The BBC could scarcely have chosen a less auspicious time to release as its flagship Spring drama an adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s contentious, race-baiting Noughts + Crosses. For one thing, it is under increasing pressure to demonstrate that it is not purely the propaganda arm of the liberal, metropolitan elite. For another, a dystopian fantasy about a Britain where blacks are the bullying ruling class and whites are the oppressed Untermenschen has even less urgent or topical satirical value than it did when it was first published 18 years ago.
Blackman, I’m sure, has done very nicely out of her young adults trilogy. By focusing on every teacher’s favourite topic – racism – her book ended up on the recommended reading list of schools across the land, so that loads of children, including mine, were bludgeoned into reading her not exactly sparkling prose. I’m not begrudging her success: it was a canny move, taking the starcross’d lovers theme of Romeo and Juliet, and setting it in a world where black people are the racists and white people are the victims, ticking so many boxes for teenage readers. But as grown-up entertainment it doesn’t stand up. And as socio-political commentary it is next to useless.
Part of the problem is its lack of nuance. There’s a scene in the first episode, for example, where a black university lecturer says to our heroine Persephone ‘Sephy’ Hadley (Masali Baduza) about white people: “They’re always so cheerful but you do get those uppity ones. That’s not prejudice. That’s just fact.”
Yes, we get the sledgehammer point. These are the kind of casually racist assumptions which white people express all the time. Except a) I don’t think they do, actually. And b): a university lecturer? Really? If this dystopian satire is going to be accurate or meaningful, then surely academe would be chock full of black professors trying to undermine the status quo by standing up for ‘white’ rights and encouraging their students to do the same.
Still, if you can get over the intriguing premise – that 700 years ago, sub-Saharan Africans managed to conquer Europe – it does have its enjoyable moments. I like, for example, its idea of how African London would look: more colourful geometric decoration on the tower blocks; how the elite would dress (a cross between tribal princelings and Eighties rap artistes, with more modest, African-print garb for the white servant class); what music would sound like with, presumably, no Bach or Beatles (Shauri Yako, basically); what the white underclass would do for entertainment (drag races; hang out in pubs; all while trying to avoid being harassed by the racist black police).
My big reservation is with the idea, heavily touted by the stars, author, and production team, that this has anything to tell us about our times. ‘Unfortunately the facts show that there is more hate crime in Britain nowadays, and people being judged on skin colour or religion or sexual orientation,’ claims Blackman. This is so risibly the opposite of true that frankly she should be ashamed. Even in 2001, Noughts + Crosses was a painfully dated throwback to an era which may just about have existed at the time of Broadwater Farm or the Brixton Riots. Today, when every institution from barristers’ chambers to the City of London to Oxford and Cambridge bends over backwards to recruit ‘BAME’ candidates, even to the point of positive discrimination against white candidates, it just looks chippy, cry-bullying paranoia.
Though it’s true ‘racism’ is a concept you still hear bandied about an awful lot, it’s generally from people whose careers depend on it being a thing; author Afua Hirsch, say, or MP David Lammy. Most of us in the real world, though, find it thoroughly mystifying because it has been many years in Britain since people’s ethnicity was a serious issue. We all rub along pretty nicely. And about the only thing these days that threatens that easy-going relationship is the burgeoning identity politics industry, which has a vested interest in stoking the kind of racial tensions now being invoked by this provocatively-timed BBC adaptation.
What the BBC is trying to tell us, I’m sure, is that it’s damned if it’s going to change tack from its vital Social Justice agenda merely to please a few right-wing politicians and critics and viewers who are all basically fascist so they don’t count anyway.
If it carries on in this arrogant way, I don’t fancy its long-term future. If on the other hand, it wants to restore the reputation it once had for diverse, original, thought-provoking and not relentlessly left-biased drama, here’s one of the first things it should do: make a film of a brilliant short play by Dameon Garnett I saw recently at the Actors’ Centre in London called Sticks and Stones.
It’s a two-hander (superbly acted by Eva Fontaine and Catherine Harvey) featuring a black character (by eerie coincidence called Afua) and a white character, Tina, only their power relationship has a lot more to say about our times than Blackman’s frivolous fantasy. Afua is a senior manager in a secondary school, the privileged daughter of a Ghanaian lawyer; Tina is a northern white working-class dinner lady. They used to be friends as well as colleagues but when Afua is asked to investigate some ‘offensive’ online comments made by Tina’s internet friendship circle, and it all very quickly turns sour.
Garnett doesn’t cheat by making Tina’s remarks completely innocuous: she does, for example, repeat a patently racist joke about only being able to see a black person in the dark because of their white teeth. But the bigger and more important point is that these people were once genuine friends, and that this relationship (not to mention poor Tina’s career) has now been savagely destroyed by an officious, politically correct, inhuman modern culture which gives extraordinary, brutal power to those who can claim to be offended victims even when absolutely no offence was intended.
Neither the BBC – nor Channel 4 nor the West End nor anywhere else for that matter, I would imagine – will touch it with a bargepole.
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