This weeks Quantum has some of the usual items and some very unusual…
You can listen to it here….
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Here are some of the links.
2) Covid Crazy
Melbourne – the death of four South Australian babies and other
But with Melbourne under lockdown the distraught families of the infants were told that their children were not permitted to enter Victoria for the operations.
And SA Health was also of the view that the babies should remain in Adelaide for fear of exposing them to the virus in Victorian hospitals as they were immunocompromised.
The Boss
Transhomomisogyny, The Pope and Steve Chalke
“Transhomomisogyny is the converse of cisheteronormativity. If cisheteronormativity reflects the ways in which society rewards expressions of identity that conform to cisgender and heterosexual narratives, then transhomomisogyny reflects the ways society punishes all narratives straying from a cisheteropatriarchal supremacy.”
China – is growing economically while the rest of the world declines.
6) Nathan Apocada –
Euthanasia – Euthanasia in Queensland –and the Netherlands allows for euthanising children. The decapitation of a teacher in France.
Pam Ayers –
Mary Whitehouse –
We also look at
Life Life is a sexually transmitted disease – CDC
https://twitter.com/michaelkellahan/status/1319120878265724929?s=20
And we finish with this:
Quantum 116 – Circuit Breakers, Korean Yogurt Ladies, Amy, Jacinda, Hilary, and Lionel – and Cliff
https://patron.podbean.com/theweeflea
Excellent selection . Thank you.
Mary Whitehouse stood for decency during the 1960’s Sexual Revolution , an event for which the decadent Weimar Republic was a swiftly (and thankfully) terminated dress rehearsal.
I can never look at Steve van Zandt and not think of the Sopranos!
This podcast didnt come down thru my itunes subscribe acct. Was wondering if Apple blocked?
Thanks Viki – I will check….let me know if the problem continues….
Re Fleetwood Mac , according to Stevie Nicks , the band would not exist in its present form if she had not had an abortion :
https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/10/stevie-nicks-abortion-fleetwood-mac/
Could we meet in after work, I was asked? Asking a queue outside the City’s only concert venue who it was for, she’d joined it and bought two tickets,for that night.
We sat two rows from the front, far too close as it happens, and I was far to conspicuous in a suit. It was too loud at that proximity, with banks of loudspeakers a few feet away and nose hairs could be seen with a neck fixed, contorted upwards.
But it was typical high energy sweaty stuff, mostly from his first two albums.
An evening with my now wife and Springsteen, mid 1970’s, as we emerged, deafened, at the close, into the “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”
I think he drifted in his middle career and I know little of his music now. But a lifetime of creativity is a gift to few.
Nils Lofgren’s music was also good, in parts.
‘Still have some of their vinyl LP’s, being hi-fi buff’s (idolaters) of that era, with the, deck of deck’s from Scottish manufacturer Linn.
Fleetwood Mac’s drummer , Mick , is a favourite of mine . He combines unstudied musicality with an impressive joy in keeping the beat and much else.
Scotland produced excellent drummers in an earlier genre , mostly thanks to that Christian organisation , The Boys Brigade . About 1.31 along this video :
For some articles on how Catholics have responded to what the Pope said on civil unions, see:
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/pope-remarks
https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/pope-francis-didn-t-change-church-teaching-on-marriage
https://www.ncregister.com/news/pope-francis-homosexuality-comments-heavily-edited-in-documentary-no-vatican-comment-on-civil-unions
I missed this episode at the time somehow or another, so I’ll belatedly respond now…
The Queensland premier’s name is pronounced something like Palace-shay.
A handy tip I heard on the radio on how to remember how to spell it is this:
“Pala” – Slovak – Czech – United Kingdom
which becomes
Pala sz cz uk.
🙂
Ilike the very earliest Fleetwood Mac, not their later “pop” phase. In fact, I never really appreciated or understood blues music until I (very belatedly) heard Peter Green on Mac’s debut album. It is probably heresy to say it took me a white band to undratand the blues but there you go. As for the Stevie Nicks version of the band, I am not a fan.
