Television
We do care
James Delingpole
Something bothered me about the BBC's trendy new eco-drama series Nature Boy (BBC 2, Monday) but I didn't work out what it was until about ten minutes into the second episode. Up to that point, I had been very much enjoying it because for all its faults — which I'll come to in a second — it included many of the things which always go down rather nicely in one's liv- ing-room on an otherwise dull Monday evening. Like: dirty little slapper school- girls saying: 'You can **** me if you want'; car chases, explosions, wanton drug use and mindless violence; achingly gorgeous shots of windswept beaches, sunrises and grazing deer; urban sleaze, dysfunctional families and classroom tension; appalling cruelty and satifisfyingly dire revenge. And all accompanied by a fetching soundtrack featuring the likes of Nick Drake, Pulp and Beth Orton. The plotline wasn't bad either. It's about a sensitive, introverted 16-year-old foster child called David (handsomely played by Lee Ingleby), who seeks solace from his squalid home and the brutalities of the schoolyard in the beauteous surrounds of the nature reserve at Barrow-in-Furness. By the end of the first episode, he has been cast out of this Eden and heads off to find his long-lost father on a journey which will take him from the industrial wastes of Mid- dlesbrough, through the Midlands (where he gets to hang out with some eco-war- riors) and finally into the orchards of Kent. Befriending lots of cute furry animals en route, one imagines, because, hey, that's why they call him Nature Boy.
Now you might not have guessed this from my sophisticated metropolitan manner but I'm a bit of a Nature Boy myself. I get it from my father who used to be a world champion guppy breeder and I grew up sur- rounded by tropical fish, amphibians and reptiles like David, our six-foot boa constric- tor, and Bathsheba, his nine-foot girlfriend. When I was little, we used to travel all over the world catching rare specimens; we were also quite heavily into bird-watching — not here, where, let's face it, twitching is a bit of a saddo's hobby, but in places like Kenya.
Anyway the point of that autobiographi- cal detail — apart from the fact that it's been ages since I told you anything about myself and I'm a bit worried I'm dwelling too much on the TV aspect of this job — is that it's quite possible to be as big a liber- tarian and reactionary as I am and still believe that nature is generally lovely and worth preserving. And the annoying thing about Nature Boy is that I don't think it recognises such nice distinctions.
You can see this in the crude oppositions it sets up between the characters who love nature (Nature Boy, his eco-warrior girl- friend, the shy schoolboy with horrid mid- dle-class parents etc.) and those who don't (playground bullies, racists, wicked foster fathers, businessmen, farmers who shoot foxes, anyone with a posh accent, the Forces of Conservatism).
As I say, I didn't really notice this prob- lem in the first episode, perhaps because I was distracted by all The-Lakes-style histri- onics, not to mention that naughty school- girl. But it really hit home in episode two when we were introduced to a family of stock characters straight out of The Leftie's Big Bumper Compendium Of Class Hate Targets: the emotionally-sterile, sexually- frustrated, career-fixated bourgeois hus- band and wife with the little boy whose needs they just don't understand. The wife, almost inevitably, was acting as PR for a stereotypically evil, environment-destroying aggregates company called Blexco; the hus- band, more surprisingly, was a toffee-nosed government environment minister who kept whingeing about how ghastly it was being forced to live in a filthy urban con- stituency oop North. I say 'more surprising- ly' because, though the series is set in the present, this man displayed all the attributes which dramatic cliché tradition- ally apportions to Conservative ministers, not Labour ones.
And this is when the horrible truth struck me. Just as on Radio Four panel comedy programmes you still hear alternative comics making digs at a Tory administra- tion that left office three years ago, so, in TV drama land, there are writers who apparently believe that the Forces of Con- servatism are not merely the greatest threat to our beloved land since Adolf Hitler but that they're still running the country. This I find strangely terrifying. It is not enough, apparently, that the Forces of PC should be allowed to emasculate the police, destroy the Union, drag us deeper into the mire of Europe, tax the middle classes by stealth, appease terrorists, wipe out the grammar schools, trash the greenbelt, try to abolish hunting and so on. But they want to have their cake and eat it by making out that they're still members of an oppressed, dis- enfranchised minority and the plucky guardians of all that is beautiful, truthful and noble as well.
Such I fear is the subtext of Nature Boy: only people without a salaried job who appreciate Nick Drake, campaign for the environment, rarely wash and save little baby foxes from horrid farmers truly care about nature. Everyone else — and that probably includes me and you, dear reader — is just evil fascist scum.
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