How I See It

Bridgerton’s ballsy casting calls for celebration – not justification I struggle with Agatha Christie, where all the blonds in golfing sweaters blur into one

Since my column last week about Bridgerton, in which I opined that it had a plot like a porn film – confusing, raising more questions than it answers and best batted away as one concentrates on enjoying other elements – several readers have been in touch to ask why I didn’t address the show’s revolutionary approach to casting.

The answer is that I simply didn’t have time, as I was too interested in all the sex. (“Just like my student days!” I want to add, except that would be literally the opposite of the truth. My lord, I got a lot of work done.)

But yes, one of the most talked-about aspects of this talked-about show is the diverse racial casting of its Regency characters. I hold the same view of that as I do of the series in general: it’s great fun and very good news, if you can avoid analysing the logic of the specifics. To achieve this, I would advise skipping episode four completely.

I’m a big fan of “diversity”; the word has acquired an air of tired cliché due to recent overuse, but it only means variety, which is obviously a good thing in entertainment.

For example: I bow to no one in my love of a white, male, middleaged, real ale drinker in a televised trivia quiz, and without them Only Connect would be quite lost. However, while the episodes we made ten years ago would regularly feature 100 per cent line-ups of people fitting that description, the inclusion of more women, some younger people and broader ethnic make-up has made the programmes more visually interesting, with more memorable teams and a wider frame of reference. (By “ethnic make-up”, I don’t mean the contestants are putting on ethnic make-up. Please. It’s not 1974. Except when it comes to my jokes. You understand I was just trying to avoid the word diversity, for the sake of diversity.)

It’s boring if everyone’s the same. There are other, weightier implications about representation and not making people feel left out: I have two mixed-race godchildren and it’s amazing how long one has to sift through bookshops or theatrical listings to find examples that don’t make them think their skin colour is somehow imaginary.

But I’m not talking about anything worthy in this instance, only that variety should be a cornerstone of light entertainment. Also it means you can tell one person from another, which I really struggle to do in, say, an Agatha Christie. All the blonds in golfing sweaters blur into one, so the reveal is never much of a surprise.

Daphne, our white heroine in Bridgerton, has five white brothers who all look like Colin Firth; it took me several episodes to work out there was more than one of them. So thank God her husband is black, to give us half a chance of knowing when the scene’s changed.

Lots of other characters are black, too. It’s not the single mimsy BAME character that’s normally levered into a costume drama, nor the eight black barristers you invariably find in a crime show: these are Regency ballrooms and Georgian streets, filled with people of different colours! I love the ballsy, unconventional freshness of the thing. In a world of timid, derivative television with so many programmes vying to copy whatever else is on, this is a genuine vision of something different. It’s so carefree, so confident, so unapologetic and thus so genuinely aristocratic in its attitude, it makes every previous costume drama, even the great

Downton Abbey, seem nervously middle-class.

The problem only comes when they try to explain why it’s like that. I assumed it was operating like the musical Hamilton or Armando Iannucci’s film of David Copperfield: casting black and brown actors because that’s creatively interesting and broadens the range of available talent, and to hell with historical detail. Whether the characters are actually meant to be black, who knows or cares? Doesn’t matter any more than whether

Sky Masterson or Danny Zuko or Mary Poppins are actually meant to be singers.

But then, in episode four, it is suddenly spelt out that George III created a raft of black aristocrats when he married Queen Charlotte (a real person, who some say was of African descent). “We were separate societies, divided by colour,” explains the fictional character Lady Danbury, “until a king fell in love with one of us.”

This caused a terrible traffic jam in my brain. Why does the Duke of Hastings’s father have a haughty, Norman-style obsession with the antiquity of the Hastings title if it only began with him? And what was he doing before? Are they meant to be foreign, like the Dutch nobs that came over with William of Orange? And where has all the racism gone, if we’re in a world where it ever existed? Why are the farmers and local snobs so suddenly obsequious to the new black toffs?

It reminded me of the sci-fi film Face/Off. I watched that film very happily enjoying the premise that John Travolta and Nicolas Cage could swap faces and be indistinguishable from each other. Great premise! But utterly ruined by a scene halfway through, in which scientists explained the technology by which the faces were exchanged, via skilled facial surgery and scar-erasing cream – which completely failed to mention that John Travolta is two stone heavier than Nicolas Cage and has a completely different voice. The explanation actively triggered the doubt. As a person who presented a quiz show at Christmas dressed as a cello, I say: never apologise, never explain! Just do it, and hope people

like it.

My cup of tea: Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton