h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thinking back to my daily dose of “Father Brown” yesterday, the first episode of the repeat of series one, I am minded of the fact that there is a comon theme linking Father Brown with “Call the Midwife” and “Bletchly Circle”- and that is the ‘refugee’ world that I found myself living in as a toddler, that first “Age of Austerity”. And it is probably no accident that we have found a new interest in these times, with “Call the Midwife” now billed as Britain’s favourite drama series.
Surely a part of the appeal of the programme is in the sense of a real common struggle associated with that determination to ‘Win the peace the way that we won the war’, with the Midwives acting as urban missionaries coming into lives of deprivation and hardship in order to give the children of the post-war generation ‘a better start in life’. But perhaps no scenario can bring out more clearly the fact that the war had been fought, not to defeat and destroy Nazi Germany, but in order to preserve ‘Christian Civilization’, the essence of which is not really belief in God but belief in people.
To some extent that distinction goes right to the heart of the “Father Brown” stories of G.K.Chesterton. Back in the time of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland”, which dealt with Britain in the economic and social crisis of 1921, Chesterton chose the topic of William Cobbett, when asked to give a memorial lecture, and followed this up with a brief biography of Cobbett, which included very appropriate comments about the whole culture of corporatism, corruption and immorality that was associated especially with the vast fortunes being made in America through the giant oil conglomerates, and this was years before the ‘Teapot Dome’ scandals of the late 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the World Chaos of 1932-33. But ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt and the Muck-raking journalists had already led the counter-attack, Roosevelt observing that ‘Money makes a very good servant, but a very bad master’, something that seems very relevant too in our current problems that have been created by our corrupted and unhealthy relationship with the Financial System.