Plastic History from the BBC

I sat through BBC's 'The Village' wondering why a production so lavishly funded would be so short of horses. The story was ostensibly about a farmer attempting to harvest a huge, post-war sized field of wheat by himself with a scythe. And no horses. One wondered how he had ploughed the field in the first instance - perhaps he harnessed his downtrodden wife and sons to the plough. And no farmworkers, either; in reality, even small farmers in 1914 employed several agricultural labourers, particularly a farmer who owned his farm, one of the rural elite when a tenancy for two or three lives was the norm. And though the thing was called 'The Village' it was actually a small market town, complete with municipal baths in which the town's women spent their leisurely day like Roman matriarchs. Public baths in reality of course were for public hygiene rather than leisure; places of carbolic soap and harsh treatment to rid a crowded town's poor of lice and fleas.

Either the writer Peter Moffat knows very little of his history, or this is yet another deliberate distortion of history by the BBC. The Telegraph's TV critic Ben Lawrence knows no better either; "This was drama as history where the past is definitely another country" he writes this morning. Dickhead.

This isn't petty picking at minor problems of costume or props - a Sam Browne worn the wrong way, or a car not yet in production - the whole thing is so fundamentally flawed, so historically dishonest as to do real harm to the memory of the harshness of pre-Great War rural life. So, in place of this sanitised, plastic BBC history I offer you two good alternatives;

washing the corpse - from das Weisse Band

First, Michael Haneke's 'Der weisse Band' - available in full length on Youtube though with Spanish subtitles  http://youtu.be/lpOwFLER47E

The second of course is Peter Hall's 1974 film 'Akenfield' - still available on DVD, but this clip gives a flavour. With horses.

I was right. The EU is a religious cult.

If I ask a whole load of you a question, and you come up with an answer I don't want to hear, do I take counsel and reconsider my position? Not if I'm the EU I don't.

The EU will take a sample of you, and lock you in a room with EU 'experts' until they think you've changed your mind. Then ask you the question again. If you still get the answer wrong, they'll lock you up some more until the Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and you agree with your torturers. Then they'll publish the 'new and accurate' poll results.

You think I'm kidding? Do you imagine this kind of totalitarian distortion doesn't exist in the 21st century? Think again.

See HERE. It's called 'Deliberative Polling'. It's the EU's new and preferred way of presenting public opinion.