A Collision of Values
by Frank Hilliard
Collision is a five-part mini-series that ran on ITV1 in Britain in 2009 starring, among others, the spectacularly beautiful Lucy Griffiths. It involves a five-car pileup on the A12, an expressway between Suffolk and London.
In a series of flashbacks we meet the individuals who crash into each other and examine their lives, their relationships and their culpability in what happens. The whole thing is glued together by a romantic angle between the lead investigator, Douglas Henshall, and a female police commander who, it turns out, is his ex-mistress.
Let me show you how the Daily Telegraph describes this so you get the ostensible reasons for what's going on. Then I'll give you the real content.
Everyone is certainly up to something, most especially the producer, who also wrote the series, Anthony Horowitz, one of the busiest writers in England and a very interesting guy who looks a little like Russell Crowe.In Collision, five cars are involved in a major incident on the A12, and Horowitz has managed to pack all human life into the mangled chassis and still-spinning wheels. Or at least most of the bad bits – flashbacks reveal that the white van may have been smuggling contraband; the driver of the Rover, who worked with children, had just furtively handed over a DVD to a man he’d contacted via the internet; a secretary has been stealing files from her boss’s computer and passing them on. A theme begins to emerge, which is that everyone involved in the crash is up to something.
Before I go on, let me say that at various points in my life I've been the Director of Communications for one Canadian crown corporation and the Manager of Media Relations at another. Whatever else these jobs did for me, one thing they did manage was to sensitize me to political messages in the media, print and television.
When you put aside the drama, which, let's admit it, is extremely well produced, there are a number of 'hidden messages' in Collision which struck me forcibly because they're straight cultural Marxism. The whole show seemed to be a sugar-coated excuse to push these revolutionary themes.
The 'evil of Immigration Control
The first theme involves a Kenyan 'engineer' who is having himself smuggled into Britain in a hidden compartment in a furniture van driven by an ex-soldier. In an interview in Holland he says he wants to get into the UK to join his wife and baby and have a better life. Why is he risking his life in a smuggling operation? Because, he says, "it's the only way."
Of course, the van is part of the accident and this attractive black man bleeds to death in the compartment before he is found days later when it's pulled apart in the police garage. The police supervisor berates himself for not having spotted the compartment earlier and possibly save the man. Meanwhile, we see heartrending scenes of his wife worried sick, as she should be, about his non arrival.
What's the political point here? It is that all border controls are wrong; that it's wrong that Europe has more prosperity and infrastructure than Africa, that the world should be borderless. This is the argument of the No One is Illegal organization in Canada, Britain and elsewhere. The dead Kenyan should be a poster boy for this group; he certainly makes their case, or rather Horowitz makes their case.
Large Corporations, the Security Service and the Government are Corrupt
This political position comes out when we discover a secretary at a large pharmaceutical company, who is also in the collision, and who steals some company documents, has been murdered by mysterious and shadowy figures who are either hired assassins working for the company or agents of MI5.
The plot suggests the company has been selling chemical weapons to some government in East Africa for use in clearing tribes off land they plan to exploit for oil production. Tarred with this particular brush are the British Government, large pharmaceutical companies and the security service. And they stay tarred, convicted of killing innocent Africans, right to the end of the show.
This, again, is a Marxist argument; that Britain is continuing its colonial activities, only by other means, and that big business is actually murdering people in the third world. It's complete garbage, but since it's a 'drama,' Horowitz can say what he likes.
Anywhere other than Britain is Better
The character played by Lucy Griffiths is a waitress working at a motorway restaurant who is wooed by a rich businessman (those bastards again) who is married. After the collision he has a dislocated shoulder and Lucy calms him before it's reset. He's grateful and smitten and starts dating her, eventually promising to fulfill her dream of travel to Europe, Paris, Berlin and Italy, drinking wine on a Tuscan hillside.
She is currently living with a loutish English working class man who is portrayed as only interested in marriage, children, football and his friends at the pub. At the end of the series, the businessman is shown to be a spineless cad, but Lucy hangs on to her Eurostar ticket and heads for the continent (how thrilling to be out of England) without him. Brave little girl.
So what have we got here? That nasty British government is keeping deserving Africans out of the country and they're dying to get in. Shocking. It's also in cahoots with that equally nasty big business to rape and murder Africans in Africa with chemical weapons. Uuuggh!
Really Britain is the pits; any sensible person would leave, as does our plucky waitress. Meanwhile the hero walks off into the sunset with his mistress. Happy ending.
Well, Uuuggh is right. This is the kind of Marxist propaganda Britain gets over the airwaves these days, propaganda designed to destroy British morale and belief in itself, in government and in capitalism.
No wonder they're rioting; they've been given plenty of reasons.
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