Two things resonated with me over the weekend. The first was after I’d popped into our nearest (small) town for the Saturday paper. It should take me twenty minutes, but I got chatting to someone I bumped into, so it took longer. As we chewed the fat, we watched a traffic warden attach parking tickets to the windscreens of three cars parked on double yellow lines while their owners were in the post office, the deli, and the butcher. Parachuting a traffic warden into the town on Saturday mornings must be a nice little earner for the council.
Rural village living in Somerset.
As I drove back home, I listened to R4’s Saturday Live where Broadchurch writer Chris Chibnall was promoting his latest book, Death at the White Hart. Chris lives in the market town of Bridport in Dorset. He recounted how locals there responded positively to his depiction of a small English town in Broadchurch. What was particularly interesting was the reaction of some reviewers to an episode where a character walked through Broadchurch, greeting residents they knew as they went. Chris said that some wrote this wasn’t realistic. Similarly, they dismissed scenes in a pub which was the hub of the community as also being fantasy, because pubs like that don’t exist in Britain anymore.
Village pub and post office, Exmoor.
An Alternative Britain
What’s incredible about this isn’t the obvious, that both scenes reflect life in any number of locations around the UK. It’s that there are journalists who review TV programmes for national publications who don’t know this to be the case. I say it’s incredible, but maybe not a surprise. Chris didn’t mention where these critics were based, but I can make a guess at it being London. There are numerous times when I’ve read reviews of a TV programme, movie, or book where it is obvious the reviewer simply doesn’t get it because they struggle to relate to the location or the way people live their lives – my theory why the superior Normal People lost out to I May Destroy You at the 2021 BAFTAs. Coincidentally, an article in Saturday’s paper by Bradford-born journalist Lanre Bakare highlighted how Black life in Britain is almost always portrayed from the viewpoint of London rather than other parts of the country. He observed: ‘For commissioners and editors, London is the Black story. But for me and thousands of others, it isn’t – and never could be.’
A view that hasn’t really changed since I left in the 1980s.
It’s something I have concerns about when submitting manuscripts to potential literary agents in London, where most are based. How can anyone whose entire world revolves around creative circles in the metropolis relate to a novel with a generous smattering of Scots dialogue set on a small Scottish island? I understand the lack of connection; I’ve experienced it from the other side, standing in a Notting Hill kitchen with someone who’d just directed a movie about Bob Marley, a food critic for a UK broadsheet, and a news editor for Channel Four. Their world was as alien to me as no doubt my boring provincial life was to them. It didn’t resemble at all the way of life I’d experienced on a Scottish island, in Manchester, and in a suburb of Stockport. I can now add rural locations in Devon, Somerset, Tenerife, and Portugal to that list.
Our friend can hardly walk down this Welsh street without stopping to talk to loads of people.
Even Further Out There
The second thing that resonated was watching The Outrun, starring an excellent Saoirse Ronan as Rona, a young woman whose life is wrecked by alcohol dependency who tries to break addiction’s shackles by swapping her chaotic existence in London for the farm in Orkney where she grew up.
It’s a powerhouse of a performance that is uncomfortably familiar. The idea that alcohol and happiness are intrinsically linked is one my younger self could relate to, as is the island setting, although Bute where I grew up is nowhere near as remote, bleak, or weather pummelled as Orkney. Bute has trees, including palms.
The Rothesay ferry.
One of the many things that was particularly good about The Outrun was it didn’t romanticise island life, something which didn’t go down well with some, like the reviewer who wrote, ‘I found it difficult to connect with the narrative or indeed what should have been the dramatic visual splendour of the Orkneys.’
Life in remote areas is about far more, or less, than visual splendour. As a wet-behind-the-ears civil servant in the Department of Employment, I occasionally had to travel to outlying parts of Argyll and Bute to interview ‘postal claimants.’ These were unemployed people who lived too far from a dole office to be reasonably able to ‘sign on’ fortnightly. Even though my base was on an island and these people lived on the mainland, their remote locations made Bute seem cosmopolitan by comparison. The first time I did this, I interviewed two separate couples who were clinically depressed by the harsh realities of a rural existence. Both were incomers, drawn by a romanticised notion of what it might be like to live in the Scottish Highlands amid heather-clad glens overlooking serene sea lochs. One couple, sitting up in bed while I perched on the end of the duvet, documents in hand, even spoke of contemplating suicide. I was neither professionally nor emotionally equipped to deal with such a situation. As is evident in The Outrun, idyllic scenery does not always equate to an idyllic existence.
Beautiful setting, but remote rural living isn’t for everyone.
Empire magazine’s London-based reviewer Laura Venning gave The Outrun a 3-star rating, commenting, ‘… do we need yet another scene of Rona looking out at the crashing waves accompanied by plodding voiceover?’ Yes, because it helps reinforce the stark reality of island life, especially when contrasted with scenes of clubbing in the capital, both environments connected yet wildly different. But it would be unfair to expect someone who lives and breathes only London air to accurately comment on places which are far more than just geographically miles distant from them. Unfair maybe, but as London is the UK’s media hub, it happens all the time. Which is why there exists an alternate Britain where there aren’t any streets populated by locals chatting happily with each other.