However, the real thing I want to talk about is Mary Whitehouse. As an Aussie, I completely fail to understand how she became such a figure of ire and mockery, except maybe as a “Mrs Grundy” type. I can’t help but think she’d have been more wary received in Australia. For instance, Willesee never became a target of mockery after ripping into smutty glam rock band Skyhooks in this infamous interview:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O4wn_Nx_gwA
I mainly know her from being a closet Doctor Who fan though and knowing she raises the hackles of a lot of Whovians. Why, though, did the progressive leftists dislike her? I can understand them disliking her sexual morality but surely they would have been just as concerned as her about the impact of violence on children and found common cause over that issue?
With regard to Doctor Who, a kids’ show is obviously a soft target for her to pick but at the same time, it was meant to be a show for children and families and it did seem to betray its original purpose early on: the educational aspect was forgotten by the end of Hartnell’s time and during Tom Baker’s run, more and more violence and “Hammer Horror”/ gothic elements were injected. During Peter Davison’s run the show became extremely violent and nihilistic with Resurrection of the Dalek episodes infamously having more onscreen deaths than the original Terminator film! Somewhere along the line, the makers clearly had forgotten it was meant to be a children’s show.
Men in rubber suits pretending yo be monsters didn’t frighten my own kids but one thing that did scare them from the late Tom Baker era was the fact that the Master had a “shrinking ray” gun that left behind miniaturised corpses that looked like little voodoo dolls. These corpseswere always shown onscreen, which was too graphic for them. The director could just as easily have cut away at those moments and just implied death instead. That was just one deliberate choice amongst many.
Anyway, I talked to a psychologist friend workinģ in research at a major Rurooean uni a while ago and she believes that, yes, more solid evidence is emerging that shows more clearly that onscreen violence does desensitize us in a detrimental way, just as it has been shown that frequently viewing porn can rewire the brain.
Likewise, feminist should have found common cause with Mary Whitehouse over the exploitation of women, surely?
From the little I know of her, I am aware she had some huge moral nlindspits/moments of hypocrisy however: most shockingly, whilst decrying violence on television she was a supporter of the Vietnam War(!) Apparently she also refused to condemn a show (might have been Dixon of Dock Green) that referred to domestic violence in a positive light.
Anyway, it seems like more and more of her critics are reassessing things and admitting she was largely right now. As you say in the Podcast, there is obviously the Saville/Rolf Harris scandals right at the very heart of the BBC and there is also the decline of the broadcaster you have documented so well in recent times in this blog.
Here is a sample I have just found in a very quick search:
https://www.bbc.com/news/10202116
https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/sunday-review/regulars/culture-why-mary-whitehouse-was-right-all-along-828784.html?amp
https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/When-IT-Meets-Politics/So-we-now-know-that-Mary-Whitehouse-was-right-about-the-BBC
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3833610/amp/Mocked-cruelly-Mary-Whitehouse-right-SARAH-VINE-says-taken-tenth-campaigner-said-world-better-place.html
https://catholicherald.co.uk/mary-whitehouse-was-right-about-morality-says-barrister-who-fought-against-her/
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/mary-whitehouse-dies-aged-91-1.404830?mode=amp
By the way, because I also don’t understand a class-ridden society like England’s very well, am I correct to understand the BBC was traditionally considered the more “posh” broadçaster, favoured by the middle and upper classes, whereas working class people preferred ITV? I read something on another blog recently that inferred that.
To answer my own question, I found a colourful discussion on the matter here:
https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/1407098/is-itv-more-popular-in-working-class-areas-still
Yet more:
“The middle class watch the BBC, the working class watch ITV. But my upbringing was split down the middle, class-wise. I spent my first ten years in one of North London’s less salubrious areas, and my adolescence in a village just outside one of the most affluent cities in the south of England. I’m a class mongrel, and regardless of this there was no switching off programmes because they were on the “wrong” channel when I was young. I have a vague recollection of my grandparents being a little spooked by the concept of adverts on the television, but this is very fuzzy and might even be a false memory… As a kid, though, I’d flick between Multi-Coloured Swap Shop and Tiswas of a Saturday morning without my parents pulling the plug on the television and lecturing me on the evils of adverts for Frosties.
