History or creepy PC propoganda...

Watched a History of Scotland on BBC 2 on Monday night - or rather I was persuaded to watch it by my girlfriend. Being Scottish I'd watched this series when it first started but had given up in a rage half way through the first program. It is a presented by a long haired muppet trailing dolefully about in an anorak - but always always in shot. An archaeologist, one of the the earth sciences anyway but definitely not an historian - and he's on camera through almost the entire time I watched, his face, his back, his feet - spared nothing while a droning commentary sapped the will to live - but never time for even a woodcut of the people he was talking about...

Now I was watching him again and it was an exercise in smug indulgence, a demonstration of how utterly non racists he and his teenage program makers were - because their history of Scotland in the eighteenth century came down to a seventeen year old legging it from Culloden and ending up making a lot of money in Jamaica, where he then brought A SLAVE CALL JIMMY (he must have been from Glasgae) back to Scotland who then took him to court in Edinburgh for his back wages - a slave's back wages??? Well never mind, he won, gaining the right to go off and become a coal miner in Fife. 

Adam Smith would have disapproved of all this because by then even he was having his doubts about his very own invention - the transcendent wisdom of the unregulated market...and that was it, Scotland's history for a century and half taken care of....

I seriously wish I could get out of paying my BBC licence - an institution I once unreservedly admired...