This week I'm joined by Deb Stanish of the Verity! podcast and Mad Norwegian's delightful anthology Chicks Unravel Time to talk about the stunning mess that is Kerblam! Because obviously she's just your go-to person for things with exclamation points in them.
I don't know exactly how to contribute here. Looking at the way politics is here in the UK, it's hard to know how things will pan out of course, but I am the least worried I have been about unfairness and slander against Corbyn, and indeed his supporters, for quite some time. It's as if the spell of Murdoch was shattered at the last election, but sometimes I think Old Labour people ("Old Labour" as a useful label, not to try and freeze what that means in time, because it isn't, certainly no longer) are still so traumatized by, well, the last thirty years, that they worry more than they need to about the newspapers, about depictions in media, things like that.
I don't believe most people in Britain, certainly not most non-hardcore Tory people, will take Charlie as a comment on Corbynistas. Charlie is an advocate of violence for change. He will resort to murder. That simply can't apply to the average Labour party supporter: from the beginning the Labour party has assumed the possibility of a democratic road to social change, and it has succeded at least once. The union it sprang from exist to represent their workers. They were rarely revolutionary organisations, and labourism and the party they created is defined by its links with the unions.
I believe most people in the UK recognize this, and won't identify Charlie with young Labour party supporters. He does represent a type of the fanatical left-wing ideologue willing to use violent means though, and this is not a new type. It's long existed in reality, and it's surely a fair target.
It sure does make the episode complex, and very interesting. I doubt people are so inured to the direction of some modern working practices that they would have thought "Charlie lost, so that's all cool". Amazon is firmly in the crossfire here. The impression has been created. A whole generation has seen this and that impression will go on into the future. Meanwhile, anyone googling it now will discover that Amazon are in many ways worse than Kerblam. And they will know beforehand that Kerblam was a satire on Amazon.
Yes, I'm signed up to Prime too. My family all have wishlists. In the meantime Amazon workers in Scotland are living in tents. I minimize my usage.
I fully agree with both of you that it'll be interesting to see where this series ends up.
So, anyway, I was previously aware that the actors didn't know who the killer was until the end or very near the end. (There is some convincing rationale for this on the season one Wikipedia page.) I hadn't known that Chibnall was writing it that way also. Is that known to definitely be so?