If anything, as a youngster I think I preferred ITV to the BBC. For one thing, we lived in London, which meant that late on Friday afternoons there’d be frosty few seconds as Thames Television handed over to London Weekend Television, which was always oddly satisfying to watch. In addition to this, ITV seemed bubblier and brighter. The colours were slightly over-saturated, with their Saturday evening light entertainment shows… having a strangely glassy look to them, especially by the 1980s. On Saturday afternoons when I wasn’t at a football match, they had wrestling or banger racing on, and there was a better chance of Spurs featuring on The Big Match than on Match Of The Day. They had Dangermouse and, later, Roland Rat.”
https://twohundredpercent.net/whatever-happened-to-itv/amp/
Also:
“BBC veteran Michael Buerk has said the broadcaster is increasingly excluding working-class talent in favour of “gilded youth”…
He claimed that the BBC is becoming a club dominated by those with family connections and the material means to further a “fashionable” career in the press… Buerk… has said that BBC concerns over racial representation and gender pay have blinded it to growing uniformities of class.”
https://www.itv.com/news/2019-03-26/bbc-is-excluding-working-class-talent-for-gilded-youth-michael-buerk-claims
One more illuminating article, about how actors these days from working-class backgrounds face a huge battle to make it:
https://www.bigissue.com/culture/film-tv-radio/olivia-cooke-defied-working-class-odds-to-win-her-role-in-itvs-vanity-fair/
Some of my comments didn’t come down. I will just repost the links without comment:
https://www.itv.com/news/2019-03-26/bbc-is-excluding-working-class-talent-for-gilded-youth-michael-buerk-claims
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/listen-bbc-s-comedy-sketch-attack-on-working-class-itv
https://twohundredpercent.net/whatever-happened-to-itv/amp/
https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/1212626/does-itv-have-a-right-wing-agenda/p2
(The other tjing I failed to mention is that, from the Peter Davison/Jon-Nathan Turner era onwards, more and more overt homosexual themes and characters have been inserted into Doctor Who, a trend that continues to the current day, so again that is evidence that yjis once-innocent children’s show has been taken away from the kids and turned into something else, which I think is a tragedy.
Okay, so it turns out the first time Mary Whitehouse criticised Doctor Who was when it aired a violent episode during Jon Pertwee’s run. (It just happened to be the first episode to feature the Master’s shrinking ray and “voodoo doll” corpses.) The producer admitted he had gone too far and toned the show down after that.
As discussed above, during Tom Baker’s tenure, the violence and horror returned and were amped up, and the producer during that period lost his job as a result of his idiocy. The whole story can be found here:
https://them0vieblog.com/2013/03/04/doctor-who-terror-of-the-autons-review/amp/
With regard to Palaszczuk and abortion, yes, that little election promise was pulled on us at the last minute. She was gambling that she was going to win by a huge margin, due to her successful handling of the (first phase of the) COVID pandemic and because the State LNP are hopelessly inept. I know a lot of older people who were going to vote for Palaszczuk, including at least one who had never voted Labor in his life, because she had kept them safe from the virus but they all changed their minds when she announced the abortion policy. Obviously her gamble paid off though since she did not alienate enough people with that policy to change the outcome. Just as vile is her constant promotion of the arms industry. She has actively gone out and won major military contracts for the State and frequently promotes the armaments and weapons factories located here on the news. A disgusting woman.
