For me, this is the straw that broke the camel’s back with regard to the formerly well respected British Broadcasting Corporation - a black Friar Tuck.

After destroying a whole generation’s enjoyment of the Arthurian legend by making the blonde, blue eyed Queen Guinevere black, quite regardless of the fact that this was an impossibility, they have now trampled all over the image of Friar Tuck.

No longer is the Friar a balding, rotund, educated man with a penchant for ale, now he has been transformed into a ‘hunky, fighting robed warrior.’

The BBC has once again treated me with contempt and further embarrassed me with their continuing Operation Get Behind the Darkies. It appears that the top brass at the BBC believe that by splashing black faces all over every programme that they air, they are somehow beyond reproach when it comes to race issues and can hide the fact that in reality they are one of the least diverse corporations in Britain, at least in upper management. No doubt the management also throw words around such as modern, trendy, uptodate and groovy.

It is easy to point the finger at the middle aged white old Etonians that run the BBC but white people in general must also bear some of the blame for this; how much longer are they going to allow their culture, traditions and even folklore be trampled over by such people? Such people I hasten to add, who are doing this not through a love of Negroes, but rather as a convenient smokescreen for their own racism.

The same people who will no doubt scream racist should a white objector point out the idiocy of their programming. Friar Tuck is white. I am well aware that in reality he did not exist, I am well aware also that Arthur did not exist, nor Guinevere but these are folklores and legends that have been around for centuries, what right have a few ex public school boys in suits to alter them purely to save face?

‘Our generation of kids won’t bat an eyelid at the fact Friar Tuck is black, but it’s important for me to get to play a role model.’

Naturally thanks to the wonderful British education system most children are oblivious to things like history. As for Friar Tuck being a role model, since when? He’s the overweight jovial drunkard, well done David for lapping up another white cast off. All the BBC have done is turn Friar Tuck black to keep the Negroes happy, well I for one am not happy.

Programmes such as Robin Hood are meant to entertain the young whilst also gently educating, instead we have a television programme so far removed from the period in which it were set, it may as well be situated in space. What do youngsters today glean from such a programme? That skin colour is irrelevant and more down to chance rather than the geographical location from which a person comes from? I am not black by a mere accident, it is because my ancestors evolved this skin colour to better protect themselves from their environment.

This is a minor issue compared to the big issue that this sort of thing disguises – slavery. Should one of Britain’s ill informed, ignorant youth do something out of the ordinary, and think for a moment about slavery, no doubt they’d consider that both British whites and British blacks were complicit in slavery, when this isn’t the case at all. Negroes came here as slaves and several hundred years after Robin Hood was set. Yet according to the BBC Negroes have always been here.

This will give our government even more cause to ditch large swaths of British history and instead teach things such as Twitting, MyFace and BoBo in schools, reserving the tricky stuff for, well probably just the historians. Gone will be the likes of Ignatius Sancho, William Wilberforce and already many children believe that Churchill is a fictional character (if not a nodding dog), despite Churchill only dying 44 years ago. Many teens also believe that Robin Hood was real and bizarrely, despite him appearing in many of the aforementioned Robin Hood’s tales, Richard the Lionheart as fictional!

Needless to say if they believe Robin Hood to be based on a real person, then likewise they’ll believe Friar Tuck to have been a black martial arts expert, rather than the portly man of God of the legends. This poorly conceived attempt to make the BBC appear Negro friendly has stripped this awful series of the last bit of credibility it may have held and also dropped the BBC beyond salvage in my regard.

It shouldn’t have surprised me however, particularly on the back of the black Guinevere, the Black Doctor Who, and the recent and even more infuriating All Black espisode of Eastenders. At the BBC it seems that 2009 is the year of the Negro.

I found the BBC episode particularly insulting, it was completely unnecessary and just another PR stunt intended to keep the Negroes happy. This wasn’t a landmark, there was nothing to celebrate in an episode tht purposely kept whites off screen purely with the intention of having an all black episode. In any event it was not an all black episode, merely an all non-white episode. This wasn’t even just centred around one family or one location, some scenes were in the public house, but just carefully crafted to ensure no white faces violated the episode. Indeed the bar had no bar staff as they are all white, so they simply ceased to exist in that episode. Black extras crowed every seat and featured in every walk by, purely to get Negroes on screen.

