Sunshine and showers on the Coast

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 21 August 2005 00:25.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment wanted us all to be part of the same broad humanity - but the brutal truth is that we are all a bit tribal.
Simon Schama, a latter-day Macaulay quoted in yesterday’s Guardian as saying something necessary and true - and, given his background, rather refreshing.

Schama, along with fellow-historian and liberal Tristram Hunt, was endeavouring to explain to TV producer and Guardian invitee Stephen Moss the unexpectedly high viewer figures for BBC2’s series, Coast. Of these Moss writes:-

One recent episode of Coast, on BBC2, attracted 5 million viewers, the highest rating factual programme on the channel this year. And it’s not only programmes about the British seaside that are currently winning audiences: series featuring Britain’s landscape (Alan Titchmarsh’s British Isles: a Natural History), history (Tony Robinson’s Time Team and their Big Dig), and our native wildlife (Bill Oddie’s Springwatch) have been some of television’s biggest recent hits.

Now, many a Guardianista will find this highly vexing and Shama’s truth “brutal” precisely because tribalism is anathema to the enlightened mind. Why would anybody be patriotic? Ever? So Coast’s popularity must reveal something inadmissible at work, something that ought, after all these decades of Marxian counter-culture, to have been dissolved away … something not in the plan for a racial revolution though tolerance, egalitarianism and individualism. But what, precisely? Why are the natives so recrudescently nativist?

Moss goes for damage limitation:-

It may be that an enthusiasm for their landscape and countryside doesn’t quite explain why more people than expected have been tuning in to natural history. It could be that there is another, more topical, reason too.

The “Blue Planet effect” was a phrase coined after the first episode of David Attenborough’s landmark series on the world’s oceans was broadcast on September 12 2001, achieving stupendous viewing figures of almost 10m. A few commentators suggested that the key factor was because the programme was broadcast just one day after the cataclysmic events of 9/11. After witnessing the unimaginable horrors of the previous day, did people want to escape - at least temporarily - into another, more tranquil, world?

It might not be too fanciful to suggest that, in the aftermath of the London bombings, people are subconsciously searching for something that renews their faith and pride in their country, and have found it in a televisual trip to the seaside. As one enthusiastic viewer of Coast commented: “A new look at our country - coincidentally at a time when we need to show increased patriotism.”

So the liberal imagination - or, at least, Stephen Moss’s liberal imagination - takes refuge in selective specificity. We are provided with a single causal factor in “the London bombings”. Well done, Stephen - an excellent patsy. And we have the safely amorphous medium of “people” – including all those, of course, always vibrant Somalis, Bengalis, Afghans, Zulus, Guineans, Iraqis, Albanians, Filipinos, Turks and Caribbs who never miss a good natural history programme. Thus our mossy friend attempts to ameliorate Shama’s brutality. It’s not much but it’s all he can do with this beastly, inchoate, deeply Conservative, deeply brutal backwardness of ours.

I particularly admired, by the way, his use of the word “subconsciously”, as if those newly individualist natives are merely being swept along to an unnecessary, illogical love of kin and country. It’s all just a blind consequence of four “home-grown” Moslem bombers and four other hapless immigrant types. Why, I wonder, are liberals so bloody arrogant? Why do they think they are the only ones capable of reason?

It’s time to enlighten our Guardian friends as to what is going on here.

Coast is the second piece of minor good news I have written about at MR recently. The first concerned the 1.2 million track downloads that followed BBC Radio 3’s Beethoven Experience in June. That proved that a substantial number of us have not been entirely won over by drug-clubs, over-hyped children’s entertainers and that hip-grinding, small-brained Rothstein garbage. Eventually, the relentless battering at our ears and/or our sensibilities makes us strain for a sweeter sound. We know it when we hear it, and we heard it in June.

But Coast goes many a mile further than that. It speaks to us – and to us exclusively - of our forefathers, of their quite staggering achievements in lives of too few years and too many hardships. It speaks of our history and ours alone. It tells us something of who we are, and who can never be us. It tells of a clear, bright island, sacred to us alone, in a murky liberal sea. It tells us unfussily, as suits our constitition, that there is a shore at which liberalism may lap but never claim.

This is mightily encouraging. Any schoolchild knows that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. We are slowly approaching the last surge of the high tide of liberalism. It may take a decade or even two before the tidal flow is finally spent. But spent it must be, and something in us will not just remain untouched by it afterwards but will be activated. And that’s the inner meaning of those high viewer figures for Coast. There’s nothing of merely sub-conscious reaction there. In a world in which a relentless race revolution seeps through every little crack and tolerates no public dissent, genuflecting before our island history, our uniqueness, even our homogeneity is activism of a kind.