By the way, I don’t know if you are aware of this, Pastor, but, during the same-sex marriage debate, she gave money to an LGBT charity to act as her private vigilantes to go and search out hate speech against homoeexuals on the internet and prosecute the offenders:
“The service received Queensland government funding to monitor hate speech during the same-sex marriage debate. It said it found about 220 posts that met the legal definition of hate speech, but decided to pursue the 25 worst examples.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/26/far-right-group-accused-of-hate-speech-fails-to-appear-at-queensland-tribunal
The other side of the debate did not receive funding to search for and prosecute hate speech or threats against lobbyists, Christian groups, etc.
Okay, by coincidence I just heard on the news tonight that there was a large anti-abortion rally in Brisbane today “because the legislation is due to be debated in parliament in the next few weeks”.
Let us pray it is somehow stopped. 🙁
I will watch the QLD debate with prayerful concern. Will there be a conscience vote? That would be the best way to stop it if a lot of LNP and some ALP people find they cannot bring thhlemselves to endorse the legislation.
This discussion made me curious so I’ve just been off watching my first ever Mary Whitehouse interview:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KIiepKGNMWw
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WYx_GJqgoeg
Maybe it is the passage of time but as an Aussie, I just can’t see why she was such a target of vilification and mockery. She seems to be talking a great deal of sense in the interview and *some* of her ideas about sex education were definitely employed when I went to school in the 1990s: use of proper medical/biological terms for organs, talk of pleasure role and a big (in fact, huge) emphasis on the risks of STDs and unwanted pregnancy. Her understanding that teens do go through a rebellious stage seems to be fairly well accepted by educators and psychologists these days. In fact, she seems less dated in her opinions to me than the interviewer asking her the questions.
The books we used has diagrams and cartoons and the films we watched (mainly animations) explained things well. Apart from the fact she would have preferred parents to take on the teaching role instead of students, I daresay she would have largely approved of our curriculum. The thing we lacked that would have concerned her though was any talk of sexual morality since we were a secular government school, so there was no discussion of fornication as sin or immoraliy of masturbation, etc.
On the issue of film and tevision, it does sound like she was picking on the wrong targets with things like Doctor Who. The bigger question, though, is how do Christians handle “indecent” television without becoming just mirror images of the cancel culture leftists or the Muslims whi threatened the Danish cartoonist and attacked Charlie Hebdo? We don’t want to go around banning and censoring everything, surely, just like our opponents yet at the same time we do want to protect children and try to preserve society’s rapidly declining moral standards. How on earth do we do this, Pastor?!
I just watched another one:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ejU6NockGAc
(Before I go on, note I have never seen any of the Rambo films myself so I know them only by reputation as violent, braindead Hollywood trash…)
Anyway, once again, Mrs Whitehouse seems like a thoroughly sensible elderly lady, unlike the other smug people who continually musrepresent what she is actually trying to say by throwing strawmen up or talking over her throughout the whole debate.
The men at 4:20 and 15:30 seem to be the onky other sane people there.
With an increasingly-growing body of evidence that violent films do desensitise people, it seems her time of posthumous vindication is nearly upon us.
I watched the debate. It is interesting to see what Mary’s opponents do NOT say: none of them argue, “Well, I oppose all censorship as a matter of principle, therefore I believe we shouldn’t ban any films, even if that means we have to let through violent trash like Rambo as a cost of upholding freedom of expression.” I could understand and even sympathise to some degree with that kind of argument.
Rather than that though, they are actually arguing specifically in Rambo’s favour, saying what a wonderful, harmless piece of entertainment it is(!) I think that shows a big gulf between British and Australian attitudes at the time. Most Aussies would regard it as just another example of American cultural imperialism, foistering their violent, toxic trash upon us, whereas the Brit intellectual class evidently seem to love it, even though the film itself is anything but intellectual.
Yes, it is also quite shocking to see how Mary’s opponents twist her words and misrepresent her arguments (to her face(!))
You are right and Mrw.’s opponents tangle themselves in inots trying to defend it.
