You know the thing where getting rid of plastic straws was meant to save the world but wound up just distracting from the bigger environmental concerns and making it impossible for anyone who needs to use a plastic straw (children, people with certain disabilities, people who don’t enjoy paper straws disintegrating mid-beverage) to drink with a straw?
Another thing like this: the demise of the plastic produce bag. I mean they’re not gone entirely, they survived the (similarly fraught) culling of supermarket plastic bags in favor of environmentally dubious reusables. But the farmer’s market is all about selling stuff in identical-in-each-stand brown paper bags. So you get home and your fridge has several of these bags and you’re meant to remember which is which, and not let whichever bag of $7 produce go off. Wouldn’t it be better in terms of food waste and eat-your-vegetables if the vegetables in question came in some sort of I don’t know clear thin plastic bag? Someone should invent that.
And now the main attraction:
The first time I saw the As Time Goes By episode where Jean Hardcastle née Pargetter flirts with protesting, it was very much the ACAB era. 2020ish. Defund the police and all that. But for reasons that shall soon become clear, “The Bypass,” 1998, is now more richly topical. Even aside from the topicality, there are layers.
The episode opens with Alistair and Judy,* who are I guess in an on-again phase of their relationship, going out for the night, and some weirdness around the fact that Jean (her mother) and Lionel (Jean’s husband) shouldn’t wait up. Judy is 35 and twice divorced in Season 1 and “The Bypass” is in Season 7. But it’s scandalous, in the strange universe of this show, that anyone might, you know.
This is but a foreshadowing to the fact that Sandy, the other young woman who lives with them, also not so young by the time we’re in Season 5,002, is very possibly going to be spending the weekend alone with her serious boyfriend. The others are going to the country, to the manor house Lionel’s father handed him for some reason, as one does, but Sandy will be staying behind because her cop boyfriend is off duty. Lionel finds it concerning that Jean tells Sandy she can have the house to herself for the weekend, he thinks this is rushing Sandy into things with the boyfriend, but no, she’s game.
Well. Turns out her boyfriend who is genuinely so boring I forgot his name despite watching this show on infini-loop does have to work, after all, because… there is a protest in Hyde Park, and police need to be present. The fact that protests mean Sandy shan’t be getting laid turns Sandy into a full-on anti-protest activist, holding forth at every opportunity (and you will soon see, there are many) about why protesters are terrible people who ruin police officers’ weekends.
Lionel, big surprise, agrees with her about protesters, and they hold forth a bunch about how protesters are paid to do that and—barring ancient examples of very worthy and calm protests—always in the wrong.
Is it ever established what the protest is Harry (I’ve remembered the cop boyfriend’s name!) is enlisted to deal with? It is not.
So anyway this means Sandy joins the gang and heads to the country, where they all learn that there’s a brouhaha in the village about a bypass. A road is going to be built around the little village’s periphery. A protest is underway, and the hayseed villagers are struggling to mobilize. The representatives of the villagers on the show, the maid (more like a lady-butler) and gardener who wait on them hand and foot because this is how one lives, let them know. The lady-butler, Mrs. Bale, tells them to stay out of local matters, for they are part-timers, cityfolk.
Jean is not convinced. She is a Guardian-reading, latte-sipping Corbynite, she says, mixing a lot of references up and speaking in anachronism. She is into the idea of protest, and even hammers up a placard for herself. She is going to prevent that bypass! All of this goes poorly because what do you know, she got what the Brits call wrong end of stick (skipping the “the” in the north; I have watched my shows) and in fact the villagers want this road built. The people who don’t are young people from outside the village who’ve come to protest and have formed wait for it an encampment. Tragically, this is never shown, only alluded to, unlike the student protesters who come for Lionel in an earlier episode:
Jean imagines she’s an eco-warrior, because she feels (it is established she doesn’t know this) the road will go through an area of outstanding natural beauty. I know from Escape to the Country that this is a real designation and not just her turn of phrase. Anyway, turns out it won’t, it’s going through some area with abandoned cars. The villagers want the road because there are loud trucks passing through their wee small delightful rustic old-ways village. It’s not that she mistakes the villagers for simple folk who are one with nature, she hasn’t been wrong due to being patronizing. It’s not that the villagers want modernity. They want quiet, just not the way she thinks.
There’s a meeting scene straight out of The Vicar of Dibley, lots of older men in tweet with a village-idiot vibe. Maybe this is what it’s really like in such locales, how exactly am I supposed to know? Or maybe it’s derogatory in which case, apologies on behalf of… a fictional character played by Dame Judi Dench.
The episode is clearly Team Sandy and Lionel on this one. Protesters are fancy, uninformed rich interlopers. There’s this subtle but incredible moment where Mrs. Bale—she of the ‘dinner will be served in six and a half minutes’ catchphrase—informs Jean that she has tidied up from the placard-making, has put the hammer away.
Does any of this have anything to do with protests of today? Only insofar as encampment protesters are not new and it’s always fun to be reminded that the world didn’t start yesterday. Oh and I suppose the thing where people think they’re on the right side of an issue, think there is no possible discussion to be had, that of course they’re with the good side, and then the minute they actually learn what’s at stake, it turns out there might just be more to it.
*Is it ever addressed whether Judy, who lives with and works for her mother, contributes to household expenses, or whether this is a rent-free situation and if so, what she’s doing with the remaining cash? I guess kind of, she does seem to buy a lot of flashy new clothes, and it is at one point established she doesn’t know what a thrift store is.