LONDON - The English county of Midsomer is rural, picturesque, astonishingly murder-prone and completely white.
It's also fictional, the setting for "Midsomer Murders," a TV series that has run for 14 years, offering a steady diet of violent crimes in leafy lanes and villages, all reassuringly solved by avuncular Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby.
Now Midsomer's cozy world has been rocked, and its producer suspended Tuesday, after he said that the show "wouldn't work" if there were any nonwhite people in the cast.
"We are a cosmopolitan society in this country, but if you watch 'Midsomer' you wouldn't think so," executive producer Brian True-May told Radio Times magazine, adding that "quite honestly I wouldn't want to change it."
"We just don't have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work," he was quoted as saying.
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"We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way."
ITV, the network that broadcasts the show, said it was "shocked and appalled" by True-May's comments. It said True-May, one of the show's co-founders, has been suspended by producing company All3Media pending an investigation.
True-May's equation of "English" with "white" was strongly condemned by some, but defended by others, who say he is simply telling it like it is: the vast majority of nonwhite Britons - who make up about 8 percent of the total population - live in cities or suburbs.
Daily Telegraph columnist Christina Odone accused a "metropolitan creative elite" of trying to rewrite reality by foisting "multicultural fantasy worlds on viewers and listeners."
Historian and thriller writer Guy Walters - himself a resident of a "typical, exclusively white" English village - said that while True-May's description of monocultural villages was not inaccurate, "the problem with his words is it looks like he is saying that is a desirable state of affairs."
