The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
A NOD TO THE BARD
Noughts + Crosses - BBC1
Adapted from Malorie Blackman’s highly successful novel of the same name, Noughts + Crosses is an earnest effort to confront racism in Britain by flipping the ethnic power divide.
In Blackman’s imagined world, the whole of Europe, including Britain, is dominated by the descendants of African invaders who conquered the continent 700 years earlier. Those descendants are the Crosses, while the indigenous Brits are the Noughts.
When asked why she chose these terms, Blackman explained that it was because, in the game of noughts and crosses, there are no winners. Perhaps she got her inspiration from the 1983 movie WarGames, in which the computer blows a fuse trying to win the same game.
She certainly got the inspiration for the central plot from the bard’s Romeo and Juliet. This involves the love affair between a young, white, English Nought, Callum McGregor (Jack Rowan) – not to be confused with Celtic’s midfielder of the same name – and Sephy (Masali Baduza), the daughter of a high-ranking Cross politician, who has his eye on the female Prime Minister’s job.
He also has his eye on his wife’s lover, in a curious sub-plot that adds nothing much to the overall story.
In case you missed the Shakespeare connection, there was even a balcony scene, only this time Callum/Romeo was on the balcony, while Sephy/Juliet had to fight her way through dustbins and clamber up unaided. She wouldn’t have been smelling of roses by the time she got there.
In Albion, The Aprica super-state’s name for what we call England, black people have all the goodies. They live in mansions, have white servants to peel their grapes, and control their ethnic inferiors with a violent, bigoted police force. The Noughts, on the other hand, live in squalid council houses and have to queue up for a few hours’ casual labour.
In the first episode we saw a Cross cop cracking the skull of a pal of Callum’s brother, Jude (Josh Dylan), during a stop-and-search.
This pushed Jude into the arms of Jack Dorn (Shaun Dingwall), the leader of a proscribed paramilitary organisation called LM. But Dorn is no noble freedom fighter. He is an evil, twisted slimeball, who murders the injured boy and blames it on the police.
Much to Jude’s disgust, Callum enrols in an elite military academy, where 99% of the cadets, including Sephy’s boyfriend Lekan (Jonathan Ajayi), are Crosses. In Thursday’s episode his fellow cadets welcomed him by urinating on his mattress. I know how he felt. My workmates at a wheat silo in Australia welcomed me in the same fashion many years ago. It must be a universal bigot thing.
But, I digress. While the aim of the novel and TV series is to ask white people how they would feel if they were treated as badly as those of a darker hue in our own society, I fear that the people Blackman is trying to reach will have changed channels within seconds of the beginning of the opening episode. And the few white supremacists who watched it for any length of time will just have had their prejudices reinforced.
Blackman is heavily in favour of a homogenised society, and quite right she is, but, curiously enough, she added her name to a petition in 2014 opposing Scottish independence. Ethnic homogenisation is one thing. Dismissing the history and culture of a nation is quite another.