It is also interesting to see the range of differing (and contradictory) approaches they take:
1. The young blokes cosplaying (dressing up) as Rambo argue it is just lighthearted, escapist entertainment gor boys, allowing them to pretend to be soldier action heroes;
2. The Yank journo argues it is instead a form of therapy for soldiers traumatised by yhe Vietnam War and the horrors of conflict and instils patriotic values in people;
3. The actual Vietnam vet says it is over-the-top, unrealistic rubbish;
4. The psychologist, Cumberbatch, says it does not have any lasting impact on the psyche in which case, presumably, it would not help vets with PTSD nor would it encourage those young guys to dress up and fantasise about being Rambo after watching it! (Presumably some of those young guys had watched it at least several days beforehand since they had time to assemble their own Rambo costumes.)
I agree though, Jean, that a straightgorward argument that junk lile Rambo is the price we have to pay for artistic freedom would have been more effective and it would have been far more interesting and educational to see what Mrs W.’s counterarguments would have been to that claim.
I watched a bit of the first Rambo film online today, by the way, in order to be fair and see if Mrs W.’s opponents have a point and to avoid giving false witness. I can say that the film is every bit as moronic and violent as its critics say it is. The ONLY thing they can say in its defence is that Rambo only actually kills one person (and that is more or less by accident). Instead, he wounds a lot of people and does a lot of damage by shooting things up and blowing them up. I guess that is part of the fanyasy: cause a lot of destruction on a shooting rampage without killing anyone… (Apparently the death toll in the later films in the series is a lot higher though.)
The film could be a condemnation of police brutality in tge USA (obviously a huge issue at the moment) if it weren’t so utterly ridiculous. As it is, any such premise of police prejudice or PTSD amongst vets is just a pretext to get Sylvester Stallone to go off on his rampage. The film’s artistic and thematic value is zilch, in my subjective opinion. Everything I’ve ever heard about it is correct.
Thinking about it overnight, these are the (rather obvious) questions I’d have loved to have asked Mrs W. for her thoughts on if she were still around today:
1. Is it the way in which violence is graphically depicted onscreen that worries her or is it all violence (ie, is it a question of how violence is aesthetically presented?)
For instance, a lot of 1930s-1940s film noir detective films and 1950s westerns feature a lot of killing but they do not depict the deaths in the same graphic way as 1970s and 1990s action films with lots of “blood and guts”. Nevertheless, the perpetrators of the violence, like Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, are presented as heroes and their extreme acts of violence are presented as necessary, masculine and heroic, even when enacted as acts of revenge (flagrantly violating Jesus’ teachings). Do these films bother Mrs W. or is it only when thr violence is depicted graphically onscreen that it worries her?
Likewise, there is a theory in horror film-making that offscreen, implied acts of terror are more frightening than those shown onscreen, because the imagination of the viewer is left to fill in the gaps of what a tually happened. Does Mrs W. have concerns about this or only when the horror is directly shown onscreen?
2. What about context? I would argue there is a difference between a soapie showing an unmarried couple in bed together, glamourising their lifestyle and presenting it as morally valid, and a film showing a couple in bed together – or maybe even depicting a premarital sex scene between them – that ultimately depicts their fornication as immoral and shows the negative moral consequences of their sinful lifestyle choice. In general, are there ever cases where onscreen sex scenes are artistically justified and not “indecent” in her eyes?
Likewise, I have seen some films (mainly European arthouse movies) that present shocking acts of graphic violence onscreenbut in no way glamourise it. In fact, they show how ugly and disturbing the reality of violence is. These are the polar opposite of Hollywood films that show violence in a glamorous, positive, heroic light. (I am thinking of films like Haneke’s Hidden and Der Untergang (Downfall) about the last days of Adolf Hitler, which shows war in all its ugliness and not as some kind of heroic adventure.) Would Mrs W. also object to these presentations of violence that show it in a truly ugly light that disturbs the viewer or would she approve of it in these contexts?
