h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Excuse me while I try and type a quite complex argument against the wind. I have 28 minutes til midnight.

This evening I listened to the first two parts of a dramatisation of 'The Colour Purple' on the BBC iplayer. For those of you not familliar, it's a pulitzer prize winning novel by Alice Walker which was made into a film starring Whoopie Goldberg, charting the life of a black girl in the deep south between the wars. I don't know how it's going to end up, but so far it's involved a lot of deep unpleasantness.

I think you'll agree from that sentence that it sort of matters that the main character is female and black. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but she is pretty downtrodden (so far at least) and she wouldn't work as well if she were rewritten as a middle class white guy from New York.

This brings me on to the first of two of my pet hates. Cultural Vandalism. Years agao I heard of a prodution of Hamlet where all the gender roles are reversed. I haven't seen the play, but I can't see how that would work properly because at least half the leading characters' behaviours are grounded in their gender roles. Okay, so it might well have been an interesting new story, but it wasn't Hamlet, it was a new play based on a stolen plot. If Shakespeare hadn't been long dead he probably would have sued.

TV companies have a great nack for this. A few years ago Billie Piper appeared in... I think it was Sense and Sensibility. She was supposed to be playing an unattractive, plain and overlooked. Billie Piper is not plain and unattractive. So they could have cast a less attractive actess (yeah, right) or they could have used skillful make-up to make Billie less attratcive (ditto) but they didn't. Instead, they decided (to quote the executive producer, who was a woman, by the way) to 'emphasise her difference in other ways'. Ways, that is, other than the ways Jane Austen chose. Jane Austen and William Shakespeare are widely thought to be quite good. Presumably if you're spending time and money dramatising their stuff, you must think they're quite good too. In which case why on earth do you see fit to throw bits of the ideas they spent their own time and talent on, and sling your ideas in instead? If you've got than many ideas, try writing something of your own. Okay, so you can't call it Jane Austen or William Shakespeare, but it will be more honest and you'll be doing something original, rather than destroying something derrivative.

Which brings me to 'Elementary' and thence to my second moan. Elementary is an American made remake thingy of Sherlock Holmes. In which John Watson is an Asian Woman. NO! No no no no no. He isn't. He just isn't. He's a white guy from the army. That's why he behaves the way he does. If he was an asian woman who'd been in the army, or even an asian woman who hadn't been in the army (since we're tossing the whole damn book out of the window) he, or rather she, would behave totally differently. Which makes him/her a totally different character which means it's not the same! Lucy Liu, who is playing Dr Joan (seriously- they're that desperate to stick to the original? Does Lucy Liu really look like a 'Joan') says that she's excited to be playing Asian Watson. Cobblers. Unless Lucy is a total idiot then she will realise that what this really means is that while there isn't going to be a mainstream original drama where an Asian woman gets to play the sidekick (god forbid the lead) she can get the hanger-on role in a lazy remake of something somebody else thought of ages ago. Allowing for the fact that she's also pretty hot. That's not really a great leap forward for race/gender equality.

When this was pointed out by Victoria Coren in the Observer, she was accused, directly in many cases, of being racist and sexist. This is what annoys me most. People who don't know what discrimination actually is. It isn't racist to call someone black when they are. It isn't intrisically racist to talk about their colour in relation to their work (especially if they brought it up). It's racist to presume that any member of an ethnic group can be presumed to be like, or at least broadly simillar too, any other member of the same group, because they're all basically the same.

Unless you follow the logic that an Asian Female American person is sufficiently simillar to a White Male English person that the change doesn't constitute so drastic a wharping of the original work that it's not a respectful copy but a half assed uncreative cherry picking of the bits of somebody else's idea that you happen to like. In which case we're all completely the same and prejudice is now impossible.

Which is nice.

[Amy P]

What do you think of a reverse casted Othello? (where Othello is white and all the other characters are Black)

Haven't seen othello Hellboy, but I presume that since he is 'the moor of venice' his ethnicity has at least some relevance.

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