Midsomer Murders: a Producer in Trouble

Typical?

This week there was a fascinating case in the British media. The programme called Midsomer Murders, known around the world as Barnaby or Inspector Barnaby, portrays a typical English village (with a very untypical murder rate!).  

I have written about it before. One of the reasons it succeeds is that it occupies very familiar territory: for detective stories about English villages are a well-known genre around the world, made famous from the novels of Agatha Christie and many others. 

Thus Midsomer Murders is different from -- but in the same mould as -- Inspector Morse and Poirot and Miss Marple, all widely shown around the world. (Midsomer Murders is actually based on the books of Caroline Graham – no relation).

There was furore last week when its producer – and CEO of its production company – in explaining how he designed this show, said he had cast no black or Asian performers since black or Asian people would be out of place in a typical English village.

In real life Brian True-May is not completely correct. Like everything else, England’s villages are changing.  I live in one and we have a black family and one Asian family in a village of about a hundred homes. They participate fully. One family member sits on the village council – or Parish Council as it is called.  Another is a doctor.

True-May has been widely criticised and suspended from his job.

So this is the issue.  Midsomer Murder is fiction.  It’s a story -- it has a high audience among older, more conservative viewers in the UK and its job is to continue to appeal to that audience. In other countries it may appeal to different groups. But it needs to be recognised for what it is, to have a clear and coherent identity, and to be part of a well-established tradition. People like to know what they are getting before they invest their time in watching something…

When a producer is casting a show, he or she will look for ways to clarify and simplify context and location. He or she is using clues to locate the work in the viewer’s minds and to make recognition and navigation easy. It is legitimate to use every trick – a story is an illusion, a simplified frame for fictional events which the viewer will need to track.

Or to put in another way, the villages in Midsomer Murders are stereotypes. Whatever their consequences for social behaviour, in cultural terms, stereotypes are a tool, a way we navigate our lives and make decisions. I have referred before to the work of Boyd and Richerson who have tried to explain why humans have “culture”. They conclude it is because we cannot research every decision: we need a way of making decisions in a way that is not as crude as pure animal instinct, but is “quick and easy”. Copying available models is one way we do that. Stereotypes are another: this looks like a kind of person or place I have met before, so I will treat them as I did then. 

Entertainment uses stereotypes – recognizable frames that provide familiarity and easy understanding for people and events that are new to the viewer. Stereotypes are almost by their nature behind the curve of reality.

So, going back to the main issue, the question is: should casting be colour blind? UK urban drama often features black and Asian actors. There is social truth in this, for minority ethnic groups live mainly in cities in the UK.  

Midsomer Murders is not a challenging work but it does its job, staying firmly within an established tradition. But even much more “difficult” works like The Wire from the US use stereotypes.

So should social policy determine the casting of a TV series? Many might say, yes, if it contributes to social or racial prejudice. But there is no evidence that Midsomer Murders has contributed to racial prejudice. Nor is there evidence that the producer himself – though he may have been impolitic – is prejudiced. You could say he was just making a professional judgement.

Others might say it would be better with a more typical social mix. The point is: should a producer have been fired for explaining his casting policy which prior to his interview has raised no complaint – except from critics who found it old-fashioned and dull?

Media Strategy: Ancient Instincts, New Stories

Image via Wikipedia

Murder: Fascinated and Revolted

Last week I tried to say something about the very basics of content that sells.

You have something they want and they cannot do it themselves.

But this is entertainment. What people want is mysterious and highly personal. How can you generalize?

That’s what we try to do.

Last week I suggested that one of the things that excite people is a place where they would like to be.

One of the reasons US content is so popular – but only one – is because it has been, for the last century, a country where enterprising people could go and live, a destination of choice, a place you could dream about.

In the process it became a familiar place – which is another condition for content that travels. There needs to be some element of familiarity.

So if your location is not a familiar one, you will need to figure how to make it both familiar and interesting. For Familiarity and Novelty are both essential. Relevance is important, too. People will be interested in a location that is cool, fashionable, leading edge in some way, a place they would want to visit or a way of life they might like to be part of….

In addition, you need, in the main, to show people whom the audiences can look up to, characters who are smart, or good looking or brave or enterprising and who show it in the things they do or say. As I have said in a previous post, evolution has provided us with a need for behaviour models. It’s how we learn what to do, how to behave.

There are other things that matter deeply, so much so that you can revisit them again and again and again, concerns that come from deep in our evolutionary past. For example, we are obsessed with murder. Perhaps that is because humans only survived by living in groups that held together because the punished murder –, most of us have a deep revulsion for murder and a deep desire to see the murder caught and punished.

But that deep code of instinctive justice also drives the desire for revenge – which often comes into play when a justice system breaks down. These instinct sometimes fight one another create conflicts which interest us greatly.

By the same token we are endlessly interested in sex and love. Biologists would say that that our role is to carry genes forward into the next generation so we ha e an instinctive interest in everything to do with reproduction, finding the best mate, etc..

Culture and Evolution; some new thinking.



Not by genes alone: The PowerPoint is available on request

This will be my last post of 2010.  I'm going to look at something absolutely basic to what we do.  We are all in the culture business. 

But what is culture?

A wide definition is preferable. Culture is simply the way we behave in a certain place at a certain time. Breakfast in Japan is different from breakfast in Britain.

Something as deeply embedded as culture must be instinctive. We acquire a large part of it without thinking about it. But then, like all instincts, it must have a use, be, as they say, adaptive.

Do other animals have cultures?  In some chimpanzee bands one member may find a new way of doing something useful, like extracting termites with a stick, and others copy him or her.  But it doesn’t seem to go much further than that. 

Yet that, according to the latest thinking on culture, we have an instinct to watch others in order to learn things, determine how best to behave.  The two academics who have articulated this viewpoint most clearly, Boyd and Richardson, use the term "fast and frugal heuristics" which simply means that a quick way to decide what to do in a given situation is to copy others. This appears in a book called Not by Genes Alone.