Dennis kelly

Shedding a Skin opens with an office nightmare. Myah is a mixed-race employee in a predominantly white firm who gets summoned to the boss’s room for a group photo. The only other workers present are black and they greet each other with the ‘black nod’ as she calls it. And the group includes a black cleaner dressed in a suit to ‘bump up the numbers’. She tells the boss that this attempt to promote racial harmony simply instils mistrust and division but she gets sacked for rebelling against the firm’s ‘fakery’. Next, her layabout boyfriend, a musician who lives on a barge, gives her the elbow. Now she’s homeless, jobless

‘Art is dead,’ declared Mark Steyn recently. He was referring to the new rules — copied from the Baftas — whereby to qualify for the Oscars your movie must have the correct quota of gay/ethnic minority/transgender/etc people. This, he argued, will lead to the kind of leaden, politicised, phoney art we associate with communist regimes in the Soviet era and which, not so long ago, we used to find eminently mockable. If British and American producers want to lose money on TV shows and movies that no one wants to watch, then good luck to them. All that matters is that there’ll be enough brave dissenters out there to say: