Against authenticity
... and for better representation of artists (and respect for their ideas)
When Miranda Wayland, the head of creative diversity at the BBC, decided to speak at the digital MIPTV conference on 13 April, little did she know she would become a strong contender for Twitter’s Main Character the following day (Daily Mail).
All Wayland wanted to do was get us ‘to really think about who we want to work with and understand what authentic portrayal of diversity means’, a noble sentiment. However, in mentioning flagship crime drama Luther as an example of culturally diverse programming that could do better, Wayland unwittingly stirred up a hornet’s nest of angry opinion. The Daily Mail – that bastion of cultural sensitivity – headlined:
BBC diversity chief says Idris Elba’s TV detective Luther ‘isn't Black enough to be real’ because ‘he doesn’t have any Black friends and doesn’t eat any Caribbean food’
This bait-and-snitch tactic of journalistic sensationalism appeared to work so far as to draw a comment from the drama’s (White) creator and writer Neil Cross, who insisted that Elba only took the role in the first place because race was not considered important to the character, adding:
I have no knowledge or expertise or right to try to tackle in some way the experience of being a Black man in modern Britain.
It would have been an act of tremendous arrogance for me to try to write a Black character. We would have ended up with a slightly embarrassed, ignorant, middle-class, White writer’s idea of a Black character.
Cross had to defend himself, and he spoke no wrong in doing so. But the knock-on effect of his public response read as a part of a spat between two BBC-hired creatives, making the corporation look foolish for playing to the morally outraged tune of Daily Mail readers.
Still, Wayland’s point has some merit: that ‘to achieve true representation, TV chiefs must ensure Black characters have an environment and culture built around them that is completely reflective of their background’. This statement comes from a good place, and wishes to be respectful of an audience cohort weary of seeing people of its ilk portrayed in unfamiliar ways. Luther was simply the wrong example to illustrate it.
After all, he is a detective in the hugely under-representative-of-Black-people Metropolitan police, and with real-life stories of police racism rife in that organisation – one famous instance so recently portrayed by John Boyega in the Small Axe series – it’d be pretty safe to assume that few Black viewers of the show need reminders in entirely fictional works.
He is also a maverick, a character which, by definition, is representative of no one. That did not stop attempts to visualise what a ‘Black enough’ episode of Luther would be like, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way:
Who would bet against a serious attempt to insert elements of overt Blackness succumbing to Comic Relief levels of parody though?
This is because Idris Elba’s Luther follows in the footsteps of TV show mavericks such as Ken Stott as Inspector Pat Chappel in The Vice, or Robbie Coltrane as Dr Eddie ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald in Cracker, or – to go beyond police dramas – medical doctors who faint at the sight of blood (Martin Clunes as Doc Martin) and antiques dealers who have an almost supernatural ability to spot gems from forgeries (Ian McShane as Lovejoy). These kinds of shows make for great entertainment. What would also be great is if more of them featured an ever more culturally diverse range of actorly talents.
Luther is also a fundamentally different show from the sort Wayland is referring to. But Wayland is right to call for better cultural representation on screen, and that the solution ‘[isn’t] as simple as just hiring more Black directors’. It is also hiring more culturally diverse writers too, and respecting the ideas they bring to pitches for shows, whether they be specifically rooted in their lived experience or not, because it would be equally as problematic if directors and writers were hired to make shows that were wholly contingent upon references to their culture rather than if their ideas were intrinsically interesting.
In short: authenticity is important, to a degree, but respect for ideas from a wider set of voices is more so.