Description
Look at how unimpressed the muscle-headed Mancunian detective, Ray Carling, is by the 80s Young Urban Professional, Edward Marcombe, who flaunts his privileged education by flashing Latin tags while explaining why he should be released from custody.
BBC TV science fiction series Ashes to Ashes – first screened in 2008 – tells the story of the 21st-century police officer, Detective Inspector Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes). After being shot in the head DI Drake wakes up in 1981, where she meets DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) and his team, which includes the bullish Ray (Dean Andrews).
Marcombe, described by Hunt as a “city trading ponce” has been arrested as the supposed head of a drugs dealership operating from the London docks. The co-creator of the drama, Matthew Graham, has the self-satisfied Marcombe quote the Roman poet Virgil’s favorite exclamation mirabile dictu (‘wondrous to relate’), which occurs six times in his Augustan epic the Aeneid. The brief exchange between Marcombe and Ray caricatures to comic effect the complex class dynamics of the North/South divide in 1980s Britain.
By bringing together two Englishmen from different ends of the country and with different cultural frames of reference (Virgil’s Aeneid and Star Trek) Graham somewhat bluntly indicates the heightened social and cultural conflict of 1980s Britain. We might not expect Ray, characterized throughout the series as a chauvinistic and dimwitted Neanderthal, to spot the show of yuppie erudition, but are we (the 8m viewers who tuned into the show) or is our fictional representative – DI Drake – supposed to recognize the Latin, and know what it means?
Marcombe, quoting Virgil and casually wielding the legalistic Latin expression ipso facto (‘by the fact itself’), comes across as an obnoxious know-it-all. By the same stroke Ray’s ignorant retort, alluding as it does to the contemporary and popular cultural heritage of the pathbreaking American sci-fi series Star Trek, casts him as a stereotypically dumb and poorly educated Northerner with more muscle than sense.
Just like the equivalent expression “It’s all Greek to me”, Ray’s innocent “… and some of it was in Klingon” asks us, the show’s 21st-century audience, to laugh at the apparently even wider gap between the worlds of the ruling and working classes in 80s Britain.