One last comment – this is just from Mrs W.’s Wikipedia page but it shows why she was so aggro with the BBC:
“She commented about one unnamed television programme, believing it to be “unbalanced” and biased, in which “youngsters were asking questions [and] there was not a single member of the panel who was prepared to say outright that pre-marital relations were wrong. In fact, when a girl asked a clergyman, ‘Do you think that fornication is sin?’ he replied, ‘It depends on what you mean by sin and what you mean by fornication.'” Whitehouse thought it was a “big hazard” for “present-day children” that “so many adults do not stand for anything”, and affirmed that it was the responsibility of the BBC to have a “missionary role” to compensate for this social deficiency.”
Heaven knows what the old girl’d think of the even worse bias at the BBC (and the ABC down here) today. She must be weeping in heaven for today’s kids. 🙁
“The decision to become the self-appointed guardian of Britain’s morals stemmed from her pupils’ reaction to a BBC Meeting Point programme on premarital sex, which prompted her to write the first of many letters of protest and concern. “My objection was not to the discussion of the subject,” she wrote, “but to the refusal of those who might be expected to be clear and able spokesmen of the Church, to commit themselves to a firm position on right and wrong.” She continued: “The programme remains as a landmark in the creation of ‘the permissive society’ and a classic example of the power of television to create and change patterns of thought and behaviour.””
http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/4643.htm
“[Producer] Philip Hinchcliffe later remarked, “I always felt that Mary Whitehouse thought of Doctor Who as a children’s programme, for little children, and it wasn’t … so she was really coming at the show from the wrong starting-point.””
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse
There are lots of quotes from the first Doctor Who, William Hartnell, expressing his concerns whenever he felt the show was drifting away from its core audience of children. Here are a couple of examples:
“A lot of the script writers used to make the Doctor use expressions like ‘centrifugal force’ but I refused. If it gets too technical, the children don’t understand and they lose interest.”
““The first Dalek story I remember there was a bit of trouble over. It was in the script that when the Dalek was incapacitated or exterimnated, they were to have some oozy blood coming out of the base of the machines and a lot of them, Bill included, said ‘No, that’s too nasty for children’, so they cut it out.”
https://drwhointerviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-hartnell/
I was wondering why she was complaining about an old Robin Hood series too, but it yurns out it is not Robin Hood as we jormally think of him:
“Robin of Sherwood is on the pagan side; in this version of the story Robin is the Chosen Son of Herne the Hunter, a supernatural entity, a personification of an abstract, the British folk-memory of any number of pagan Horned Gods. Herne entrusts Robin with Albion, one of the seven enchanted swords of Wayland the Smith and tasks him with defending the spirit of the land. This means that forcible redistribution of wealth and the defence of the working class from the forces of law and order by martial rebellion is aligned with goodness, rightness, and truth on a cosmic level… Robin of Sherwood portrayed Britain in thrall to literal dark forces. Consequently, while every single episode of Robin of Sherwood has some sort of pagan or supernatural element, you could pick on a good half dozen episodes (and there were only two dozen) where the paganism tips over into legitimate folk horror.One of the most obvious is 1985’s double-length “The Swords of Wayland”, which I remember at the time being especially thrilling, and which disturbed my parents in ways that I only really understand now I can watch it as an adult… Robin (the spectacularly coiffed and marvellously charismatic Michael Praed) and his friends are called away from Sherwood to protect a village from the Hounds of Lucifer, demonic Knights with skull faces… Of course they’re not really demons, they’re just men with skull masks, but they do in fact serve Satan and most of them aren’t even willing, having been forced to obey by the magics of the high priestess of Lucifer, Morgwyn of Ravenscar…”
https://www.room207press.com/2017/02/we-dont-go-back-35-swords-of-wayland.html?m=1
This is where Mary and I part company though:
“The contemporary coverage of the Vietnam War, “the first ‘television war'”, demonstrated for Whitehouse that television was “an ally of pacifism”. In a 1970 speech to the Royal College of Nursing she argued: “However good the cause … the horrific effects on men and terrain of modern warfare as seen on the television screen could well sap the will of a nation to safeguard its own freedom, let alone resist the forces of evil abroad.””