This is easy for me to say, of course. I’m already somewhat active, and not very typical. So this morning, for example, when I logged on twice to my BT Yahoo spam-filter, the first time to find that my screen was decorated by a black female face, the second time to find a black male one, I did not grow that fraction more resigned to sharing my homeland with our, of course, always vibrant, new countrymen and women. I grew a fraction more sick and tired of the sight of them. I grew more truculent, more desirous of collaring some schmuck at BT’s ad agency and asking him/her/it how he/she/it could possibly consider negroid images commercially advantageous.

With each solicitous, petty-marxist invitation to be more tolerant, more open to difference la la la, I take another step back towards that sacred psychological island. So the garishly coloured link to Africa Lives on the BBC Radio 3 front page I visit every day does absolutely nothing to commend World Music to me. The outlandish minority representation on the ITN news only causes me to wonder whether a certain, incorrect dissonance obtains among white journalists in the broadcast media when they are once again passed over for the plum job. And as for children’s television, fortunately that’s just about redundant in our household. I don’t have to risk apoplexy every time I walk into the family room.

Still, atypical or not, I believe my response to liberalism’s encroachments are the future, not the past. And only if programmes like Coast one day cease to appeal to something in us will I ever change my mind.

Tags: Media

Comments:

Posted by Andrew L on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 01:09 | #

5 Million viewer’s , with a population of 75 Million, would I be out of order to suggest that the rest probably can not speak English or realy care, they are watching Al Gazeers, the real propaganda station. Perhaps BBC should use Ethnic subtitles in lingo the rest of the population can understand. Interesting concept, now day’s.

Posted by Geoff Beck on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 01:14 | #

GW, where is the Lake District? Where might I find that on a map?

I know this place from Wordsworth’s poetry.

Posted by Andrew L on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 01:57 | #

Have you loaded Google Earth on your computer yet Geoff, check it out using Satalite photo’s, Exellent.

Posted by Svigor on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 02:56 | #

I did not grow that fraction more resigned to sharing my homeland with our, of course, always vibrant, new countrymen and women. I grew a fraction more sick and tired of the sight of them. I grew more truculent, more desirous of collaring some schmuck at BT’s ad agency and asking him/her/it how he/she/it could possibly consider negroid images commercially advantageous.

With each solicitous, petty-marxist invitation to be more tolerant, more open to difference la la la, I take another step back towards that sacred psychological island.

This eloquently describes one of my major emotional motivations for WNism. Aside from any logic, I feel that my race is worth preserving because obviously others feel it needs to be destroyed.

There’s a very powerful “f—k you” factor there.

Posted by Stuka on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 02:59 | #

Beautiful, beautiful post, GW.

One of my favorite responses to liberalism’s encroachments is to immerse myself in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan, and H. Rider Haggard, among many others.

Please wake me whan all this is over.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 03:12 | #

I understand that they’re bringing out a new edition of “This Island Race” the 1902 history of Britain last re-issued for the Queen’s Coronation. Distribution of this to all the impressionable kids you know would probably be good—it may be PC by Edwardian standards but it was written in 1902 and it treats the Empire as a positive.

The Scottish and English Enlightenments were not universalist, merely religiously and racially tolerant. It was loonies like Rousseau who went in for the universalist rubbish, which was picked up by the Jacobins.

Posted by Lurker on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 03:13 | #

Andrew - In fact UK population is only @ 60 million.

Geoff - Lake District: top left hand corner of England. Find the bottom left hand corner of Scotland, its south of there.

Posted by Andrew L on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 03:44 | #

The BBC would have a bigger audience in Australia if it were shown, The only enigmatic structures our Indiginous ansestory left are some kindergarten rock paintings in caves, and some excreations in the landscape. Poms need to get out more and look around their own country , it amazes me how many Pom’s have not a clue what is on such a small Island as is the UK, and they live there.
Sorry Lurker, my population scale had a post modern moment.Ha
What is the Highes mountain in the UK?

Posted by A Casual Observer on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 03:48 | #

I’m unfamiliar with “This Island Race.” Who is the author, when will it be published, and where can I get it?

Much thanks.

Posted by Lurker on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 04:11 | #

Ben Nevis in Scotland is the highest UK mountain. Second highest is Snowdon in Wales.

Posted by Lurker on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 04:27 | #

Sorry Im mixing up my lists there!

Ben Nevis is the highest in the UK, and highest in Scotland. Snowdon is highest in Wales but several Scottish mountiains are higher so at least the top five UK mountains are Scottish.

