‘Timeless’ used to be a commonly heard term to describe great works of art. If a piece of theatre or cinema transcended the era in which it was created, then it was for the ages and could be recognised as potentially great. Its opposites are obvious: works that date, are of their time or passé. Still others clearly aspire to be outside of their time — and end up being hopelessly immersed in it.
This was on my mind while watching the BBC’s beautifully-acted, directed and produced moral disaster Noughts + Crosses, based on the series of novels by Malorie Blackman.
Presented as a race-reversal work, it is set in Britain at a time when Africa has colonised Europe, where politicians are in hoc to African leaders and where, as a result, black people find themselves at the top of society while whites form a racial underclass.
Many teenagers or parents with teenage children will have encountered the book, and ever since its publication in 2001 Noughts and Crosses and its sequels have haunted not just bestseller lists but also classroom reading lists. Various aspects of the work are meant to make it perfect fodder for teenagers, most significantly the fact that it is seen as a work of anti-racism.
The plot centres around two star-cross’d lovers who break this racial divide, and away from this central plotline the heavy-handed racial role-reversal is presented everywhere. In Blackman’s fictional world white people are known as noughts and black people are known as crosses; the black characters even occasionally use the term ‘blankers’ of the white people, which is obviously an analogy to the N-word.
At the opening of the series a group of young white men are hanging around on the streets when some black police officers decide to come over and break them up, eventually arbitrarily arresting and mistreating them. One of their victims is hospitalised, leading to increased tensions in the country at large and as a result the black politicians who lead the country discuss stop-and-search powers being increased on white youths. The daughter of one of these politicians will, provoked by these events, soon cross the racial divide.
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