TV star turns hand to playing... a racist
DURING the 1980s Noughts + Crosses star Paterson Joseph would ring up friends to tell them: “There’s a black man on the TV!” “It was like seeing a wildebeest in Harlesden,” says the former Peep Show actor.
Paterson, who now lives in north London with his French wife after 10 years in France, was told at youth theatre he would play certain roles.
“When I was at youth theatre with Lennie James,” says the 55-year-old, “my people would tell me we would end up playing slaves. We didn’t believe that. I wanted to be Roger Moore and Patrick Macnee from The Avengers. In my head the last generation should have dealt with all this.” Lennie went on to star in movies such as Snatch while Paterson is now a Rightwing politician in TV drama Noughts + Crosses.
The black population run a fictional country and are banned from marrying white people.
“He’s a weird character to play,” said Paterson, who stars alongside Bonnie Mbuli, “and to get your head around. I don’t normally play a racist!”
Asked if it would be controversial, he replied: “God, I hope so! It’s saying big things about being oppressed, big things about being treated instantly by the colour of your skin, and it flips the situation so the majority of people watching it who will be white can see what it would be like in an extreme example.”
The drama was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, which he says “seems to work in the way that it did under apartheid”, with businesses still run by whites.
And television still has a problem with diversity, he said. “There’s a whole swathe of British black history in it – Indian, Chinese and Arab – that is missing from our TV screens.”
● Noughts + Crosses, BBC One, 9pm Thursday.