"Grantchester" - and the annoying tendency of cosy crime dramas to pat us on the head for being so enlightened

ITV’s latest cosy crime series, Grantchester, is set in the “and is there honey still for tea?” Cambridge village c. 1953. There’s a square-jawed, blond, painfully reticent, Scotch-guzzling, jazz-loving vicar, who saw service during the war and who now uses his (seemingly inexhaustible) spare time to help the local detective inspector (who, oddly, is a Geordie, possibly because Robson Green, the actor playing him, can’t do any other accent but his own) investigate crimes, of which there are plenty, as there always are in English villages in British cosy crime dramas set in periods where there was almost no crime. The series is based on novels written by the son of James Runcie, an actual Archbishop of Canterbury.

It’s not bad. I wouldn’t cry if I missed one, and there’s a bit of slightly tedious background stuff involving the girl the vicar should have married getting ready to marry someone else whom we don’t like very much because the vicar didn’t manage to pluck up the courage to pop the question… or something. And now the dreamboat cleric is on the verge of getting entangled with a German widow whose English husband was bumped off in Episode 1, and who is back in England to sell their house. (Last night’s fourth episode ended with the former frau and the bachelor vicar playing piano on the vicarage lawn.)

Anyway, what I wanted to moan about (again) was the tendency of comfy crime series set in the past to congratulate us on having outgrown the dinosauric illiberal attitudes of our forebears. I complained a while back about the BBC’s George Gently, where the grizzled eponymous detective, Martin Shaw, was a classic Guardian-reading frappuccino-quaffing left-liberal seemingly transplanted from modern-day Islington to the North-East of the 1960s in order to demonstrate what a bunch of knuckle-dragging fascists we were back then (obviously, Inspector Gently been forced to flee London because all the cops there were as bent as buggery – it seems unlikely that anyone sent to prison in the metropolis back then hadn’t been fitted up).

Grantchester takes a similar approach to George Gently, with each episode devoted to an issue dear to the heart of Today Programme-listeners. So far, we’ve had racism (vile prejudice leads to a flashy young black working-class Londoner with a criminal record being arrested on suspicion of stealing a diamond ring from the upper-middle class Grantchester home where he was – far-fetchedly – a dinner-guest). It looks as if next week will be devoted to the same subject, as it appears to be set in London jazz clubs, and the same young black man is due to stage a reappearance.

Last night’s episode centred on homophobia. An otherwise respectable middle-class cottager was stabbed to death in the local bogs, a wife almost let her house burn down after putting a match to a poison pen letter confirming that her husband batted for both sides, and the house of the young man who her husband had been waiting for in the Gents was daubed with the word “QUEER” after he had been arrested for gross indecency. In case that wasn’t enough gaiety for one episode, the young verger who has just been employed by the vicar is also a player of the pink oboe – although we suspect he is keeping his natural tendencies in check, to such an extent that he was last glimpsed sitting down to tea with a local girl who has been giving him the eye despite the fact that he’s as camp as a row of tent-pegs. No doubt the theme of being forced to “live a lie” will feature heavily in future instalments.

We also had a touch of (anti-German) racism, because, let’s face it, there’s no such thing as too much racism on TV, and Robson Green’s Geordie (yes, he’s a Geordie who is also called Geordie, which I suspect counts as an example of provincialism) went off and got pissed and monstered suspects rather that supporting his wife as she looked after their infant son, who was in danger of dying of whooping cough (doctors and hospitals apparently hadn't been invented back then). You see, men in olden days (apart, of course, from sensitive liberal-minded vicars) were dreadfully emotionally repressed and buried their feelings rather than confronting them. (The baby, bless it, survived, and Geordie stopped getting drunk and brutalising gays, and also apologised to his wife a lot for the crime of being a manly man in the 1950s.)

Don’t get me wrong: I’m genuinely delighted that homosexuality is no longer illegal and that a black Londoner attending or hosting a dinner party in a place like Grantchester no longer seems in the slightest bit unlikely. And it seems reasonable for dramas set in the past to make the occasional passing reference to the many ways in which British society has changed over the years. But when we sit down to watch cosy crime dramas set in the past, surely what we want to do is escape the world we inhabit – where we constantly have to monitor what we say and think and where we’re forced to fret about racism and homophobia and inequality and whether we’re sharing the housework and childcare duties equally or inadvertently offending any serial offendees. No, what we want when we sit down to watch cosy crime is to enter an alternate reality where all that stuff simply isn’t the main issue. I have absolutely no desire to watch dramas peppered with words like “queer” or “darkie” or where women regularly have their bums pinched by insensitive troglodytes, but at the same time I really, seriously object to watching entertainment which denigrates the past while patting us on the head for being such good little modern progressives.

I'll close now, because it’s time for me batter her indoors for being five minutes' late with my lunch, shout random racial epithets at passing black people, and get ready for a spot of queer-bashing – after all, isn’t that what our wicked, unenlightened forebears used to do?