Watch TV with Paul Flynn
WITH SOME SECTIONS
of the media craftily facilitating its downfall and a UK Government greasing its pole, now is probably the worst time for the BBC to launch a dystopian drama about racism. A primetime adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s brilliant Noughts + Crosses series of noughties novels is a baller move. Within five minutes of the drama starting, all the correct hackles will be raised.
Noughts + Crosses is a star-crossed lovers story set in an imaginary London colonised by African nations 700 years ago, a colourfully reappropriated capital in which the power base of skin colour is directly inverted. In the opening scene, a bunch of white lads are accosted by the black police force and treated like scum. One is hospitalised, leaving severe repercussions for the fictional Home Secretary, a judiciously sly character called Kamal Hadley. As he calls for curfews, stop and search and an end to peaceful protest, you can draw your own comparisons to a reverse-psychology Priti Patel. His housemaid is Meggy (Helen Baxendale), who brings her son Callum to Hadley’s wife’s birthday party to moonlight as a waiter. At the party he meets his childhood friend Sephy, Hadley’s daughter. Dangerous cross-class and cross-race romantic sparks begin to fly.
Blackman’s feeling for story is exceptional. But it’s the entire world she creates around this radical reinterpretation of the Montagues and Capulets that really puts a firework under the drama. You can sense the itch of white viewers literally made to feel the experience of citizens made second-class because of the colour of their skin. Equally, the whoop and holler of joy in viewers of colour at the sheer complexity and authority she draws in redistributed power. These books were Stormzy’s favourites growing up. He appears as a newspaper editor in the final episode. They’re audacious works.
Noughts + Crosses is a house of mirrors in which we should all examine our reflections. Not least the BBC. Like the Prime Minister in this amazing work, let’s hope the next BBC director general is a black woman, eh?
Begins Thursday, 9pm, BBC One