The Baftas n-word row has been very revealing |
At the Baftas on Sunday night, John Davidson – whose story of living with Tourette’s syndrome is dramatised in the (very good) film I Swear – shouted out the n-word when black actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan were on stage to present an award. You’d hope that by now people might understand the mechanics of Tourette’s symptoms – that the tics are totally involuntary, and consist of erupting with the worst possible things at the worst possible times; the imp of the perverse dialled up to 11. But no.
What this sorry spectacle has inadvertently demonstrated is the grip that the cruel and ideological politics of identity still has on the mediocrities of the creative industries
What this sorry spectacle has inadvertently demonstrated is the grip that the cruel and ideological politics of identity still has on the mediocrities of the creative industries
This was another one of the increasing number of events in this century that feel almost comically demonstrative. If you were concocting a drama to expose the raw nerves of the progressive milieu, you would reject the scenario – too on the nose, too silly to be credible.
It has everything – the pearl clutching about words, the setting among a star-spangled shindig of the privileged pretending to be counter-cultural and the ham-fistedness of the BBC. Incredibly, the BBC didn’t remove one of the shouts before transmission, and even uploaded it to their iPlayer. Now, we should all know by now that expecting the BBC to react swiftly to a crisis without months of inquiries, delay and obfuscation is........