It’s a mystery why the ‘woke BBC’ took so long to have a Black hero in an Agatha Christie

Femi Oluwole says it makes a change for a classic murder mystery to have a lead character with Nigerian heritage – but even Shakespeare has long been reimagined in this way. At least this two-parter is upsetting all the right people…

David Jonsson plays Luke Fitzwilliam in the BBC’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder Is Easy’ (BBC/Mammoth Screen/Anne Binckebanck)

Oh, look! They’ve got another Black actor to play a white role. It’s the latest “woke lecture” from the BBC, yet more “modern agenda-driven nonsense” to keep “3D, sympathetic white men off our screens”.

At least that’s what certain parts of the internet are saying about Rye Lane actor David Jonsson, who stars in BBC One’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1939 thriller, Murder Is Easy. He plays Luke Fitzwilliam, a young Nigerian man about to embark on a career in Whitehall who finds himself investigating a series of murders in the sleepy English village of Wychwood under Ashe.

Now set in the Fifties, at a time of rising immigration into the UK, this reimagining is only doing what every decent story has done since time immemorial: it tells us something new about society at the time.