He shouldn't be sacked for it. Perhaps he spoke unthinkingly. And we all prize freedom of speech within society's agreed legal parameters. Still, if he gets a bit of stick, he shouldn't be surprised.

Exit the motorway. Follow the signs. Welcome to the town of Causton. It's all white, the "last bastion of Englishness". And crime there is solved within the hour. No wonder it's popular with certain types.

Causton is how Brian True-May apparently sees the ideal life in the best of times, and the producer of ITV's Midsomer Murders series is in quite a lot of trouble for articulating his TV vision of nirvana to the Radio Times. No ethnic minorities. "Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work." Indeed, it would spoil everything. "We might be in Slough. Ironically Causton is supposed to be Slough. And you wouldn't see a white face there. We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way," he says.

So what is wrong with this? Quite a lot. Slough, for example, is about 40% ethnic minorities. And I've travelled a bit in small towns and villages. Hardly a melting pot, but it is rare to visit one that has no minorities at any time. According to the 2001 census, 47,000 non-white people lived in "sparse" and "less sparse" English villages. They were residents. And many villages have an Indian restaurant nearby. And a Chinese takeaway. These people aren't invisible. What about non-white visitors? The Runnymede Trust suggests that every local authority ward in England has minority representation of some sort. No swamping, so Baroness Thatcher can rest easy. But outside our cities minorities do exist.

And let's not get stuck arguing over definitions of "Englishness". That's a red herring. Where does it say that an English village, on the telly, should have only English people in it?

What really wrong here is tone. I don't need minorities in everything. The televised Tudors might not have worked so well with a Rastafarian as Thomas Cromwell. The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, set in Botswana, probably didn't need white characters. But language is important and by boasting of his all-white idyll in such wistful terms, True-May does sound like a phonetically refined Alf Garnett.

He shouldn't be sacked for it. Perhaps he spoke unthinkingly. And we all prize freedom of speech within society's agreed legal parameters. Still, if he gets a bit of stick, he shouldn't be surprised.