very deliberate.
Given the low quality of acting in "Merlin", I find the idea that they chose "the best actor for the role" very unlikely. Casting ethnic minorities is a conscious decision - especially when the roles would never have been white in the first place (a black Friar Tuck etc.).
It is all deliberate, and springs from middle-class self-hate and Western colonial guilt. They are trying to retcon British society to modern standards. Kids watching this will believe that Britain was always multicultural, and will therefore be confused about people moaning about immigration and political correctness etc. It's rather like the Nazis putting a swastika flag into the hand of every child at the earliest opportunity, to ensure their obedience.
Thus, it is social engineering.
mad mushroom says:While I'm no expert on Arthurian/British mythology, I'm pretty sure there would have been no black knights at the court of King Arthur (or whatever was the true basis for the legend). Or even black settlers. Then there's the issue of the lack of religion in this series. King Arthur - myth or fact - was supposed to have ruled sometime after the retreat of the Roman Empire. Rome brought Christianity to these shores: and that Early Insular Christianity was still alive hundreds of years later when Pope Gregory I sent Augustine to convert King Æthelberht of Kent. Yet in the Merlin series the only time religion gets any mention at all is when that tired, old phrase 'It's a mark of the old religion ... sire' gets trotted out.
There are no priests in Merlin, no chaplains, no monks, no prayers, no God. In case such content offends certain minority quarters, perhaps. This is revisionist, politically correct history of the worst sort: mind-numbing pap for the same generation that lapped up Russel Davies' camp rubbish. Unfortunately, the forces now in control of the government and the BBC (New Labour & Tories being pretty much the same after all, and they'll soon realise it) are determined to stamp out all the cohesive institutions of our society that ordinary people have taken for granted for the last hundred years: family, marriage, religion, courtesy, law and order. Ever read George Orwell? The totalitarian state described in '1984' destroys these institutions to prevent organised opposition. What does the New Labour/Tories/Lib Dem Alliance have in store for us?
Colin D. Robertson says:Mad_mushroom, I agree with everything in your post.
You suggest that Christianity is omitted in case it offends minorities. I think it's even worse than that: it's in case Christianity offends the trendy white middle-class Islington metrosexuals (who populate the BBC itself).
The communists realised in the 1920s that national identity is a block to revolution. While it is too early to define what the future holds, it's fairly obvious that national identity is being slowly crushed (if it weren't, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron would each have been done for treason).
New Labour's desire for mass immigration into Britain ("to rub the Right's nose in it") is evidence that social cohesion and the wishes of the British people mean nothing to our elite. Then there's Jack Straw, who wrote that "the English as a race are not worth saving", though thankfully he never got the chance to revamp our constitution.
The wilful skewing of our history and mythology by our cultural elite (the BBC) is a way to estrange the British people from their own heritage. And you don't do that for the sake of it. There has to be some reasoning. Either it's because, as you suggest, some new world order is on the way, or it's more open-ended; a simple dislike for Britain, Christianity, and our history. (I definitely think the Empire has a role in British self-hate.)
Of course people say Merlin is "just a TV show". But in a time like ours with people reading less and less and community playing an ever smaller part in people's lives, TV shows are of monumental cultural importance. They inform the public of who they are, where they came from, etc. If a modern child derived all their knowledge of their heritage from shows like "Merlin", they wouldn't even know that they live in a post-Christian country. Then again, Russell T Davies (whom you rightly vilify) openly said that historical accuracy doesn't matter.
It even seeps into programmes like "Lark Rise to Candleford". While it may be charming and cosy, the way it is done (acting, dialogue, music, etc.) is so anodyne that I barely recognise it as English life. They've simply transposed trendy/banal attitudes onto pretty backdrops.
Either way, I do believe that in this century there is going to be massive civil unrest in Britain, and that programmes like "Merlin" will one day be seen as the corrosive agents of left-wing dogma that they are. When they realise en masse that their countries are being stolen from them by a detached, sanctimonious elite, people will rebel as a matter of survival.
