#batballs

Any pictures included in this post are my own. Honest! I also apologise for any grammatical mistakes. Shall we going start?

Its become a staple of our culture. Every Sunday evening we'll get a little glimpse of the past, of a simpler time when Maggie Smith reigned supreme, or when the works of Charles Dickens were being written by the Queen on the Titanic. Its classic post sunder lunch, belly-stuffed, easy viewing. We like the certainty of the past. Especially if it concentrates on pastoral lives or the rich, be it country mansions or swinging London town houses. We like looking back to a time where white old women could cycle down to the church, then on the way back see the boys on the green playing cricket and drinking warm beer. Obviously a high proportion of history is not like this. In fact there was probably only one town like that but we don't know about it because it has a rude name little 'Little Twattits.'

Its also a staple of this Sunday night viewing that there will be the servants. The waiters, butlers, maids and house staff are all there to serve the protagonists of or that rich family in the show. Personally I find it disgraceful that we've gotten so used to the sign of polite, twee servants in modern TV shows (during the middle of the worst economic depression for quite some time) that we block them out of our conscience.

A clear underclass is established by the site of their uniform and we ignore it. Occasionally they will be the intelligent force behind the adventures, or misadventures of their masters. At other times they'll be the modest polite kind who'd say "Thank you mi lady" after a punch in the nuts. Maybe they'll be the comical thicko that is 'positively ghastly'. Something that comes up a lot in costume dramas, usually round the servants or the poorer characters is the 'I've never had - ' line. This is designed to make the modern audience feel smug and think 'well I've had -'. The subject of this can change drastically. Here are some examples I've just made up.

  I apologise if you can't read my devil scratchings.

This is a line that has been going for quite some time and recurs everywhere and its one that I'm sick of... because I fall for it every time. I always think 'HA! THAT IS SOMETHING THAT I USE REGULARLY!' I also think that writers could get away with anything. For instance - orange juice. That only came into full circulation in Britain in the 1960s. Sounds realistic but I don't know that and neither do you... probably. Its a made up fact by the way.

But back on topic, servants are in everything. Not just Sunday night dramas on BBC One. We've got them in horror, be it films or books. They are always pushing levers.. And yet their bodies are always so distorted with little sign of upper body strength. They're always treated so poorly for the most evil of uses and yet they're not the ones that are concentrated on in terms of cruelty. Instead its 'oh no, poor humanity' WELL IGOR IS A HUMAN TOO! KIND OF! 

They're also in child's literature and films. Dobby the house-elf is a ball full of what seams to be kinky sexual repression with a desire to be dominated and to serve, and also right wing cartoons of the poor. There's probably a left wing message there, of the stupidity of the unwillingness to revolt, but to the untrained eye its just a message that the workers are pushovers. Even the hero of the piece exploits a house-elf and casts it aside without care. I've already had a communist rant about Potter so I'll leave this here.

That says "Dobby has never had socks before" by the way.

And then their the gentleman's gentleman. The one who's charge patrols the night over his city. The one who was a replacement father to a brooding emotionally damaged teenager. Alfred Pennyworth. He's seen the boy he's had to look after grow up so damaged and so twisted that he dresses as a giant bat to scare crime out of Gotham city. Bruce Wayne's butler never flinches though it breaks his heart, especially as Batman drags others into his own personal hell and makes his war theirs. He's had to feel for and protect about 4 different Robins and see them leave or become damaged or even die. He's had to deal with the worst of humanity Gotham has and just waves it away with a "Very good sir". Alfred Pennyworth should tell Batman to stick it. 

This all leaves me with one conclusion. Fictional servants! Comrades who don't exist! Overthrow you masters... who also don't exist! You're lives don't have to be lived this way... not that they're being lived at all! Or, as this picture of Karl Marx says: