Britain’s obsession with empire, as portrayed in one more dreary TV drama, reveals how marginal & mediocre the nation actually is

‘The Singapore Grip’ seeks to revive the UK’s sense of itself as distinctive and important to the world – however really achieves the alternative. Such TV reveals want to start out depicting the repressive actuality of colonialism.

Britain’s empire has now been misplaced for nearly so long as most of it existed. The Raj, as an illustration, disappeared with Indian and Pakistani independence 73 years in the past, having been established solely 90 years earlier than that. Regardless of nearly no Britons in the present day having any lived expertise of it, that very transient second of imperial grandeur casts an unbreakable spell over their creativeness, expressed in a nationwide obsession with abysmally written, third-rate colonial dramas wherein ham-faced Brits sweat profusely of their starched collars whereas swilling an excessive amount of gin and lording over and lusting after the natives.

This yr’s dreary, coma-inducing dose of nostalgia comes within the type of ‘The Singapore Grip’, a supposedly satirical drama about Britain’s ignominious defeat by the Japanese in 1942 that started airing on Sunday evening. The Battle of Singapore was a second as pivotal in trendy historical past as that of Stalingrad or the Normandy landings, when European energy in Asia collapsed for good, resulting in the decolonising of the planet’s most populous area and America’s growing enmeshment with it.

Additionally on rt.com

The rise of China, India and the remainder of the continent all have an antecedent in that occasion, however moderately than utilizing it as a possibility to show the general public one thing in regards to the world and its place inside it, the broadcaster, ITV, has chosen, but once more, to feed the nationwide habit to soothing, morphine-shot fantasies a few bygone age when the British have been prime canine.

Posing as a historic drama, the present comprises loads of traditional automobiles, tailor-made linen, Brylcreemed coiffs and plantation mansions – accompanied with a loud, incessant big-band rating to assist the extra silly viewer to recognise that it’s all set, you realize, within the 1940s –  however pathetically little historical past. It focuses totally on a seedy plotline wherein a slimy three-piece-suited English businessman cajoles his nubile daughter into seducing his boss’s son. Blonde, bouncy and summer-frocked, “In fact, I’ll!” she exclaims. “No matter he’s like!”

After an hour of this garbage, one is left with no sense of how or why the British have been in Asia, or why the Japanese have been within the strategy of evicting them. One does, nonetheless, get a very good perception into the deeply confused relationship the British have with their previous and the remainder of the world.

Britain is a rustic neurotically obsessive about its misplaced empire, but obstinately reluctant to studying something about it – a dysfunction that results in reveals akin to this, filled with white colonists intriguing amongst themselves for development, whereas having nothing to do with the natives aside from giving orders to grovelling employees or when searching for sexual favours. The one important non-white presence within the first episode is a stupendous Chinese language girl who throws herself on the mercy of white saviours, and a pair of turbaned and semi-naked ‘yogis’, employed as celebration leisure, who chant a Sikh liturgy earlier than breaking tea cups on their heads and consuming them, after which one bites the top off a stay snake and eats that too – depictions that might sit properly in a Leni Riefenstahl or DW Griffith characteristic.

Additionally on rt.com

The British characters are nearly all both shysters, silly or incompetent – a weak effort at satire that solely obfuscates the politics moderately than critiquing it. And the dearth of any native narrative leads, after all, to a robust suggestion that the empire was a form of mutually agreed voluntary enterprise, with no trace of the repressive system that saved a tiny clutch of white individuals sipping cocktails in palatial fan-cooled manor homes whereas hundreds of thousands of Asians slaved away within the fields: a wilful denialism adhered to by the British to this present day.

The present is a dramatisation of a novel by JG Farrell, a third-rate author whose trilogy of empire-era fiction, written within the 1970s – of which that is the final – are correctly ignored by the cognoscenti in the present day. However the resurrection of this guide for a TV collection now could be in keeping with the favored, empty-headed manias of a Brexit Britain that final month had a match of hysteria on the risk that the BBC may cease broadcasting renditions of ‘Rule Britannia’ – a trashy if jaunty piece of jingoistic doggerel set to sailor music – as if have been the equal of banning Wagner in Germany or Shostakovich in Russia. composition no higher than the typical nursery rhyme is an unofficial anthem ought to have been a trigger for nationwide embarrassment and its retirement welcomed, not railed towards.

The saddest irony on this land the place irony started is that the extra Britain does to revive a way of itself as distinctive and important to the world – be it via leaving the EU, holding onto infantile ditties or producing inane costume dramas – the extra peripheral and mediocre it reveals itself to be.

Suppose your pals would have an interest? Share this story!