Shimmering Chimera

Modern British TV as an opiate for the Boomers

Of course, not all Boomers. I realise very well that many people over 65 “get it”. I also realise that many under 65 don’t. In any case, my goal with this essay is not to vilify the Boomers, but the commissioners in mainstream TV who keep them asleep.

Admittedly, the acquiescent can be criticised for acquiescing, but that is to be at war with human nature, which seems a fool’s errand. The masses will take whatever opiate is presented to them - religion, culture, DVD boxsets, football, even Wimbledon and The Antiques Roadshow. But those who purvey the opiate must, surely, know what they are doing, so they deserve castigation.

My observation is simply this: a lot of modern TV, whether soap opera, drama, documentary, sitcom or panel show, seems to be designed to stave off awareness of the disaster unfolding around all of us in contemporary Britain.

Eastenders in 2025. There is racial diversity but still a preponderance of White people, and everyone speaks with an English accent and is integrated into a single culture. Total fiction.

Of course the target for this bamboozlement is as wide as possible - all ages, all classes, and definitely all White people (the dangerous people). But the Boomer generation are both especially susceptible to bamboozlement and especially important to target with it. The former, because they are largely insulated from the realities of modern life, being cooped up at home with often little to do but watch TV, relying on it for their awareness of things. The latter, because they, still now, are the ones with the money, and because they are the largest generation, and thus (in theory) could cause a lot of problems should they ever realise how bad life is going to be for their grandchildren.

When reality is unpleasant, it is understandable to take refuge in things that are very different from it. I do this myself, only watching TV dramas from the 1970s which depict a Britain radically unlike that of today. But I watch these dramas painfully aware of this fact, not in denial of it. By contrast, when your average Boomer watches Have I Got News For You, they cheerfully believe that the panellists are discussing Britain as it is today, as it still is, which is much like it was in the mid 2000s. Younger people know that this is false, but Boomers don’t.

This perhaps explains why so much of modern TV seems to be tailored for that generation, now in their late 60s and 70s. For current affairs and politics they are given agonisingly smug panel shows bemoaning “the Tories”. For period drama they are given cutesy things like Call the Midwife and Lark Rise to Candleford - which, incidentally, are often laced with modern attitudes, transplanting 1990s Boomer presumptions into 1890s rural England, etc. But perhaps the greatest deceit is in the “contemporary” dramas they are given. These show a Britain that nobody under fifty would recognise except from their early adulthood, because it is fossilised in the mid 2000s, and blooms with the thinking of that time. That thinking was fraudulent even back then, but it seemed plausible. Today it lies in ruins, yet the televisual expressions of it continue anyway, flickering eternally on the gogglebox.

On TV:

• east London is still mostly White and everyone has an English accent, unpolluted by MLE

• the mainstream of political discourse (which is now very left-wing) is the only sensible option. Everything else is crank extremism

• Muslims are nice and integrated

• refugees are all deserving cases who mean well and just want to help Britain, work hard, and certainly not molest White schoolgirls

• Black men are intelligent and non-violent

• White men are stupid, racist, sexist, violent and insecure

• White people are entitled

• racists are White

• rapists are White, and usually middle-class

• mixed-race relationships work and the children they produce are well-adjusted, actually more so than White children since they have to learn how to get along in racist Britain - vital lessons in humility and resilience

• twenty-somethings buy houses

• terrorism is committed by “the far-right”, not Muslims or Mossad

• racist conservatives are in charge of everything and must be dethroned

• kids go to university and then get professional jobs

• migrant hotels are an absurd right-wing myth

• feminism has made life better

• Pakistanis are helpful shopkeepers who shake their heads in disgust at news of White child molesters

• childless women are happy

• climate change is real and every sensible person believes in it

• “racists” have absolutely no just cause and are simply creating trouble because they are hateful idiots

• the Conservative Party (and now Reform UK) are a bunch of arrogant aristocratic racists and the worst thing that could happen is them getting into 10 Downing Street (which, on TV, is where real power lies, not in high finance or global bodies).

In short, you would think that the last twenty years simply haven’t happened and we are currently in 2006.

But of course there are some discrepancies. Even though it’s 2006, there is something called Brexit, and some dark fact symbolised by the word “Rotherham” (something so dark that it is almost never spoken about), and there is a bad man called Elon Musk. And there is an evil force called “MAGA” that stalks the land and is linked to racist rednecks and the Ku Klux Klan or something like that. There is a threat called “incel”, poor young men tricked and controlled by a villain called Andrew Tate. And there are other villains who also have no place in 2006 but are here anyway - bad men like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. These bugbears exist like pustules on the bottom of 2006, spoiling it, not belonging here but insisting on sticking around to ruin everyone else’s fun. If not for them, if only they would disappear… life in 2026/2006 would be just great.

But that is actually reassuring, because it means that life in our society is, by default, just great, and all we need to do is defeat these horrible things that don’t belong here in 2026/2006. It’s a beautiful Groundhog Day, it just has some glitches. And a glitch, being a small disruption of an otherwise harmonious pattern, lacks any justification or support from outside itself, so can easily be excised and destroyed.

Of course, this doesn’t actually work in practice. The MSM have been presenting these bugbears as glitches for decades, yet they remain in British society and are stronger than ever, making the fakeness of the Groundhog Day ever more obvious. This is because the glitches are not glitches but grave systemic problems that arise from the fabric of modern society itself, that result from its core (and fraudulent) premises and thus cannot be swept away except under a rug.

But the Boomers don’t realise any of this. After all, the TV has been their priest all their lives - it would never lie to them! So they keep watching, and keep believing, and berate younger people who desperately try to tell them about the world beyond the opiate.

The Boomers might die sincerely believing that we are just one step away from conquering racism forever, and that when we finally manage it, John Lennon will return to Earth.

But I don’t really think so. When the migrant hotel opens in town and your grandchild’s best friend gets molested, it is human to react, to wake up, and to realise (to some extent) that the TV was lying to you all along. I think many Boomers will live long enough to make this realisation and redeem themselves, despite the best efforts of the scum who run TV.

For those of us in the thick of it, there is a temptation to condemn the Boomers for not seeing reality. But I almost hope they never do. It would be a cruel thing for a man at the end of his life to realise he had been duped all the way through it.