Noughts + Crosses
YOUNG LOVERS ARE TORN APART BY RACISM IN MALORIE BLACKMAN’S ALTERNATEWORLD YA NOVEL NOUGHTS + CROSSES. PRODUCER PREETHI MAVAHALLI TELLS US HOW THEY BROUGHT IT TO THE SCREEN
THE MURDER OF TEENAGER STEPHEN Lawrence was the spark. Angered by watching a documentary on the case, YA author Malorie Blackman finally decided to tackle racial issues in her work. The result: Noughts + Crosses, set in a segregated Britain where – in a through-the-looking-glass inversion – black “Crosses” rule the roost and white “Noughts” are considered inferior. In this alternate Albion, Nought slavery only ended 50 years ago; their education and career prospects remain stunted; and they’re still the subject of crude prejudices (“They smell funny, and eat peculiar foods”). Through the star-crossed love of privileged Cross Sephy – daughter of a powerful politician – and impoverished Nought Callum, Blackman’s book invited readers to look at racism, past and present, from an entirely different perspective.
Now, nearly two decades on, it’s been turned into a BBC One series – with an initial six-episode run – by Mammoth Screen, makers of The City & The City and The War Of The Worlds. For executive producer Preethi Mavahalli, who optioned the rights eight years back, it’s clearly been a labour of love.
“I was a fan – I read it when it came out,” she tells SFX. “As an Indian woman, second generation, it connected with me so much, because I’d never read anything where people have had the same experience as me. It was quite moving. They’re beautifully written characters, but you’re able to tackle big issues from that.” Mavahalli picks out a memorable passage where Callum has a plaster on his face: designed with the Cross majority in mind, it’s brown, standing out against his pale skin. It’s a moment
that can make white readers consider how often whiteness is considered the default – and not just them.
“What’s mad is, it hadn’t occurred to me either,” Mavahalli says. “When Malorie does that, you’re able to jump out of yourself and look at things a different way. I think it works for everyone. Malorie’s always said she wants to allow people to walk in the shoes of others. She’s reflecting the world back at you, in a different way. That’s the power of the idea.”
THE WRITE STUFF
In earlier stages of its lengthy gestation, the likes of Life On Mars’ Matthew Graham and Being Human’s Toby Whithouse were attached to the project. But in its final form, the series is the work of three writers from BAME backgrounds (plus two non-white directors) – something Mavahalli is proud of.
“It’s the only way we can be taken seriously,” she says. “It’s important when we’re talking about these issues of what it’s like to be underrepresented, and not in a place of privilege. So I made a massive push to make sure we had a team that was diverse and had lots of voices, and that they were all heard. Because if you don’t do it on this show, what show could it happen on? It’s absolutely crucial.”
To begin with, the author was quite hands-off, by choice. But latterly she’s been more and more involved. “She read every draft of the scripts,” Mavahalli says. “She watched every cut of the episodes. She’s been across the casting. She’s as involved as she wants to be – and we want her to, because she’s hugely useful and very wise.”
This doesn’t mean they’ve treated the novel like an inviolable sacred text, though. While Mavahalli says the TV version – which doesn’t exhaust the events of the book, leaving room to complete the story in a second series – is “pretty faithful to the main arc”, they have made adjustments. The leads, who begin the novel aged 13 and 15, are a little older; Callum’s now one of the first Noughts to join a military academy, rather than go to a Cross school. It took a while to reach that decision.
“We started [out] being more faithful to the novel, and set a lot of the story in school, but once you put them in a school environment, there’s a safety to it,” Mavahalli explains. “When they can go to school every day and kiss behind the bike sheds, it doesn’t push them into the adult territory you need! It was harder to feel we were mining the truth of the difficulties of what it’s like to be together when the whole of society doesn’t approve. When you age them up to 18 or 19, and they’re having to make proper life decisions about who they want to be, it brings it all into focus.”
EMPIRE BUILDING
Once the series geared up into pre-production, the biggest challenge was conceiving its alternate world. Though the book mentions, for example, people eating burger and chips and drinking Chardonnay, it’s pretty sparse on details. “It’s not like The Lord Of The Rings where there’s an explanation of what every spoon looks like!” Mavahalli jokes. And a direct line to the author didn’t really help. “When you talk to Malorie about it, she’s like, ‘London looks exactly the same, except the proportions of black and white are different.’ But when you probe that and ask things like, ‘What does architecture look like?’, it’s difficult to find norms.” To provide a foundation for the design work, they had to decide when Albion’s history diverged. “2,000 years ago there were a lot of powerful West African empires, and they sent fleets of ships out in search of South America,” Mavahalli explains. “We said, ‘What if one of those fleets made it to Southern Europe, and they started to colonise Europe?’”
A timeline “bible” was then devised, with historian David Olusoga (presenter of the BBC’s Black And British: A Forgotten History) acting as a consultant. “From that, it trickled down into every department. If Britain was colonised by a West African empire, how would language have changed; the way we dress; how we interact? What would architecture be like? You wouldn’t have Georgian and Victorian architecture, because we wouldn’t have that monarchy.”
The result is a setting that feels contemporary, but subtly different. “It is 2020, and it’s not like technology hasn’t developed. Everything feels familiar, but is skewed a particular way.” So, for example, Callum’s clothes have an African vibrancy. All this made South Africa – increasingly popular with TV
I made a massive push to make sure we had a team that was diverse and had lots of voices
crews, for economic reasons – a particularly appropriate place to film. “If we shot in London, we’d be redesigning everything, so there was no point,” Mavahalli says.
“We ended up doing a couple of days there because the one thing that remains is the river; the city would have been built around that iconic shape of the Thames. But all the skylines would be very different, and the architecture. Because of its colonial past, there’s a useful European/African mix in South Africa, in terms of architecture. So it felt right.”
Another challenge was the presentation of some pretty provocative material. In the book, Callum’s family become involved with Nought resistance group the Liberation Militia. Put on-screen without care, that could look like a white supremacist’s wet dream: white terrorists, oppressed by an uncaring majority, planting bombs that kill black civilians.
“It’s a real challenge,” Mavahalli admits. “When something’s written, and you’re imagining it in your head, it’s very different to the stark reality of seeing it on screen. I think there are a lot of things that’ll make people feel uncomfortable – and necessarily so. It’s sort of the point of the flipped premise: to feel uncomfortable, and to think again about what you’re seeing, and what it means about what we’re trying to reflect.
“It can be very easy to forget about the flipped world,” she acknowledges. “There are lots of really nasty Cross characters. You could think, ‘We’re falling into stereotypes. This is really bad.’ But the point is, they’re representing a flipped world; because they’re the ones in power, we’re making a comment on the world we live in.”
Mavahalli’s hope is that the characterisation is sufficiently nuanced that it reflects many perspectives. “There are terrible Crosses in our story. We also have violent Noughts who are killing innocent people. But we have the whole spectrum. There are characters who never really thought about their privilege. There are characters who feel like they’ve been given an unfair disadvantage in life, but are trying to integrate. I hope that, across the range of characters, we’re giving all points of view. Because the only message the show has is that prejudice, in all forms – whether it’s sex, race, religion, whatever – is bad.”
Noughts + Crosses starts airing on BBC One on Thursday 5 March.