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse
She was ahead of her time with regard to paedophilia though, given what we now know about what was going on at the BBC and in other high circles in Britain at the time:
“The Paedophile Information Exchange had been asked to help the Albany Trust, which received public money, to produce a booklet on paedophilia, which was to have been published by the Trust. Whitehouse mentioned the connection in a speech, asserting that public funds were being used to subsidise paedophile groups, and the Trust withdrew its support for the production of the pamphlet in 1977. However, PIE itself did not receive public funding.
Her subsequent petition against paedophilia and child pornography was signed by 1½ million people.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Whitehouse
I found some more information on the very eccentric version of Robin Hood that Mary disliked:
https://medium.com/cult-tv-archive/nothing-is-forgotten-robin-of-sherwood-e237774d78fb
Some quotes:
“Clannad’s music fitted perfectly because it complimented the final element that went into making the show so distinctive — the underlying layer of paganism that ran through the show.
Even in the eighties, imbuing the series with Pagan and occult themes was a bold move on Carpenter’s part. Not only did it provoke controversy in some of the more conservative quarters of the British press, but it also risked overwhelming the efforts to provide a solid historical grounding to the series if handled badly. Carpenter felt it important though that the series include this otherworldly element, in part because it seemed the best way to give Robin some kind of mentor, but also because the idea of continuity of culture and folk memory was so central to the series.
“We couldn’t use Merlin because Merlin was part of the King Arthur legends.” Carpenter told Starlog. “I cast around for a suitable mythological figure that was Celtic and of the earth, and it seemed to me that the old pre-Christian horned god — ‘Cernunnos,’ the Romans called him, ‘Herne’ we call him — was the ideal figure.”
“Herne as a place name crops up all over England,” he continued. “It’s quite likely that in those days he was very much revered as a spirit of the forest by local people because everybody always paid their dues to the Church and at the same time threw salt over their left shoulder and did all the superstitious things which actually date back to pre-Christian times. I wanted to show that the folk beliefs could go on alongside the existing religion.””
Also, this quote apparently appears at the start of the show:
““In the days of the lion spawned of the Devil’s brood, the Hooded Man shall come to the forest. There he will meet Herne the Hunter, Lord of the Trees and be his son and do his bidding. The Powers of Light and Darkness shall be strong within him. And the guilty shall tremble.” — Prophecies of Gildas.”
Given Gildas was a very stern and moralistic Dark Ages Welsh Christian preacher, I doubt very much he would gave written anything remotely like that….
At least the show’s creator has an intuitive understanding of Original Sin and Total Depravity:
““People haven’t changed, I don’t believe, in the last 2,000 years,” said Richard “Kip” Carpenter, speaking to Starlog magazine back in 1991. “We are still a brutal, licentious, greedy animal.””
That makes a refreshing change from the unrealistically positive view the secular humanist crowd has today.
There is an interesting, not altogether serious, discussion about Mary Whitehouse (and the 1960s in the UK) here:
https://justthetalk.com/notesandqueries/6073/mary_whitehouse?do=all
I don’t it woul have helped Mary to appeal to more academic sources in her debates but studies on the effect of violence in the media on the mind presumably didn’t exist in abundance at the time. Only now scientofoc studies are confirming what she was arguing through commonsense/instinct (and maybe a Biblical worldview). Her opponents seemed fairly smug and self-assured though so maybe even concrete evidence to the contrary would not have swayed them.
Anyway, I just ordered one of Mary’s books second-gand today to learn more about her views and rcacyly what positions she took, so thanks for revitalising my interest in this subject with your podcast, Pastor.
My Mary Whitehouse book just arrived. I’ve only had a quick flip through it but it seems to be very Biblical with a lot of scriptural quotes and thoughts about sin.
The chapter about censorship seems far more nuanced than her opponents hive her credit for: she acknowledges the negative risks of censorshop from the experiences in Nazi Germany, etc. She would rather television and film producers listen to her lobby group’s concerns and raise their standards, not impose censorship.
