"You bet people are annoyed, this is our heritage or folklore."
That's one of the posts on the Points of View messageboard about David Harewood's role in the third series of Robin Hood, the early evening entertainment on BBC on Saturday evenings. Harewood plays Friar Tuck and the sense of outrage at Tuck being portrayed by a black actor is fairly tangible, coming hot on the heels of other black actors being cast in Merlin, Dr.Who and one of the Dickens adaptations to name three that come readily to mind.
I find the outpourings not the least surprising, because as soon as Harewood made his first appearance on screen I thought "I can see people rushing to their keyboards as we speak." I think the moral indignant outburst miss something in this case though when compared say with the appearance of Freema Agyeman as Tatty Coram in Little Dorrit. There's no doubt in my mind that there was some strange kind of enforced diversity policy in having a black actress play a character who is actually described at one point by Dickens as being fair skinned.
With Tuck however the whole story is a big lie, there weren't any Friars during the time of Richard The Lionheart. So over the past seventy years since Errol Flynn made the first major appearance on the big screen of Robin Hood we have bought into the notion that a character who didn't exist had to have been white. The acceptance of the physical appearance of a character who doesn't even appear in some of the stories surrounding the legend of Robin Hood is based purely on the fact that until comparatively recently this country was almost exclusively white, therefore our heroes were white. The patron Saint of England wasn't white though was he but we don't like to confront that issue.
Personally I don't mind what colour Tuck is. The whole programme is forty five minutes of pure escapism that all the family can watch and just indulge itself in with Keith Allen perfectly cast as the pantomime villain in the role of the Sheriff of Nottingham. If the BBC wants to change the colour of people in fiction, so long as it stays within reasonable parameters I don't mind - mind you, if they ever make a film about Alf Tupper and he survives on a diet of muesli and pesto I will be pissed off!
1 comment:
He could have been a holyman (Friar/monk/whatever) from the continent or one of many (presumably) 'brown skinned people' who would no doubt have come and gone with the various crusades so it's not too farfetched. Trouble is he's a well known face so it doesn't seem to fit and in all the tales he's the cook so make him fat.
In fact I'm not really bothered either way but it does make me question "why?"! If it's because they're too concerned at NOT having a non-white face then they're a bunch of fuckwits...to coin a phrase.
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