How Did We Let It Happen?

In the seventies towards the end, there was a general movement; it led towards a feeling that something big was brewing.
Some of us, more than you might think, were attuned to this surge and felt it beginning to surface in the General Election of 1979.
We were ready to see what came.

And what came was so good that we were none of us disappointed.

But a different type of person was 'attuned' to the swell also; these people were not friends of Freedom.
They were 'upside-down' people with a problem for every solution, a catch to deflate any victory and a pin to prick any bubble of happiness.
They went to work right away.
Realising it would be a long and thankless task, they played the long-game.

At every turn they were outmaneouvred, outclassed, out gunned.
But only in the broad strokes.
They were happy, but not content, to pick up the details, the wreckage, the flavour of the smaller parts of the changes that progress caused, and turn these to their purpose.

So, when the 'wobblies' looked for new examples ('paradigms') in the social atmosphere, these were supplied.
Their ingenuity was such that we all thought, indulgently, that they were actually with us when they created the new stereotypes with which to illuminate the age.
But they were crafting, carefully, an image of impotence with which to anaesthetise us for the ages to come, a way of inducing an intellectual and critical coma, a world which screams at us to be considered 'realistic' while all the time stretching beyond all comprehension the bromides of the 'heroic' chattering classes projected onto the unlikeliest scenarios, like-you guessed it- Amanda Burton playing a 'Police Chief' at Scotland Yard.
It doesn't matter that she is 'sleeping with the enemy'.
It doesn't matter that she is using the 'gun' that none of us is allowed(instead of a 'Jagged Edged' knife).
No.
What matters here is that the universal Tofu of British dramatic characterisation is projected into the situations we are expected to thrill to.


And it is at this stage we realise that the thin, grey master race of Camden Town and Islington is being foisted on our consciousnesses as a drug, a drug which brainwashes us into the delusional belief that these nobodies are possessed of potency and effectiveness.

This isn't the 'girl next door' taking over the world.

This is the tongue-in-cheek fraudster doing it, finally out of the box we put him in during the eighties, and triumphantly ramming his post-post-post everything corrupted irony down our throats and into our front rooms.

And they wonder why audiences are collapsing?
Will votes follow?