The BBC celebrated this as an all important milestone. I was shocked and angered that since the 1950s, that this programme claimed to deal with, we have reversed positions so much that it is now acceptable for the BBC to ban all actors of a certain colour from an episode, as long as that colour is white. Sure there may well be all white episodes, but that is by chance rather than design. The BBC set out to create an episode that featured only non whites, to me that is purely and simply racism. For even racism dressed up in good intentions is still racism.

The irony is that the BBC intended that episode to highlight the racism suffered by us Negroes as we arrived here 50 years ago, by segregating the cast and having a no whites policy. One wonders if they had a sign outside the studio that day, No Whites, No Irish and No Dogs. The fact that the BBC used racism to highlight racism appears to be lost on just about everyone, I find no mention of this anywhere else on the internet. But naturally whites dare not complain and after all Negro is most certainly in vogue at present, what with Obama (I won’t even start on that particular topic!). The upper echelons of the BBC must have been positively beside themselves at his election as now they can have far more Negro on TV, at no extra cost.

The fact that the episode also went out on the tenth anniversary of the Macpherson report, a fact that the BBC claimed to be coincidence, not only insults my intelligence but also feels like a further slap in the face.

‘A BBC spokeswoman said last night that it had never been intended as a black episode.’

And yet no white people were featured in either the Cafe, or the public house? And all the extras were black? All by accident? They also refused to confirm or deny that the episode was also written by blacks.

I am sure that many whites saw this episode as a criticism of whites, labelling them racists and criticising the conduct of their ancestors once again. Such programming is hardly the best way of promoting racial harmony, but that is just typical of the BBC, they believe that ethnicitising white characters will somehow keep the Negroes happy with the lack of top BBC officials, and either fail to realise or care about the possible white backlash. Such actions by the BBC only breed hate and resentment, but fortunately for the upper class white men at the top of the BBC, the backlash is not something that they need to worry about.

It’s been six months since my last post and I honestly believed that I had covered everything that I wanted to and discussed all of the points that had enticed me into starting a blog in the first place, but recent news has compelled me to post once again.

I have been a fan of Doctor Who ever since I was a boy. It is a quintessentially British programme that I enjoyed immensely growing up.

I won’t say who my favourite Doctor was, as it would show my age, suffice to say he was more of a Grandfatherly figure than the modern Doctors.

It may come as a surprise to some, but I am actually saddened by the news that the new actor replacing David Tennant is black.

Paterson Joseph, who whilst a fine actor, is not what I envisage as Doctor Who, and whilst modernists may claim that such a selection is needed in order to bring the series up to date and in order to make the programme more inclusive – I for one certainly don’t feel it. 

I have covered this topic before and discussed my reasoning at length, but there is more to this instance of political correctness for me than simply random programme’s using black faces. There seems to be a continuing ethnicitising of Doctor Who and I cannot understand why.

I have been an avid viewer of this series almost since its inception, and I have never seen a black Timelord in 45 years. I do remember noticing the absence of black faces, but then I understood from an early age that there the Timelords were a white race.

There were black races, such as the Movellans but it wasn’t until much later that black faces began appearing in Doctor Who and it seemed to me that once the floodgates had been opened it became a veritable torrent.

The new Doctor’s first assistant had a black boyfriend, which didn’t really strike me as odd, more a sign of the times. There were many black actors and actresses through the first and second series playing a myriad of parts, and again understandable, if alien races can have white people, why not black people too? The Doctor’s second assistant was black, this did disturb me slightly and I became concerned with the direction this seemed to be taking.

Next came the Christmas ‘Special’. I distinctly remember after Merlin thinking to myself that the BBC would never add in such historical inaccuracies in a flagship programme like Doctor Who – oh dear.

