Judging by the trailers, Bonekickers, the BBC’s new Tuesday night drama, promised a piece of enjoyable hokum – a West Country Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code – offering a perfect and undemanding way to wile away the summer evenings. 

But that’s not how it turned out at all.

The plots are utterly preposterous, the dialogue clunky, the jokes leaden and the acting laughably wooden – but that isn’t really the problem.

We would put up with all these faults if the show offered in compensation a bit of uncomplicated fun – after all we lap up American series from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Heroes to Desperate Housewives with uncritical relish.

No, the real problem is that the political commissars of the BBC no longer produce anything as straightforwardly simple as light entertainment.

Everything, from children’s programmes to prime-time drama, has to be saddled with a leaden, lumbering, clunking political message.

It has happened before in shows including Spooks and Robin Hood, and now it’s poor Bonekickers’ turn.  

What should be a joyful romp has been transformed into a crass piece of indigestible left-wing agitprop.

It illustrates perfectly the liberal intelligentsia’s true view of the lumpen proletariat – the plebs can’t be relied on to read the Guardian, so they feel they must insert subliminal messages into popular drama instead.

The first episode for example featured a group of bloodthirsty Christian terrorists who were persecuting peaceable Muslims (any Muslim portrayed in a BBC drama is invariably impossibly saintly).

Just in case you failed to get the message – Christians are evil, Muslims are wonderful – you were constantly hit over the head with it for the next 60 minutes.

At one point a Christian thug who styled himself on the Knights Templar, beheaded a peaceable, saintly Muslim with a Crusader sword – I kid you not.

This week’s episode apparently featured evil white West Country racists and heroic black slaves, and included a US senator destined to become America’s first black president. Subtle or what?

I say apparently, because I didn’t actually watch the second episode. When I settle down to an evening’s entertainment I don’t want to be preached at by some ex-public schoolboy who thinks he’s the new Bertolt Brecht.

And it would seem I’m not alone. Bonekickers, the flagship of the BBC’s summer schedule, has seen a catastrophic decline in its audience figures. Fully 20% of viewers – 1.6 million people – abandoned the show between its first and second episodes.

Future episodes apparently will include further lectures on the evils of the Iraq war and no doubt storylines decrying homophobia, global warming, GM crops and every other fashionable cause – but by that time they’ll be lucky if two pensioners and a dog are still tuning in.

It’s about time the BBC stopped producing popular drama – especially when the shows turn out to be not so popular after all.

Let’s face it, the Americans do this thing so much better – and they don’t need £4 billion a year in subsidy from the taxpayer.

During the debate on the proposed 42-day detention without charge of terror suspects we were constantly told that such a move would make our legal system the most draconian in the Western world.

Organisations such as Liberty argued that no other comparable democracy holds suspects without charge for anywhere near as long. Italy, cited as one of many examples by the pressure group, held people for a maximum of four days, we were told.

Oh really? You may remember the dreadful case of Meredith Kercher, the Leeds University student murdered in November of last year while studying in Perugia, Italy.

Shortly after her body was discovered her flatmate and two men were arrested on suspicion of murder.

Since then – for more than seven months - they’ve been held in prison without charge. They were finally charged last week. It could be January before they finally face trial.

In truth in countries that operate inquisitorial legal systems, such as France, Italy, Germany and Spain, the authorities can hold suspects without charge for months or even years. The protections that originate in English common law do not hold.

Don’t believe all the propaganda the human rights activists try to feed you.

You have to pity the poor race relations professionals.

Britain is such an overwhelmingly tolerant nation – certainly compared with our European neighbours – that they have to work ever harder to find examples of racism to complain about.

They have to convince us this is a serious and growing problem, despite evidence of harmonious community relations all around us, and that lots of taxpayers’ money has to be spent to sort it out.

The stakes are high. On this desperately shaky premise ride thousands of cushy jobs, research grants, expense account lunches and conferences in luxury hotels.

This week for example, the National Children’s Bureau, funded by £12 million of your taxes every year, uncovered a previously unknown reservoir of hatred and racist bigotry – among pre-school age children.

