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26/7/05
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complex sufferer P.Diddy has also touted himself for
the role of Bond and former Red Dwarf star Craig
Charles has spoken of his dream of becoming the
first black Doctor. Support for a new direction for
Bond has even come from such 007 royalty as
Honor Blackman and Sean Connery, who touted
Cuba Gooding Jr for the role. Yet, in reality, it still
seems that we are no closer to seeing a black actor
in either of these well-loved roles, which are defined
by their constantly changing faces.
Is the British public prepared for a black Bond or
Doctor? What exactly are their objections and what
do these objections tell us about their willingness to
accept black faces in roles that are not only much
loved, but quintessentially British. I decided to
conduct a little experiment to find out.
I visited four of the Internet’s most popular Doctor
Who and James Bond fan-sites and left near identical
messages on each of their discussion forums. Posing
as a ’lifelong fan, but first-time poster’, I very gently
suggested that maybe it would be ‘cool’ to have a black
Bond or Doctor, and proposed Dirty Pretty Things actor
Chitiwel Eijofor as a potential candidate. I left it at that
and returned to these web forums a few days later. I was
astonished at the response my messages provoked.
It is only fair to say, at this point, that I embarked on
this experiment with a slightly haughty attitude,
expecting these fan-site messageboards to be
populated by socially maladroit loners and autistic,
virginal fanboys. I anticipated some easy laughs at
their expense and a simple job in pulling apart what
I expected to be their simplistic, hostile responses to
my suggestion.
What I instead found was many hundreds of cogent,
lucid, if occasionally nerdish replies to a question that
had obviously been raised and considered before. A
number of posters were quite open to the idea of a
black Doctor or Bond and constructed compelling
arguments in its favour. The majority, however,
objected to the idea for reasons that ranged from the
absurdly convoluted to the nakedly hostile.
A typical response on one of the Bond forums read
as follows:
“Bond is white. End of discussion. Can you
imagine a white guy playing Shaft? How about a
white Blade? Let’s replace Kato (from The Green
Hornet) with a latino actor while we’re at it?”
The ‘Bond is just white’ argument was a recurring
one and prompted my only other contribution to
any of the discussions other than my original
messages. Why, I asked, did the Bond fans’
necessarily considerable ability to suspend disbelief
fail when the question of their hero’s ethnicity is
raised. This is the suspension of disbelief necessary
to accommodate a character who, Simpsons-style,
refuses to age. The celluloid incarnation of 007 is
not a period character. Bond films are not set in the
60s, 70s, 80s or 90s; they are set in the day that the
film is made. The fact that Bond is a character who
blithely skips from decade to decade – who
apparently served in World War II and the Cold
War, as well as venturing into outer space and
having laser-beam shootouts in Moonraker – can be
accommodated by the fans: why not a change in his
ethnicity? As years have passed, the character has
been updated to move with the times. As another
website poster put it:
“ The idea that Fleming’s creation can’t be radically
altered is absurd enough; he was never a very
complex character anyway, and he’s been altered
plenty; the idea that his ethnicity is somehow
sacred leaves me quite cold…”
Others ignored the essential one-dimensionality of
Bond’s character and expressed concerns that his
‘socio-political-economic worldview would be totally
different if his race were changed’ – that his persona
is fundamentally white and that his outlook on the
world would necessarily be transformed if he were
black. Again, an on-line fan refutes this eloquently: »