As if we haven’t got a few other things going on at the moment.

That this House notes with concern the comments of Brian True-May, the producer and co-creator of ITV’s Midsomer Murders, in which he implied that the show would not be successful if it included ethnic minority characters; welcomes the action taken so far by ITV; further notes that there is no place for such attitudes in today’s society and media; further welcomes ITV’s work in integrating minorities into some of its programmes, such as Emmerdale; recognises the need for greater representation of ethnic minorities in television; and asks ITV and other broadcasters to continue to ensure programming is properly reflective of modern British society including in quintessential English villages.

Primary sponsor: Vaz, Keith
Sponsors: Bottomley, Peter Caton, Martin Connarty, Michael Corbyn, Jeremy

A more dubious selection of tossers is hard to imagine outside of a police station line-up room.

Anyway, what has been said can’t be unsaid and the keys to the Outrage Bus have been duly fetched. But what of the over-hyped and misreported race bandwagon?

The main trouble with including non-white characters in Midsomer Murders would be that it would limit the ‘who done it’ choices. Television nowadays is so PC that a non-white suspect couldn’t be the murderer…so viewers can rule them out as soon as they appear on screen.

That sort of writing approach spoiled the last series of Foyle’s War, for example, because Horowitz’s politics shone through. One episode had a Labour candidate as a suspect, and you knew right from the start that he had to be innocent. Another had a Tory suspect, and predictibly he did it. US series Law and Order is painfully similar – even when the disabled black lesbian is found gun in hand over the victim shouting that she’d capped his ass the eventual villain always turns out to be the white Republican congressman.

On the broader subject of ethnic minorities in English villages, this post-war British government propaganda film “Springtime in an English Village” is a must-see:

The idea seems to have been to attract immigrants from the Caribbean, but somehow the image of a little black girl being selected as the May Queen in a perfect English village, in around 1950 (not 1944 as the page claims), may have given a rather misleading impression.

And so back to Midsomer. Apart from the stunningly high murder rate in this leafy part of the world, everything else should reflect the part of the world that it seeks to mimic. And that means appropriate rather than quota-driven characters.

Unload the Outrage Bus, chaps. This one’s a non-starter.

And if that puts you in the mood for black-and-white propaganda, you have a few minutes to spare and want a good laugh, take a look at this excellent wartime film on how to boil a cabbage.