Paper Monitor
10:39 UK time, Wednesday, 16 March 2011
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Maybe journalism isn't such a bad a job after all.
Spring is here, and Fleet Street's colour writers have been wandering the lanes and byways of Midsomer Murder country.
A tour of the area in which the ITV crime drama is set will, according to the Independent, normally set you back £6.50, although the paper informs us that this price includes a packed lunch.
Nevertheless, the legion of hacks jotting down their impressions of the rustic spires, village greens and old maids biking to communion will be able to put their warm ale on expenses. Good for them, thinks Paper Monitor.
The press pack are, of course, in such congenial turf as Wallingford, Oxon and Great Missenden, Bucks, because Brian True-May, the co-creator of the series filmed within them, has said racial diversity "wouldn't work" in the show because it represents a "last bastion of Englishness".
Iain Hollingshead of the Daily Telegraph, that most Midsomer Murders-ish of newspapers, is by a community in which an advert for a Friday night lecture at the local museum promises, "with a thrilling use of quotation marks, to use 'modern technology'".
Like other reporters, Mr Hollingshead detects that this real-life slice of middle England in fact includes a small but visible ethnic minority community.
"The most striking difference between Great Missenden and the fictional towns of Midsomer county is that there are black people," observes Jack Malvern of the Times.
Malvern including an Indian newsagent called Atul who sells True-May his morning papers and defends his customer against the charge of racism.
"I think it has been blown out of proportion, really," suggests Atul.
Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail is that Mr True-May's remarks have become an issue, insisting that the writer is the victim of political correctness. "Midsomer Murders does not aim to 'reflect modern Britain' and it is bonkers to expect any drama so to do," Letts insists.
Yet in the pages of the same paper, Robert Hardman
After all, having featured 942 actors and 22,000 extras over 14 years, would it be entirely unreasonable for one of Britain's five million non-white citizens to wander into the orbit of DCI Barnaby and his team?
Diversity, it appears, is alive and well in middle England after all.
The 
