Ken Loach is right – British film and TV has become too cosy and conservative

Ear­li­er this week Ken Loach, pro­mot­ing his new film I, Daniel Blake, lev­elled an attack at the BBC (and by exten­sion the TV indus­try in Britain) by claim­ing that news cov­er­age is rightwing and TV is too tak­en up with cosy, nos­tal­gic peri­od dra­mas that present a false and rosy view of history.

He’s right. Though there are pock­ets of resis­tance, the over­all flavour of tele­vi­sion and indeed cin­e­ma in Britain tends towards the con­ser­v­a­tive. Loach point­ed the fin­ger at Down­ton Abbey, but Poldark, Vic­to­ria, The Dur­rells in Cor­fu and War & Peace are just some of the oth­er recent cos­tumed enter­tain­ments he might well have named to make his point. Next up is The Crown, the new series by Stephen Daldry and Peter Mor­gan which retraces the ear­ly days of the courtship between Queen Eliz­a­beth II and her hus­band, Prince Philip.

In film, recent peri­od dra­mas about the estab­lish­ment fig­ures Stephen Hawk­ing (Oxford) and Alan Tur­ing (Cam­bridge) have starred Eddie Red­mayne (Eton, Cam­bridge) and Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch (Eton, erm, Man­ches­ter), while A Roy­al Night Out, about the queen and Princess Mar­garet bunk­ing off roy­al duties and hav­ing it large for an evening, was released last year.

If not all of these films and TV shows are cosy per se – the bat­tle of Borodi­no was a bitch – their appeal still rests on pre­sent­ing an image of the past that flat­ters mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties with ideas of past glam­our and sophis­ti­ca­tion. Vic­to­ria presents a zingy and beau­ti­ful queen, against all evi­dence we have as to her char­ac­ter; Poldark gives us a com­plete­ly banal look into a total­ly fan­ta­sised past in which the birth right and nobil­i­ty of the aris­toc­ra­cy was self-evi­dent and undis­put­ed. If peri­od dra­mas don’t all have to be ahis­tor­i­cal and cosy – and Loach him­self has made three peri­od dra­mas with a left­wing view­point on his­tor­i­cal events, with more than their fair share of death and mis­ery – it cer­tain­ly seems that audi­ences are increas­ing­ly look­ing to be com­fort­ed in their con­cept of an ide­alised country.

How not to tie this into Brex­it, and the false pic­ture politi­cians pre­sent­ed of Britain when advo­cat­ing for it? Audi­ences appar­ent­ly don’t want to be remind­ed of unpalat­able truths about the con­sti­tu­tion of Britain, which has nev­er been all white, nev­er been peace­ful, nev­er fair.

Is Britain inter­est­ed in reflect­ing its own polit­i­cal real­i­ties in fic­tion, onscreen? The prob­lem isn’t mere­ly that the work­ing class­es are seem­ing­ly out of favour now, both on screen and in dra­ma and film schools – it’s that British minori­ties in gen­er­al are hav­ing a hard time of it. Last week in an address to mark the start of the BFI’s Black Star sea­son, David Oyelowo bemoaned the lack of oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple of colour in British film – and it’s cer­tain­ly true that he won’t be cast as AA Milne or Cap­tain Went­worth any time soon. He, Idris Elba, Naomie Har­ris, Archie Pan­jabi, Thandie New­ton and John Boye­ga are just some actors who have had to look to the Unit­ed States for work. The BBC’s ambi­tious diver­si­ty and inclu­sion strat­e­gy, set out in April, is pre­sum­ably still in its ear­ly stages.

The over­all view isn’t total­ly mis­er­able: Sal­ly Wainwright’s Hap­py Val­ley presents work­ing class lives, and par­tic­u­lar­ly women, and Ordi­nary Lies, writ­ten by Daniel Brock­le­hurst, takes its cue from a vein of British social real­ism that Loach pio­neered. The BBC mini-series Cap­i­tal aimed to show a cross-sec­tion of soci­ety and in address­ing the bank­ing cri­sis took aim at a polit­i­cal issue of our time. This Is Eng­land ​’90 bowed out just last year, more acclaimed than ever.

In the past few years, Under the Skin took a side­ways look at work­ing class Scot­land, and – of all films – Padding­ton broached the sub­ject of immi­gra­tion. But what Loach cor­rect­ly deplored, name­ly a lack of real engage­ment with cur­rent pol­i­tics in Britain’s film and TV out­put, is hard­ly pos­si­ble to deny. Will Britain’s par­lous state prompt film­mak­ers to talk more about immi­gra­tion, inequal­i­ty, racism, pover­ty, or are we going to keep look­ing inward?