e, and Dan turned up a newspaper report of the time, noting how charming she looked. “Patronising” was his verdict, and I thought, yes, that’s the word alright – but you, not them. The whole tone of the programme is patronising. “The enormous condescension of posterity” in EP Thompson’s phrase. We get silly little reconstructed tableaux of Mitchell and Kenyon and their co-workers in silent comedy mode. We get constant reminders of how backward these people were; of how they may look like they’re happy and having a good time, but really their lives were awful. And then we get some (wonderful) shots of a parade, including – oh dear! – people blacked up as golliwogs. “They didn’t realise they were being racist.” Well maybe, just possibly, they weren’t being racist: you simply cannot judge people then by today’s standards. As the programme went into a “black” section, with every shot analysed to see if there was someone of African descent in the frame or not, it wasn’t clear to me that we were, as the programme makers liked to think, looking back at these ignorant primitives from some enlightened perspective where we’ve at last got all this race stuff sorted out.
Got that off my chest. I’ll still be watching the rest of the series.
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