Why must BBC’S drama output engage in this ‘woke’ tinkering?

What does “woke” really mean, asked the BBC’S head of drama, Piers Wenger, as he launched a passionate defence of his output this week. You may have asked yourself the same question. The word is applied to pretty much everything these days as a snappier alternative to that old chestnut “political correctness gone mad”.

So let’s be clear what “woke” is not. It is not colourblind casting. By all accounts, Dev Patel is tremendous as the lead in David Copperfield. David Oyelowo was a fine Javert in Les Miserables. Setting aside any debates about historical accuracy – black people have been present in Britain for centuries – there is a persuasive argument to be made for people of colour to appear in period dramas.

First of all, audiences include black and Asian people who would like to see versions of themselves reflected on screen. Representation matters if you don’t have it. The 1951 version of A Christmas Carol isn’t a perfect representation of Dickensian London, but a perfect representation of the British film industry in 1951. Secondly, it should no more matter that a black actress played Mrs Cratchit in the latest iteration of A Christmas Carol than that Miss Piggy played her in the Muppet version. The story is the thing.

And therein lies the problem. The BBC’S desire to make its output achingly relevant means it is unable to resist tinkering with the storylines of the classics – or “repurposing” them for a contemporary audience, as Wenger put it. He defined “wokeness” as caring about equality and diversity – and who could call that a bad thing? But this has translated into screenwriters being given carte blanche to do what they like with existing texts. Sometimes it works – Dracula was a camp delight; at other times it can go badly wrong.

Everyone must have issues, every drama must have a feminist message, and Brexit lingers like a bad smell. So Ebenezer Scrooge is mean because he was sexually abused as a boy, and offers to pay for Tiny Tim’s medical bills in return for forced sex with Mrs Cratchit. Hercule Poirot was the victim of xenophobia in The ABC Murders, rewritten by Sarah Phelps as a dark warning about nationalism after she spotted parallels between the rise of fascism in the 1930s and “the language of Brexit and Trump”. As for Doctor Who, the last time I tuned in, the aliens were being used as a teaching tool about the effects of single-use plastics.

The worst drama of the last 12 months was BBC One’s adaptation of The War of the Worlds. In the book, HG Wells gave the narrator’s wife a couple of brief mentions. In this reimagining, the wife became the lead character, played by Eleanor Tomlinson as a magnificent creature who worked as a science researcher, had a degree, was a master horsewoman and – in an age where women were denied the vote – coolly walked into a cabinet meeting and told the assembled ministers just what they should be doing to save the world. When Wenger refers to “contemporary” audiences, he means not just non-white but “young”, because those are the viewers the corporation is frantically chasing in a bid to lure them from Netflix and Youtube. But instead of crowbarring hot-button issues into period dramas, why not leave them be and stick to new stories? For my money, the best drama of last year was BBC Two’s Guilt,a cracking original script set in the modern day.

The BBC is not dutybound to give us the classics. They are there on the shelf, and readers have the critical faculties to judge their content against the “woke” times in which we live.