 

After viewing the promotional trailers I actually found myself trying to justify a Negro in Victorian Britain. After emancipation some did remain in the UK and it is quite conceivable that the Doctor’s assistant would be a Victorian Negro, although it is some stretch. I had many misgivings wondering why the BBC seemed to be stretching reality to the point of breaking in order to get black faces on the screen.

Then I sat down on Christmas Day and watched the episode itself and I cannot accurately convey my utter dismay as I watched the opening scenes without using a modern abbreviation – WTF. Fortunately I did not vocalise that thought as young family members were present but that is what went through my mind during the opening scenes.

Picture the scene, Victorian London, blanketed in snow with many poor Dickensian folk going about their daily business, many of whom were black! I was furious. 400 years of history glossed over and ignored in the name of political correctness and equality point scoring.

It portrayed Britain as always having had Negroes living here, as if slavery and emancipation never happened, William Wilberforce, Ignatius Sancho and others did not ever exist, they did not need to. We’ve always been here, living in perfect harmony.

There is no black culture, no time when black people in Britain were outsiders, immigrants, nothing that black people added to Britishness and Britain that improved it, we were here all along.

As I said, this infuriated me, the BBC seemed to be treating me with utter contempt, I either did not matter or they believed that I was ignorant of my own history. As those feelings slowly subsided over the Christmas period and I had not managed to get around to voicing my anger via an official complaint, I felt that I should just let sleeping dogs lie, until I received a further slap in the face – a black Doctor.

Apparently the BBC feels that it is not enough to simply erase black history, and have black faces throughout every time period, now it has also decided that all the major parts in the series must go to black people too.

You’d be fairly confident that the hierarchy of both the BBC and of Doctor Who were predominantly black and using their position to get more black faces on the screen, contrary to equality guidelines; but nothing could be further from the truth. The only ‘minorities’ making these decisions are women and homosexuals and white ones at that. In fact if you were to head into the production of Doctor Who, or any high level meeting at the BBC, it would be foolish to play spot the Negro, you would be there for quite a while – at least until the cleaner comes in (and now I sound like those whiny equality complainers that I despise).

The real question is why. Perhaps I misjudged Lenny Henry when I lambasted him for making what I believed at the time were inappropriate, unhelpful and inaccurate remarks. Perhaps when he said:

“When I started, I was surrounded by a predominantly white workforce, and 32 years later, not a lot has changed,”

He wasn’t talking about on the screen, but he was referring to what goes on behind the cameras, as in another quote that I used before:

Samir Shah, a member of the BBC’s board of directors, said this had led to a “world of deracinated coloured people flickering across our screens – to the irritation of many viewers and the embarrassment of the very people such actions are meant to appease”

He also said:

instead of dealing with the issues surrounding why greater numbers of people from ethnic minorities had not made it to the executive level of British television, broadcasters had instead put more black and Asian faces on screen, regardless of whether they were cultural fits to the programmes they were in.

The emphasis is mine.

“I don’t think that such over-representation is a brilliant idea. Another thing that’s not real is some of the casting of non-whites in fiction,” he added.

As Mr Shah points out the problem isn’t racism, it is down to the fact that the people at the top like to promote those that they believe are like them, like some sort of old boys network.

“the positions of real creative power in British broadcasting, are still controlled by a metropolitan, largely liberal, white, middle-class, cultural elite – and, until recently, largely male and largely Oxbridge.”

What infuriates me is not that these old Etonian’s, or whatever they are, are sticking together and have implemented some sort of glass ceiling for everyone else, but that they believe they simply need to stick a few black faces on the screen to keep the Negroes and other minorities happy and everything will be fine and dandy.

What’s next? A black Scrooge? A black Robin Hood or Maid Marian? A black Father Christmas? A whole new meaning to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?

This must be annoying white people as much as everyone else, if not more, yet you’ll have to work hard to find any criticism in the mainstream press.  It appears that nobody wishes to criticise through fear of being branded racist and ironically it seems to be left to the minorities to raise a hue and cry about this deracinating of television.