I was following a bit of catch up TV and came across this.
Follows detective Matthew Venn as he returns to an evangelical community in which he grew up to attend his father’s funeral.
As a police procedural, it followed the standard pattern and wasn’t especially surprising at the end. However, the lead character is gay. This is stunning and brave, of course. Okay, I’m relaxed about that. What I am less relaxed about is repeated shots of two blokes snogging. It is perfectly possible to have a gay character without gratuitous fumbling. It isn’t necessary for plot or character development. Now, I have no problem with introducing a gay character – I’ve done it myself. However, my approach was to drop enough hints for the reader to pick up on and then left it. I didn’t write any lesbian sex scenes, didn’t show them in bed together, indeed, there was no graphic detail at all.
The BBC did something similar with Silent Witness. New character. Black – check. Lesbian – eye roll (of course she is), check. Now just to make the point we see her with her tongue down another woman’s throat in case we missed it.
There can only be one reason for this gratuitous gay sex in these programmes and that is to rub our noses in it, because neither advances the story one iota.
To be fair, I’m not hugely keen on overt heterosexual sex scenes in mainstream programmes either. It simply isn’t necessary for story development. We can have it left to our imaginations after all. The domestic backstory can be conducted without sex scenes. This doesn’t make me a prude, I just don’t feel that there is any need, certainly not repeatedly as it was with this one. A police procedural should be about the case and a little character development along the way.
Maybe it’s just me…
As an addendum, much like Vera set in the north east, there really isn’t that level of ethnic minorities in north Devon. Again, this jarred because it is so unreal.
It’s not just you. Among normal straight men, seeing two men kissing still produces a similar response to that produced when seeing a bucket of maggots.
https://www.psypost.org/2017/06/straight-mens-physiological-stress-response-seeing-two-men-kissing-seeing-maggots-49217
Yup. That’s exactly what it’s like.
The memsahib groans whenever I point these things out. The current – and worst – incarnation of Darling Buds of May – to its detriment – has every woke box heavily ticked.
Stopped watching after first ep seeing a village in Kent in 1953 with ethnics wandering about and a black publican. In a rural village in 1953!! Ye Gods.
C. S. Lewis in an interview with Kenneth Tynan deplored the attempts by early 1960’s writers to describe, as it were, “the sexual act”. Tynan was increduluous. Lewis replied ( I paraphrase ) “Very well, accurately describe the action of a pair of scissors.”
Vera is based in Northumberland I believe. In Co Durham, unless one ventures into Durham City where the university is, there simply aren’t any efnik faces. Lanchester. Consett. In Crook I once saw a lady who looked Indian, that’s it. I doubt it’s much more colourful in Northumberland. Newcastle and its surrounding areas may be a bit different.
I quite enjoy girl-on-girl action, I cannot look at two blokes kissing, I automatically, and to some extent involuntarily, look away.
But girl-on-girl is fine.
I think I’m in the majority.
Yeah i read the blurb for this. As soon as i read gay couple i decided not to watch. The notion makes me sick.
The notion I can live with. As I mentioned, one of my characters is lesbian. It’s relevant to her character, but I don’t make a big deal of it (also, of all the characters I have created in my writing, one is gay). Had they done the same thing here, fine, I can live with it. Television dramas have covered this sensibly in the past without going into the gory detail. That said, like the plethora of ethnics (as in the case of this detective’s boss – a black woman is the local police chief, which seems to be the norm now) the amount is just unrealistic.