Doctor Who- this might be the last straw even for me.

[TinselAngel]

For fucks sake

Juno Dawson as a writer.

Well yes (which also speaks to why reading a black actor through contemporary constructs of race is a mistake), but I was really meaning that if you took someone from a world where people could suffer toothache so badly they would pay a barber to pull a decaying tooth out without anaesthetic and told them in our time (1) we have medicines that repair teeth and take away the pain, and (2) sometime our actors don't have the same skin colour as their characters, I don't think the latter would be the thing they found most interesting!

Which getting back on topic is for me what is most interesting about Doctor Who and Sci Fi in general - shifting an aspect of humanity into a different context and asking "what would this change? what stays the same? what is universal?"

I would say it's because an actor's skin colour is far more obvious than their teeth. Depending on the character, we sometimes don't even see the actor's teeth.

A black actor playing a historical figure who we know was white is jarring. If the producers have gone to such trouble to get historical details correct (e.g. clothes, props and buildings), and to find actors that look approximately the right age for the characters they are playing, why ignore one of the most obvious things about an actor - their skin colour?

I think this matters less in the theatre than in TV and films - there is more artifice in the theatre.

I know this means that we restrict the roles that black actors can take if we try to be accurate when casting in TV and films, and we deprive ourselves of appreciating their skill if they are not cast because they aren't the same colour as the character they are playing.

But would we accept a white man playing Nelson Mandela in a film about his life? I doubt we would.

It's absolute PC tripe. I haven't watched it for years. I don't need a history lesson in PC everytime I watch a fantasy show.

Yes, Apple - there's been quite a few series we liked.

Thanks 😀

Another series to watch makes it easier to justify getting it again.

It's in part because we think race is important.

We don't notice people's teeth, unless they are unusual. That's why I can watch a film I say 40 years ago, and say, oh my gosh, their teeth! But I didn't notice them at all when I saw it the first time - everyone's teeth were like that.

If, 1000 years in the future, we are all effectively mixed race and no one thinks much about it, and the concept of race as it exists now is no longer a thing, I imagine no one will care much in historical productions either.

That's not true now. In fact the effect of modern identity politics is that we think about and notice race more than ever. We are even told that in some cases, we must absolutely not have cross race casting. So of course we notice it, whichever direction it happens in.

It's like Morgan Freeman said, if you want people to get over racism, stop talking about race all the bloody time.

(reply works also for @TempestTost)

Nelson Mandela? Probably not because race was at the core of his story. But who knows, perhaps in future a colour blind casting will create different insights for the audience.

But we don't insist that the actresses who play Juliet have to be (or at least look) 14. We don't require our Romans to look Italian, our Jesuses to look middle eastern or our Santa Clauses to look Turkish.

The thing about acting is it's pretendy. You know the actor isn't really the person they are pretending to be. An actor with a different skin colour to what you expected for that character or time is jarring at first, but then again so is an actor you know well from one role turning up as someone else, and we get over that quickly enough. Hell, we see famous actors out of character all the time and somehow we are able to put that aside and accept them in character.

My point being, we aren't slaves to a preset list of Things That Are Too Important To Ignore. We make the active choice to suspend disbelief about all sorts of intrusive real world knowledge. It really is up to us which physical features we consider sigificant to a part and which we do not.

But would we accept a white man playing Nelson Mandela in a film about his life? I doubt we would.

Black characters not so much, but that is largely because of the successful campaign against blackface. We have had lots of white actors playing Asian, Arab and Native American characters.

Ben Kingsley famously played Ghandi (to a fair degree of criticism from Indians, especially) and race was central to his story.

I don't disagree that black actors playing historical characters who are white can be jarring but the idea that it's just because there is a miss-match between the character and the actor deserves some scrutiny. I think there is a lot of being happy to accept the familiar and being surprised by the unfamiliar in there too.

Ben Kingsley is Indian, his actual name is Krishna Bhanji.

I was just going to say that. I wonder which Indians "criticised".

Nelson Mandela? Probably not because race was at the core of his story.

But we don't insist that the actresses who play Juliet have to be (or at least look) 14. We don't require our Romans to look Italian, our Jesuses to look middle eastern

Jesus was Jewish not ‘middle eastern’ and being Jewish is very much core to who Jesus is. You cannot consider the story of Jesus in isolation from being Jewish.

