Cultured Views

Grassington, in the Yorkshire Dales, is the subject of an interesting TV series at the moment where couples vie for the ultimate prize of a quaint little house in the picturesque village and the opportunity to live the life that the locals there enjoy, as villagers. Entertaining enough it is to see each week desperate couples and families hoping to be chosen by the voting locals to be the winners and join their community. But I see far more sinister things in this TV show – and leading them all is the local doyenne named, appropriately, Bunty.

Bunty, dear bless her, acts as chaperone to the couples who arrive to try their luck as outsiders being accepted – fat chance they have. Bunty – a name more likely to be found running a little girls pony club in Devon rather than a Yorkshire village – is a little too touchy-feely in the friendly-stakes for my liking, this woman is not your friend, she is to be feared. Looking like a British version of Bea Arthur in the Golden Girls, she heads a vicious little clique whose sugary, English-rose smiles hide fangs that would choke a vampire bat. Bunty has a certain standing in the Grassington community no doubt and I would say that her chummy-jolly exterior would change to hissing, claws-bared animosity if you dared to upset her. And interestingly as Bunty goes about advising those poor, grovelling couples to promote themselves and ‘what they could bring to the vill-age’ to the suspicious locals, one notes that her own accent is not a local one…nor are many of the local’s accents Yorkshire-bred either.

Tonight I watched two young couples demean themselves by selling their souls to try and buy votes from a community that does not really want anyone new setting up shop on their territory. That’s the problem with the English-village-idyll…the locals have long since marked their territory and they don’t want outsiders moving in on it. I found it uncomfortable to watch those two young couples grovelling to those smug villagers, most of whom are imports to the area themselves and who wish to draw up the bridge behind them. Whoever wins that darn house had better have a thick skin because they will need it – they will be constantly reminded why they are able to be there, and I have a feeling that the treacherous Bunty and Co. are capable of withdrawing the welcome mat as quickly as they put it out.

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