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.

Besides the murders, of which there are many, the two-parter, which concludes tonight, tackles several issues, other than race – the working-class struggle, women’s equality, ageism. It is not subtle on any of these points.

Shakespeare, the most English man to ever English, was never shy about preaching about class and race politics in the 17th century. “Ambition”, which we now refer to as social mobility, was a consistent theme in his plays. Othello was regularly referred to as “the Moor”, signifying he was Black. Antisemitism was a critical theme in The Merchant of Venice (“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed?”).

So to pretend that it’s somehow “not British”, or some new modern nonsense, that our storytelling includes social commentary makes me question these armchair critics’ understanding of Britishness.

What I enjoyed about Murder Is Easy is how even the lighting has race in mind. Every Black person in white-majority countries will know the pain of taking selfies with your white friends, and all you can see is our teeth and eyes, because the brightness isn’t set for darker features. But, in this Christie adaptation, this was reversed: all the white people looked slightly overexposed, while Jonsson’s character looks… normal.

Now, no… this is not the “Black agenda”. I believe scriptwriter Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and director Meena Gaur were simply making a point, that standardising everything according to white skin is a problem. We even see that in skin health, with Black diagnoses being missed because the textbooks in medical school use white examples.

That idea of treating the familiar as the norm was also there in the dialogue. Fitzwilliam – who explains to village residents that he is a cultural anthropologist and is studying their behaviour – argues that Western and African cultures both ended up with superstitions and rituals. But a rich lord, without a hint of self-awareness, dismisses Nigerian religions, by quoting the Bible: “Have nothing to do with foolish and irreverent myths. Rather, train yourself for godliness.”

There is also a very strong message about solidarity between marginalised groups. Fitzwilliam faces racism at every stage of his efforts to stop a murderer who appears to be targeting the working class and those who stick up for them. “When one of us dies,” says one character, “it’s an accident. But when it’s one of you, there’s a proper investigation.”

This is interwoven beautifully with women’s equality. Fitzwilliam’s partner in (stopping) crime, is a woman who “used to be [the Lord’s] secretary, now they’re engaged, so romantic.” She points out how unromantic that is saying she chose to marry him to be “safe… from being poor”. She even questions whether the “duties” of a wife and her former duties as the Lord’s assistant were really any different, hinting at some fairly severe workplace harassment, as well as the power dynamics created within households by the gender pay gap.

The show also points out how some who see themselves as successes of social mobility, only succeed due to opportunities that others from their background don’t get… In this case: The son of a cobbler who says he became a Lord by pulling himself up “by his bootstraps”, but really it was “war-time profiteering”.

My favourite criticism of this adaptation, which was made with the approval of the Christie estate, is that had television executives wanted a two-part detective thriller with a Black lead, they should have come up with an original story, rather than adapt an existing one. That the novel has been many times adapted before, without much fuss, begs the question: what’s the real problem these critics seem to have this time?

The level of fury shown to Murder Is Easy reminds me of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, when all of the different versions of Peter Parker are saying that Miles Morales (the one Black Spider-Man) shouldn’t exist, because the story of Spider-Man is sacred.

Miles simply responds, “Nah… I’ma do my own thing.”

‘Murder Is Easy’ is available on the BBC iPlayer