The evidence for this absurd suggestion? Well, explained the NCB, if you put a plate of unfamiliar, spicy food in front of a three-year-old and the response is “Yuk!” that is clearly racism and the toddler-bigot responsible should be singled out and condemned in forthright terms.

If you try to defend the poor child that simply demonstrates that you are a racist too, according to the NCB. The argument is perfectly circular and admits no dissent, nor even logic.

The NCB has produced a 366-page guide, Young Children and Racial Justice, which urges nursery school teachers and childminders to be zealous in cracking down on the mini-racists among their charges.

Every “racist incident” - a definition that as we’ve seen is so broad as to mean virtually anything - must be logged and reported and the children responsible reprimanded.

Even babies don’t escape the attentions of the gauleiters of the race relations Gestapo. They can be racist too because they can “recognise different people in their lives”, says the NCB. So if a baby fails to recognise an unfamiliar face that is because he or she is a racist.

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many “racist incidents” as possible. “Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In, fact the opposite is the case”, says the NCB.

You can see where this is going can’t you. Nurseries reporting high levels of “racist incidents” will earn brownie points – and no doubt funding – from local councils, while those who fail to report any will be accused of racism themselves.

What next? Are we going to drag bewildered toddlers off to state re-education camps to be force-fed chicken tikka masala?

This sort of thing is often described as the soft authoritarianism of the Left, but there is nothing soft about it.

I can think of few acts more despicable than state-sanctioned bullying of innocent youngsters just to justify a few meaningless jobs in the race relations lobby.

One thing we’re not short of in Britain is people telling us what to do.

We’re told what to eat, what to drink, what light bulbs to use, what to read to our children, what temperature to have our bathwater, where to shop, what to put in our compost bin and where to go on holiday.

The finger wagging never ceases.

So when Gordon Brown popped up the other day to tell us to eat our leftovers I would have thrown my dinner at the television – but I’d eaten it all.

Like most working families we can’t afford to waste food and rarely throw anything away – largely thanks to Brown relentlessly ratcheting up taxes over the past ten years.

Hasn’t he got anything better to do? For example running the country, although truth be told he’s making an absolute hash of that.

The Prime Minister then promptly left for the G8 summit where he dined on milk-fed lamb and pickled conger eel at numerous sumptuous banquets.

If he dares show his face around my way I can think of a very good use for some rotten tomatoes.

 Image from www.freefoto.com

How in heaven’s name did our parents’ generation ever survive without a DVD player, a mobile phone and multi-channel television?

The fact that you are reading this suggests they managed tolerably well, but they wouldn’t be able to in modern Britain, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).

The left-wing research group, which has great influence in New Labour circles, this week came up with a list of life’s necessities which they argue are absolutely essential for people to live decently and participate in society.

In addition to the items listed above they included cinema tickets, a night out, a bottle of wine, a barbecue, a bird feeder, a holiday, walking boots, a bicycle and a pair of trainers.

It sounds like a random collection of items that might appear on the conveyor belt in a 1970s episode of the Generation Game. “Don’t forget the cuddly toy!” as Bruce Forsyth would say.

But the JRF is entirely serious. The organisation’s website is emphatic that these are what people “need” to live, not just what they may “want”.

This is risible nonsense. Can anyone seriously argue that you cannot exist in modern Britain if you don’t own a bird feeder or a pair of trainers?

And is it impossible to live without multi-channel television? Well, I’ve managed to all my life, as have all my children and we cope perfectly well without endless re-runs of Last of the Summer Wine and monster truck racing from Alabama.

Let’s get this straight - these are really wants, not needs, but there is nothing wrong with that. If you fancy a new barbecue, a glass of wine or a trip to the cinema – and you are prepared to work hard to earn the money to pay for it – then nothing should stand in your way.

But that is not the JRF’s intention. Instead, what we have here is a subtle redefinition of what it means to be poor or deprived in modern Britain. The ulterior motive is to raise benefit levels still further at the expense of the real victims of modern Britain – the working poor.

The JRF estimates that to pay for all these “essentials” a single person needs to earn £13, 400 and a couple with two children £26, 800 – and guess what, current benefit levels are about two thirds of this “minimum”.

