Rachel Zegler was cast as Snow White (Photo: Wikimedia commons)
Recent news stories claim that the BBC had been “warned” about its dramas’ “clunky” colourblind casting. The BBC is charged with using actors for roles without considering their ethnicity.
Several such stories have focused on the casting of a mixed heritage actor as 17th century English scientist Isaac Newton in a 2023 episode of Doctor Who.
These headlines misrepresent an independent report on diversity at the BBC published in January. The report also concerns gender and class, as well as presenters, writers and other employees. Most of the issues it raises apply equally to other television channels.
It worries about the shortage of roles for older women, but its key concern is with lack of representation for “people from working class backgrounds (in a way that represents and celebrates their own cultures)”.
However, its estimate that the working class makes up “about half of the population” is a serious underestimate. If the class is seen as those people who live by having to work for a boss for a wage, as Marxists say, it is closer to two thirds of Britain’s population.
The weakness of a definition based on lifestyles is that the report claims that the BBC’s flagship soap Eastenders is a great representation of working class life. Meanwhile the majority of characters are small business owners, not working class people. How often do people employed in shops, offices or factories lead a television series?
Television shows also leave out difficulties faced by ethnic minorities—from the crime drama Shetland you’d think no senior police in Scotland are white.
Though as the report says, this presents positive role models, while the truly unbelievable thing is the weekly killing on an island that has only had two murders in the past 50 years.
Colourblind casting was originally introduced to celebrate the talents of ethnic people who were rightly sick of only seeing themselves cast as enslaved, bouncers, servants or gangsters.
Its strengths can be seen in a film like Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, which provided an anarchic liberation from racial or familial reality. Netflix’s Bridgerton does something similar.
But the way it is widely used creates pitfalls. More varied roles come at the expense of no one noticing they’re not white. So diversity can be satisfied by having a role written for a white man played by a black man or a woman.
To avoid this you need creative teams from a range of backgrounds. But in the media, casualisation and reliance on unpaid internships has drastically reduced opportunities for people from racial minorities and working class people.
Black Canadian actor and director Omari Newton calls colourblind casting “a form of erasure”. It “dismisses the racism that is embedded in the very fabric” of how Western societies were founded.
The excellent and politically aware Sally Wainwright’s romp Renegade Nell is about a highwaywoman in 18th century England. Now this includes fairies and other magical elements. But its theme is the sexism faced by Nell.
Her best friend is a black man who appears to be enslaved. But the aristocratic villain is also played by a black actor, while several other aristocrats are of Indian descent. This is an 18th century without the racialised slave trade or the hideous racism of the rulers at the time.
Similarly, the 2022 comedy drama Dodger places Charles Dickens’s boy thief, plausibly in a mixed race and gender gang of kids. But in a London at the peak of its racist empire when the chief of police is black and dines with the prime minister without comment.
In such worlds, the contradictions and struggle that actually improve things are entirely absent. Chartist workers leader William Cuffay did make an appearance in ITV’s Victoria. But he was portrayed as a window-smashing leftist thug getting in the way of queen Victoria’s progressive social reforms.
The brief flowering of dramas based on immigrant experiences during Black Lives Matter showed the potential alternatives, including Steve McQueen’s series Small Axe and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You.
