Sticks and Stones

Now the dust is settling after the coronation, the papers are getting worked up over the 4,165 complaints received by Ofcom about Adjoa Andoh’s on-air description of the group on Buckingham Palace balcony as ‘terribly white’. The remark was undoubtedly crass, not to mention illogical - this is, after all the royal family - but is it really as newsworthy as all that?

Some of the uproar must be due to context; in recent years, the phrase ‘hideously white’ has been used by, among others, Greg Dyke (on the BBC), Andrew Lloyd Webber (on British theatre) and Rupa Huq (on pretty much everything else). That ‘terribly’ - even if it were intended primarily as a quantifier - put Andoh’s remark in the same territory and was bound to raise a few hackles as a result, while Paddy O’Connell effectively poured petrol on the flames with his response to her on his Radio 4 programme - ‘you have nothing to apologise for’, ‘you haven’t upset anyone’.

While I can see why people might, in a kind of ‘sauce for the gander’ way, want to join in the condemnation, there is surely little to be gained in responding with the same kind of thin-skinned, prickly outrage we deplore in today’s student culture and among the easily - or professionally - offended. In this case, with a certain element of do-as-you-would-be-done-by, I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that, caught up in the occasion, she spoke without considering how her comment would sound to viewers who had tuned in to watch the coronation.

It may be a telling indication of her thought processes - in fact, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. Adjoa Andoh owes the spectacular good looks which kick-started a long career in the public eye to her dual British and Ghanaian heritage, so, for her, family gatherings will naturally be associated with a mixture of ethnicity. To that, one can add a lifetime spent in theatrical or television circles and in the capital, where multiculturalism is the order of the day and activism is generally seen as a good career move. When you have a hammer, as they say, everything looks like a nail; while the ethnicity of the various participants in the ceremony was clearly at the forefront of Andoh’s perception, to many others (fifty-somethings, at least) the most remarkable thing about the sceptre bearer was probably not that she is black but that - wonderfully! - she is Floella Benjamin from ‘Play School’.

Andoh’s presence on screen during the ITV coronation coverage was presumably entirely due to her role as an Georgian aristocrat in a newly-released Netflix costume drama - we are, in effect, back to the blending of artifice and reality (see previous post). She was hired for her celebrity status, not to provide in-depth analysis or background knowledge; her mistake here was failing to distinguish between the people associated with the King’s public position and a group largely composed of his close blood-relatives (who, unsurprisingly, are the same colour as he is) and, crucially, expressing this in potentially derogatory terms.

There’s a danger that, like over-tired toddlers after a party, some people are seizing on the opportunity to make a disproportionate fuss in order to fill the gap left when the excitement dies down. Either she intended to provoke, in which case the less media follow-up the better, or she spoke in haste and unwisely and genuinely regrets her words. It is human to err, and we’ve all made ill-considered or badly phrased remarks at times; I don’t necessarily agree with O’Connell but now, surely, it would be a good thing for people to accept it as such and move on.