Believe it or not, there is similarity in the writing style of James Herriot and Hemmingway.

I remember that episode, I'll try and watch it all when I have some time.

Below average troll.

3/10.

Last edited by formby (2014-08-25 17:20:23)

There is nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia.

Recognising the good elements does not necessarily mean you have to buy into the whole package either.

I am not so sure about telly. I did not really watch the series in question,but when I switch on for The News the last few minutes of "The Village" are usually a bastion of political correctness.

However, our industrial and rural  heritage is still clear to see by just looking around. JB Priestly " An English Journey" gives one man' s view of particular places at a certain time. Architecture and landscapes are recognisable over generations.

I don't think poverty is airbrushed out. "Ragged Trousered Philanthropists", " No Mean City" and the John Healy classic "Death of an Irish Town" address that, to give just a few examples.

What I do take issue with are the revisionist historians - the jingoist Niall Ferguson is the prime example. Then again, we have also put up with the communists like Hobsbawm over the decades.

Last edited by Kingston1an (2014-08-26 02:04:21)

Formbs - it is nearly tempting to enter into a full-blown, blow-by-bloody-blow, exegetical debate about all this but it would not repay the effort because it would be side-lined and eclipsed by another prize-winning thread from you typing up smart-alecy, historical, sartorial reminiscences of Ye Olde Englande. However, I am prepared to return to my sheep and stand by my guns (to join two surprisingly different metaphors). First of all I put up the link of "All Creatures Great and Small" because I happen to take the word of several people who were alive at the time (and not in positions of any especial note or wealth) that the several series do, consistently, give a fairly accurate representation of the times that they depict; including living and working conditions, manners, morals, clothing, housing and even the cars and enthusiasm for campanology.   I have already owned that there is a feel-good factor in the stories and this implies looking through rose-tinted spectacles, to some extent.But what is so very wrong with seeing the best and tending to ignore the worst in our immutable history as, within reason, we should see the good and tend to ignore the worst in our fellows? Kingstonian has already made this point and I support him in it. Oscar Wilde said that we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars - but he failed to go on and say that some of us are wallowing in the effluxions and detritus that we find washing around in the immediate vicinity and lose no opportunity to play up the fact that the stars are too far away from the empty cans, old burger wrappers and dogshit in which we are (some even gratefully) lying, to be of any account or interest.

You love harking back to the under-class and Britain's big problem with it as though it is unique and extreme enough to taint everything else.  Consider, if you will, the Indian caste system and the existence of the 'untouchables'; consider the Portuguese annihilation of whole races of people in what is now Brazil and their spectacular and phantastic enthusiasm for enslaving and exploiting; look at the Belgians in the Congo, even mutilating for petty misdemeanours; consider the North American depredations against all the great North American tribes, by rape, pillage and land theft (continued by 'Americans' long after the British 'left') -and many other examples of man's inhumanity to man and then go on to consider that almost every human society has a complex underclass of: the disabled, the unenabled, and the dispossessed. Britain had feudalism and bondage, which was quite nasty and oppressive; then it had an agricultural labouring class and developed the world's first industrial working class and always there have been the helpless young and orphaned, widows, those stricken with early disability and the aged and infirm to be looked after and, for long, this was left more or less to individual consciences of families and those in control, until the Poor Laws, but not every land or mill owner was a tyrant and the statue of Cupid at what was Piccadilly Circus originally pointed his arrow down Shaftesbury Avenue to commemorate the great beneficience of the man after whom that avenue was named.

However, besides those incapable of helping themselves there has also always been, in the underclass, the Stan Ogdens of this world: bums, spongers, hobos, scroungers, shirkers and lazy articles who, somehow, have managed to suck a good deal of the lifeblood out of the country and they have been doing it in all of history and they are still at it and the hazy, lazy socialist boys like you embrace the concept that they are somehow deserving of help and understanding, along with those in real need, because they have some unspecified back problem or depressive illness; instead of getting a bloody good kick up the arse.

Last edited by Dudley Clarke (2014-08-26 08:34:17)

Last edited by Kingston1an (2014-08-26 09:09:25)