@Littoralzone Jesus was what would now be called Mizrahim, the branch of Judaism that never left the Middle East (unlike the Sephardim who went to Spain/Portugal, or the Ashkenazim who went to Germany). So yes, he was indeed "Middle Eastern."

I was just going to say that. I wonder which Indians "criticised".

Well... his father was a Muslim Gujarati from Zanzibar and his mother was 'white British'. It's not too hard to see that an English person may say 'he's Indian' but an Indian might see the English mother, and religion was also crucial to that piece of history - the scars of partition run deep.
He was excellent in the role, imo, but perhaps this demonstrates some of the more nuanced sensitivities that may exist around this sort of historical figure especially when at the time the film was made some of the events were very much in living memory.

Whereas in the near contemporaneous 'A passage to India', casting Sir Alec Guinness as the Indian professor was cringeworthy even at the time and I'm sure wouldn't be done now.

Do you recall the horror some felt when there was a black woman selling oranges to the crowd at Tyburn? A perfectly historical type of person for the time. One black person in a role that might have been at the time, everyone else white.
Totally missed the elephant in the room - a non-historical castle gate close by. Or was there one completely flattened for Marble Arch? I didn't even notice the woman while puzzling over the castle.

I get distracted when buildings I know are 'miscast'. Ecclesiastical buildings doubling as secular ones often seem incongruous - they're usually far too grand and ornate. The cloisters of Gloucester cathedral seem particularly overused though I've come to terms with them leading somewhere completely different in Harry Potter because, hey, Hogwarts is a magical building and why shouldn't they have copied bits from Muggle buildings they liked?

No I don't remember and I have idea what TV or film this is actually referencing.

I stopped watching Disney Shardlake adaptation very quickly as the lack of hats and obviously non britsh architecture was annoying me - possibly as I had just watched BBC Hilary Mantel Cromwell adapation.

This kind of thing never used to bother me as much - I happily watched Cadfael - as a teen and again with DD1 as a teen - and it lead to us both learning much more about the the Anarchy a period not really covered by any school history either of us had.

Did just watch some you tube promotion for new Disney program about victorian boxers - it from Peaky Blinders people and mixes real historical people and fudges time lines for sake of good story telling - and one of the historians was getting very cross about questions on ethnic diverse cast saying a port city capital of an huge empire diversity should be not a surpise - and to me it's not but it's often not really shown on TV or if it is it's assumped it's colour blind casting and not historically accurate.

Anachronistic casting in some dramas may exacerbate distrust of realistic choices in others I guess.

No I don't remember and I have idea what TV or film this is actually referencing.

Oh good, I thought it was just me.

I understand Shardlake hasn't been renewed which I'm semi glad about as I hated that it had Barak marry the wrong woman.

American film-makers (including Disney) tend to be very ahistorical in their productions based on or around Europe. Didn’t they have an American break the enigma code? Indeed they often go so far that the whole thing becomes fantasy. It is harder to object to eg the Irish landscape in Braveheart when the whole thing is so Disneyfied that it is less realistic than a film about Babe the talking pig which came out the same year.

Not that that stopped Scottish Nats from thinking it was history.

I’m jumping genres to historical fiction. I watched Rouge Heroes on BBC recently. For the unfamiliar, it’s the story of how the SAS was created but not meant to be completely historically accurate.

They even brought drag into the SAS!

There's a fair few films which give me a 'Wonderful World' earworm ...'Don't know much about history ...' and the rest of the catalog of ignorance.

Did it? I watched and I don't remember that.
TBH though the whole thing was pretty underwhelming and barely made an impact on me. I'm not surprised it's not coming back. Shardlake was too young and Barak too RADA, IMO. Still like the books though.

I've just listened to all the Shardlake's on audio book, having read them a few years ago. I'm in mourning now I've finished them.

I think I watched sister Boniface recently and gave up because several things were too jarring. One was modern attitudes and another was modern idiom, patterns of speech and accents.

I also didn't notice in things like Cadfael. (Note to self, rewatch this). I suppose I'm older now so notice the prevailing accent (eg upwards intonation and increased glottal stops. Not judging, just saying I notice.) It's safe to say that I know it's a made up world inspired by the past.

I don't mind made up stuff and I also like documentaries. What I can't watch is certain blends like scripted reality or faux history. I don't mind alternate timelines.

I also don't mind exploratory fiction and I don't mind something didactic. I don't like the one pretending to be the other. Like ideology masquerading as science. Or waffling pretending to be expertise (that probably belongs on the Shon/kumar/coco? thread.)