Cue lots of agitation by the JRF and other “poverty” campaigners to raise the level of state handouts so people on benefit can afford these “necessities”.

Such a course of action would be disastrous. We already have millions of people permanently on benefits; while millions more immigrants come here to do the jobs the work-shy don’t fancy doing.

Benefit levels are already so generous that many of the working poor would be better off if they gave up their jobs.

Instead the welfare state – as was intended by its founders - should provide a temporary safety net to prevent families falling into destitution – not a permanent lifestyle of luxury and indolence.

Far healthier for our economy and society would be the simple message – if you want the nice things in life, then you have to work for them.

That great socialist hero Robert Mugabe has told his international critics to “go hang” and is determined to continue starving his people and brutally repressing all opposition.

No real surprise there. History shows us that every red revolution from Robespierre to Stalin to Mao has started with fine ideals, and ended with terror and bloodshed. Zimbabwe’s sad descent from bread basket to basket case is no exception.

But what can be done about it? Don’t look for help in the African Union, which during the current crisis has shown itself just as ineffectual and corrupt as those other international bodies, the UN and the EU.

No, the only country capable of rescuing Zimbabwe is South Africa. It controls Zimbabwe’s access to oil and electricity and could force Mugabe out within days. Unfortunately under Thabo Mbeki the so-called rainbow nation has backed the tyrant to the hilt.

Perhaps if international community threatened to withdraw support for the 2010 World Cup it might finally prompt South Africa to do the decent thing.

There was outrage in the United States recently when the price of gas – or what we call petrol – hit $4 a gallon.

I thought wow, that does sound expensive, especially when you consider it was about half this price 18 months ago.

But then I remembered the exchange rate – and £2 a gallon doesn’t sound too bad after all.

But hold on, a US gallon is quite a bit smaller than an imperial gallon, so is it such a good deal?

So I decided to do this comparison properly – so you don’t have to – and out came the pocket calculator.

The result in rough figures is that motorists in the US are paying about 53 pence a litre for unleaded and 63 pence for diesel – or less than half the cost of fuel in the UK.

This week it was revealed that British motorists are paying an average of 118 pence for a litre of unleaded, and 131 pence for diesel – that’s a stonking £6 a gallon (imperial of course).

Why such a huge contrast? We are both oil-producing nations and we have both been hit hard by the rising cost of oil on international markets.

Yet these figures reveal a more than100 per cent divergence in the cost of one of life’s basic necessities.

In fact this massive gap illustrates a key difference in the relationship between people and government in the US and the UK.

On this side of the Atlantic the government sees its role as punishing the hard-working citizenry by squeezing until the pips squeak, whereas the US government does all in its power to encourage people to use their talents to create wealth.

Nowhere is this clearer than the approach to fuel prices. One key reason why prices are so much higher in the UK is tax. In the UK we pay about 50 pence a litre in fuel duty, and then we pay a further 17.5% VAT on both fuel and duty. The result is a combined tax rate of well over 100%.

Without these punitive rates of tax, fuel prices in the UK would be broadly comparable with the US.

And fuel taxes in the US? It differs from state to state, but on average combined state and federal taxes amount to about 12.4 cents a litre – or a little over 6p!

Even more revealing has been the response to the latest oil crisis. In the US both Republican Presidential candidate John McCain and his erstwhile rival Hillary Clinton promised a three month “gas tax holiday” whereby federal fuel duty would be suspended throughout the summer peak driving months.

Both accept that petrol duty is a regressive tax that impacts much more heavily on the poor.

So much so that both advocated that the state take a $10 billion hit in terms of revenue in order to ease the burden on hard-working families.

And what does Gordon Brown do? He wrings his hands and grovels to the Gulf States in embarrassing fashion begging them to increase production. They of course take absolutely no notice, Meanwhile, Brown is determined to impose yet another two pence rise in fuel duty come the autumn.

Perhaps that is one reason why the US is the world’s most vigorous and successful democracy, while the UK is in a spiral of seemingly terminal decline.

Image from www.freefoto.com