Cant remember the highest English mountain, think its called Snaefell Pike (in the Lake District Geoff!) but its not much lower than Snowdon. In fact I think the Welsh & Lake District mountains are pretty level pegging in size. They certainly look the same in terrain, same rocks, same vegetation, same sheep, same relentless rain!

Welsh mountains do have lots of great steam railways, if you like that sort of thing, which I do and the Lake District rather lacks.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 04:36 | #

Lurker, as I recall Wordsworth himself had something to do with keeping the railways out of the Lake District. He was something of a Tory environmentalist.

Posted by Lurker on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 04:42 | #

Mark - Good point, Id forgotten that.

Posted by Andrew L on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 05:07 | #

I just Googled the Images , Looks Freezing, and a bit barren, I remember a scene from Who Dares Wins was take in those ranges,Brass monkey weather.Our winter is a heat wave comparatively speeking to UK.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 05:09 | #

Wordsworth was not only a great nature poet, he was also a conservative political activist.

He came closer than any other great poet to expressing a genuine, non-liberal traditionalist conservatism in his poetry.

For instance, here is his homage to Edmund Burke (in The Prelude):

“I see him, -old, but vigorous in age, -
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove. But some-
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born ...”

This is entirely out of the spirit of liberalism.

Liberals generally want to reduce social ties to what we can voluntarily consent to. Social ties are supposed to be based on what we contract to, as an expression of individual will.

This rules out ethnicity, as this is something we inherit and have no choice over.

Wordsworth explicitly rejects the liberal view: he writes of allegiances we are born to, and of customary social ties.

This view does permit a defence of a traditional English nationalism based on an inherited ethnic identity.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 05:45 | #

Lurker, while we’re on the subject, my brother once had a bloodhound (a St. Hubert) he got from an expat British woman living in Switzerland, named Bratton Tor Malcolm (the dog, not the woman), which the woman told me was the name of a peak in Scotland (Bratton Tor, not Malcolm). (Or, Bratton Tor Malcolm was the official name at any rate; everyone used the name Foghorn for short, that being what the voice resembled when loudly baying—when the dog was loudly baying ... not the woman.) Is there such a peak over there? (Or was it Wales, maybe? I forget now ...)

Andrew, I thought they only had winter down there along the southernmost fringe of Tasmania, the rest of the place being tropical—you know, John’s mangoes and sugar cane, Steve Erwin’s crocodiles, and all that: not stuff that goes together with winter ... I’m probably wrong ...

(Another fine log entry by the way, GW: first-rate.)

Posted by Andrew L on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 06:27 | #

We have had some snow in the ranges and Ice on the windscreen, but I Think you would rather love Australia Fred, sounds like you would like a bit of the colder climate, so Mark might give you a tourist brochure on Victoria, or as we say in the north , Mexico, ha.No crocks around here, just Far north Queensland, and N T, only crocks we have are the lefti labotomized .I would rather think a job as an Editor for a news paper group would suit you down patt and a welcolm one at that, just have to kick some of the less informed reporters out first.

And as Churchil said in WW2 when the Japanees were trying to take Australia, Let them take it we will get it back later.
Hows that for Migrant recruitment

Posted by Mark Richardson on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 12:36 | #

Fred, you have a somewhat misguided notion of the Australian climate.

Melbourne can be chilly in winter. Cold enough for most European visitors to complain, even though there is no snow. And cold enough for a lot of Victorian retirees to shift to Queensland.

It does snow occasionally in the foothills near Melbourne. The heaviest snow falls, though, are in the Australian Alps in eastern Victoria and southern NSW (the south-east part of the mainland - Tassie doesn’t get as much snow because the mountains aren’t as high).

Still, even in Melbourne it’s a lot sunnier than most parts of Europe or North America. It’s a dry heat over most of Australia - the tropical climate is found mostly in far north Queensland and the Top End.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 21 Aug 2005 14:29 | #

Thanks, Andrew and Mark. It sounds like Arizona’s and New Mexico’s climates—dry heat with places where it gets cold and may snow because of mountainous elevation.

Posted by Steve Edwards on Mon, 22 Aug 2005 10:35 | #

Perhaps up to two thirds of the Australian continent is not really worth inhabiting - most of the country is desert. That’s probably part of the reason we only have 20 million people.

Interestingly enough, Perth (south west, my area) apparently has a very similar climate to Florida, and is very close to its antipodes. Otherwise, Australia (except for parts of Victoria and Tasmania) doesn’t really have a temperate climate as with substantial areas of North America and Europe.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Mon, 22 Aug 2005 17:12 | #

So that’s where Titchmarsh got to. And here I thought GroundForce was a natural history of the UK.

Living in the Great (not so) White North, it’s always amazing to see Tommy lay concrete footings without digging down four feet to get below the frost line. Damn that English climate.