Malorie Blackman’s Noughts + Crosses has nothing to tell us about Britain today

The BBC could scarcely have chosen a less auspicious time to release as its flagship Spring drama an adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s contentious, race-baiting Noughts + Crosses. For one thing, it is under increasing pressure to demonstrate that it is not purely the propaganda arm of the liberal, metropolitan elite. For another, a dystopian fantasy about a Britain where blacks are the bullying ruling class and whites are the oppressed Untermenschen has even less urgent or topical satirical value than it did when it was first published 18 years ago.

Blackman, I’m sure, has done very nicely out of her young adults trilogy. By focusing on every teacher’s favourite topic – racism – her book ended up on the recommended reading list of schools across the land, so that loads of children, including mine, were bludgeoned into reading her not exactly sparkling prose. I’m not begrudging her success: it was a canny move, taking the starcross’d lovers theme of Romeo and Juliet, and setting it in a world where black people are the racists and white people are the victims, ticking so many boxes for teenage readers.