He looks pretty
bloody authentic to me.
April 14th 2021.
My ire was well and truly irked this week when I read that the the BBC's 'head of creative diversity' (a title which should be enough to frighten the horses all by itself) said that the character of John Luther from the excellent series by the same surname wasn't 'authentic enough'. She said this because he doesn't have any black friends and doesn't eat Caribbean food, so 'this doesn't feel authentic'.
Before opining in this way, she would do well to watch a few episodes. The character is a determined loner – a solitary soul whose life is his work. The show doesn't go into his personal life, much less his eating habits and for my money, it's all the stronger for it. Too many TV writers rely a little too much on the personal background both to tediously explain or underline some character aspect that 99% of the viewing public are able to have worked out all by themselves, thank you very much – or, I suspect, to pad the running time.
Luther doesn't do this. Neil Cross, the writer, is a white, middle-class Englishman, so he's on a stone-cold loser from the get-go. If he had included a rich back-story encompassing his family, friends and diet, he would have been shot down as writing stereotypically. 'What does a white Englishman know about the black experience..?' Instead, he has written about a hard-nosed, highly focused hero fighting the good fight in modern London who just happens to be black. I happen to be a middle-aged, overweight, balding white git. So does that mean I eat full English breakfasts, roast dinners and kebabs after the pub? Well I don't. What of my stereotype in a multicultural city like London? According to the BBC's thought police, I'm simply not authentic.
In response to the comment, Cross himself said “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.” He continued, “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.”
I can't say I agree fully with that, either. He's a writer. He has every right to write as he pleases, not as everyone else says he should. Whether the result has merit or not is another question altogether, but to describe it as 'tremendous arrogance' is just pandering to this oppressive policing of what a creative person should or shouldn't do. Are we to look forward to a a future where people are restricted to writing only about their own experiences and are considered arrogant if they dare write about somebody else's?
The point of course is that he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.
Idris Elba said that a part of his attraction to the role was that it didn't have any stereotypical elements to it.
We really have got to get past this constant monitoring of any supposed or invented crime against racial identity. Cross was writing stories featuring a detective. The character is strong because it's a strong character – not because it's a black character. The actor plays it to perfection and has made it his own not because he is a black man, but because he is a phenomenal actor.
Perhaps the folly of this particular nugget is the comment about Caribbean food. Unlike Wayland it seems, I watched Luther pretty thoroughly and I had no idea as to whether he is from a Caribbean background or not. It really didn't matter. I thought he was from Hackney. As it transpires, Idris Elba is of Sierra Leonean and Ghanaian heritage, so his eating Caribbean food makes no more sense than him eating a Chow Mien, which no doubt he does from time to time. And why shouldn't he? Because it's a betrayal of his cultural heritage?
Please.