Jessica Raine in Call the Midwife

I know I’ve said all this before, but this time it’s for real. Jenny is the incarnation of goodness, and her enchanting looks have turned me into an erotomaniacal fool. Sanctity is a woman’s ideal. Jessica/Jenny plays this kind of character, and I like to think that she’s not that great an actress to be as angelic as she appears onscreen while a slut in real life. I may have a beatific vision of her, but I’ve always preferred the fine to the base, the noble to the ignoble, and the beautiful to the hideous.

Which brings me to Theodore Dalrymple’s Diamond Jubilee Speccie debate of two weeks ago. I agreed with every word he wrote and I’ve put my money where my mouth is and moved out of England for exactly the reasons he gave. I felt England’s decline perhaps more than others because I am not English and never wished to be English but loved certain aspects of English life which were nonexistent in other places (the sense of humor, the understatement, the tolerance). Then the culture changed into one where the bizarre was seen as beautiful. Women, especially upper-class girls, began using one word to describe everything: “Amazing” became the most overused word in English except for the “F” one.

That posturing hermaphrodite Karl Lagerfeld called the singer Adele fat, suddenly turning her into a victim. But she is fat, and playing to her vulgar audience she said that the most frustrating thing during a recent illness when she couldn’t speak due to a throat operation was her inability to swear. She was proud of her swearing, which tells it all.

Britain has become a more dishonest and cynical country, and the odious entertainment industry is mostly to blame for this coarseness. How can a man such as Gordon Ramsay be on TV swearing his head off and making millions? How can cops be taken seriously when they’re not on the beat? How can anyone civilized watch a movie when every second word is the “F” one? How can any newspaper be taken at face value when it refuses to state a criminal’s color but describes the clothes he wore at the crime scene? How stupid do these PC commissars think we are? (We’re much more stupid that they think, because we accept everything.) Force the entertainment industry to cut out the violence and swearing and the glorification of the abominable and vulgar (Jonathan Ross), force it to produce more Call the Midwife dramas, and in a generation or two Britain’s brutalization might begin to reverse itself. In the meantime I will be found in my chalet watching endless reruns of Jessica/Jenny and pining for her even as an avalanche is about to send me to Kingdom Come.