It was
as if I'd stepped into a pageant of the rural past when
we left the car park at Goathland. There were Morris dancers on the
village green and a Ford Anglia parked outside the souvenir shop.
The tea-room played second-string sixties hits. Steam trains
ran on the railway line thronged by spotters and snappers.
History
was repeating itself as the worst possible kind of kitsch.
Goathland
is also well on its way to becoming Aidenfield, home of TV retro-fest Heartbeat, which is mainly filmed there. Every
shop is full of souvenirs and the pub proclaims its dual identity as
the Aidenfield Arms. Nick Berry's face stares out of tea-towels in
windows like a benign Big Brother.
Why does
a village deny its own identity to become a living fiction? The
obvious answer here is money. There are plenty of pretty (if
austere) villages in the moors like Goathland, but Aidenfield is its
unique selling point. And the absence of any actual services and
shops for the residents underlines the point that this is less a
functioning community, more a rural tourism retail centre.
It suits
Goathland to sink beneath its fictional alter ego.
So what?
What does it matter if indulging ourselves in an imaginary Sixties
provides a momentary distraction for middle-class tourists and a
living in a hard-pressed Moors village?
Channeling
my outer hard-headed economist (I've not managed to locate an inner
economist, but count several among my good friends), I'd suggest the
Aidenfielding of the countryside is a false solution to a viable
rural society. If we're serious about jobs, about food security,
about villages that work as places of local commerce and community, then we have to offer more than cream teas and
Heartbeat paraphenalia, even if there's no dishonour in the tourist
trade.
On a
more personal note, I also find something distubing about the
senility of cultural memory on display in Goathland/Aidenfield,
itself a debased version of the slick sixties nostalgia peddled by
Heartbeat. In Heartbeatland, we can gloss over the social
conflict and politics of the period, never mind the present, and return to an imagined era
when everyone knew their place. When threat, change or conflict is
resolved or reconciled with the whole by the end of each episode.
Where everyone is white – I saw not a single exception in my visit,
and the souvenir shop sold gollywogs.
Yep. Gollywogs. There are no words...
And what
does it say about us that we're seduced by this imagined village?
Nostalgia has always been with us, but it needs to be offset by a
vision of the future, a prospect of hope, in order for us be
psycho-culturally viable and equal to the challenges of the present.
I bear Goathland no ill will, but as a microcosm of the way we live
now, it feels like part of the problem rather than part of the
solution.
