Why Unforgotten is unforgiven by Brexiteers

The other morning, while scrolling through social media for ideas on how to stop scrolling through social media, I read something uncomfortable with which I was reluctantly forced to agree. Someone had shared Jeremy Clarkson’s Sunday Times article about Brexit (he wrote that it “hasn’t made our lives better in any way that I can see”), with the message “this will do more to change more Brexiteer minds than a dozen well-argued articles in the New European”.

Not the most cheering thing for the editor of the New European to read, but Clarkson’s reach goes way beyond our own and includes many who don’t share our view of Europe and the world. On a different topic but for exactly the same reasons, it is also welcome and surprising to see Nigel Farage break with Donald Trump and declare that “Ukraine now joining Nato is almost an essential part of this peace deal”.

Also with a big reach and a political message is ITV’s detective series Unforgotten, which pulled in 3.3million viewers on its return last Sunday. Season six is unlikely to win the approval of Farage, given that its murder victim is a violent Brexiteer and one of the leading suspects a far right pundit on Britannia News, a close relative of his employer GB News.

When she starts to have moral qualms about the unalloyed hate the channel pumps out, one of her bosses tells her to be even more hateful or risk losing her job: “Tell them what they want to hear and believe or they’ll switch off.” This struck me as both unrealistic – as if the blank-faced ideologues on GB News would ever be struck by moral qualms! – and typical of the way this above-average thriller undermines its own messages by painting them in far too broad strokes.

Nevertheless, Unforgotten’s deserved popularity (it delivered the channel’s best viewing figures for a drama in 10 months, scoring a big ratings victory against the BBC’s expensive Miss Austen) means that the valid things it has to say about the chaos wrought by toxic men emboldened by toxic TV and toxic social media will be heard by millions of mainstream viewers. And that’s clearly what matters to its screenwriter, Chris Lang.

He has also done the very worthwhile job of upsetting GB News, whose website is running a story titled “ITV Unforgotten viewers ‘switch off’ as they slam ‘woke bulls***’ following controversial return” and whose social feeds are full of angry fans outraged that when co-lead Sinead Keenan was asked about the Brexit theme, she told an interviewer: “I am European. I personally think the UK is better in than out. My boys, who are nine and seven-and-a-half, have got Irish passports. They’re very lucky.”

Some furious viewers have even told GB News that Keenan’s DI Jessica James should be replaced by bringing back her predecessor Cassie Stuart; a tough ask since that character died in a car crash at the end of season four. It’s an Unforgotten plot point they seem to have forgotten – but when did logic ever come into it with this lot?