She also acknowledges the tragedy of the murder of the Kent State Uni anti-war protestors by the American National Guard.
In a wat that was modern, she also expresses concrrn over the emerging disease of anorexia nervosa and how porn can distort young ladies’ body image, so she is quite ahead of her time in regard. It is already very apparent the real Mary is quite a different figure than the media caricature and a reasonably profound thinker on difficult issues society is still grappling with today.
God bless.
I am in and outnof the home today, so I don’t have a lot of time to look at Mary’s book properly yet but I have a few more quick observations:
1. The whole point of the book is to provide evidence for her argument that the post-war replacement of Christian morals with those of secular humanism is responsible for most of the ills facing society today, a position readers of this boig will be most familiar with.
She acknowledges the shooting of the Kent State protestors was a “terrible tragedy”, which is good of her to acknowledge since she doesn’t naturally agree with their anti-war position. Unfortunately, she doesn’t discuss tuis any further.
Talking about Denmark, she notes that an early belief in the liberalisation of pornography laws was that people would soon become bored of porn and cease looking at it (ie, people were only interested in porn because it was taboo.) Unfortunately, what they found in reality was that people would move on to more and more extreme forms of porn like kinky fetish and sado-masochistic stuff. I’ve heard experts make the same arguments about internet porn today; addiction snowballs with some people and they beging looking at more and more extreme material, including ultimately often child pornography and violent rape material.
In an appendix, Mary notes children see the eorld in a very simplistic black and white way of “goodies” and “baddies”. There is some evidence are more likely to readily emulate violent or immoral acts if a goodie commits them, because they then think the acts are okay. So if Darth Vader or Kylo Ren go around butchering people, kids will know it is evil but if Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Obi-Wan or Rey (or for that matter, John Wayne) commit acts of violence, they will think it is okay because the good guys are doing it.
Anti-heroes and other morally flawed lead characters aree problematic because small kiddies aren’t ready for that level of nuance yet.
There is some talk about whether violence should be shown in news items, like for instance whether news is unnecessarily sensationalistic to show scenes of the Iran-Irsq War or an elderly woman on death row in the United States. I don’t know; I haven’t made my mond ip on that one.
More intriguingly though, she ponders whether seeing such unrelenting gloom, with so few positive hapoy stories on the news, is exacerbating the rates of depression in society. Again, she sounds ahead of her time.
In terms of censorship, she thinks about to what extent it is necessary once we accept we live in a fallen, sinful world.
A great buy and I am intrigued to read more to learn kore of the *real* Mary’s arguments, as opposed to those of the satirical bogeywoman caricature figure constructed by the English news media.
I have read some more. Mary is very Biblically-focused and deeply concerned about the encroachment of corrupt and unfaithful liberal preachers on the church, something I can readily relate to in Brisbane today. 🙁
Anyway, Mary definitely comes across as a faithful Christian witness who draws her strength from the Holy Spirit.
One argument I am unsure about though is her concern about the de-Christianisation of British society. She wants to reverse the process of secularization. Personally, I am more in favour of separation of church and state than her. Apart from that philosophical disagreement between Mary and I, I am finding the book is really impressive so far and my respect and admiration for Mary is growing with every sentence.
God bless.
I have discovered there is an Autralian website, rasingkids.net.au, that reviews film content and whether movies are appropriate for children:
https://raisingchildren.net.au/guides/movie-reviews/divergent
If you scrollto the bottom of the page, it says:
“SUPPORTED BY
Department of Social Services
Raising Children Network is supported by the Australian Government.
Member organisations are the Parenting Research Centre and the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute with The Royal Children’s Hospital Centre for Community Child Health.”
Mary Whitehouse would be delighted that our government is onside, as are various children’s scientific and medical research centres. This reinforces my view that her views would have received a warmer welcome down here than they did at home in the UK.
“And they were offended in him. But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.” Matthew 13:57