Sam Arnon

Noughts + Crosses, the TV adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s series of novels, manages brilliantly to transfer Blackman’s sentiments and intentions onto the small screen. In a love story that transcends a society plagued by racial hatred, the leads Jack Rowan (Callum McGregor) and newcomer Masali Baduza (Sephy Hadley) produce emotive and gripping performances that enthral the audience throughout this six-part mini-series.

Classed as a ‘counterfactual history series’, the conceit of the programme is that the world has been flipped, and the lighter-skinned ‘Nought’ majority have been ruled over by the darker-skinned ‘Crosses’, who invaded 700 years ago from ‘Aprica’. Apart from this, all remains the same, as technology and society are a mirror-like image of today’s world, only it is the white population that is prejudiced against, rather than the black.

This simple switch allows a remarkable tale to emerge, addressing questions of not only race, but of class as well. Callum, the son of a servant, who is eventually forced to join the military, and Sephy, the daughter of the Home Secretary, must fight against familial expectations and cultural and racial segregation in a world where, ironically, the powers claim that ‘there is strength in difference’. The significance of this phrase is, if anything, heightened when juxtaposed with the fact that the programme was filmed in South Africa, where the national motto is ‘unity in diversity’.

This ‘difference’, caused by the reversal of racial hierarchies, creates various racially charged struggles, reflecting clashes in British history, although once again reversed. Callum is forced to picks sides in the choice between doing his job and his love for Sephy, or joining his family in their fight for the freedom of the white population against oppression.

Set in the fictional capital city of Albion, a thinly veiled London, the series conveys almost every aspect of Blackman’s drama onto the screen, from the impact that the dominance of African culture would have had on Britain’s architecture, to simpler details, such as the colouring of plasters in relation to a person’s skin colour.

The impact of this series goes above and beyond simply being an adaptation of Blackman’s novels, however, as the counter-factualism allows previously hidden, deeper societal truths to emerge. This leads not only to a celebration of different African cultures, but also an underlining of the wealth of black talent that is still unfortunately hidden from most audiences’ eyes. Stormzy, a fan of the novels, makes a brief cameo appearance, but the fact that a number of the more experienced actors in the series are relatively unknown, and the younger ones are relative newcomers, highlights by contrast something of lack of opportunities for minorities in today’s Britain.

This series makes for a genuinely enjoyable and enthralling watch, but at the same time exposes the audience to a damning indictment of today’s racialised world.

Cite this: Arnon, Sam. “Noughts + Crosses review.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 February 2026.

The post <em>Noughts + Crosses</em> review appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Malorie Blackman, 2008 (photo: Dominic Turner, CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr)

Writing for children and teens, Malorie Blackman’s career has spanned over three decades and has been instrumental in diversifying representation in children’s fiction in Britain. In 1997 Blackman won the Excelle/Write Thing Children’s Author of the Year Award for her books for new and younger readers between the ages of 3 and 11. Her picture books for new readers feature children of colour, providing much needed diversity in a market that in the 1990s was white-washed, and unfortunately remains overwhelmingly so. Thanks to authors like Blackman, the under-representation of minorities in Britain in children’s literature is changing, helped in part by the current trends of advocacy for diverse representation across media and book publishing.

Blackman’s reputation was well-established by the time she wrote the first of the Noughts and Crosses novels. In 2020 the series brought the author into the eye of a media storm following the release of the BBC television adaptation of the five-part book series. Refusing accusations of baiting a race war, Blackman argued for the revisionist politics of the reversal of racial dominance in the novels, noting that Callum’s experiences are mapped directly on her own: ‘The things he goes through particularly in school happened to me, like asking my teachers where the black scientists were on the curriculum and being told there weren’t any.’ Blackman uses this provocative strategy of racial reversal that is also deployed in two of Booker Prize-winner Bernadine Evaristo’s novels, The Emperor’s Babe and Blonde Roots, using the effect of reversing race to highlight the illogic of racist ideology.

Blackman’s more well-known young adult fiction deals in particular with adolescent protagonists undergoing an experience of rapid maturity due to circumstances often beyond their control. Set in a dystopian world where one race rules over another, the five novels that comprise the Noughts and Crosses series offer a stark reversal of the long history of racial prejudice against people of colour. Noughts and Crosses was Blackman’s first and only series of novels in which she explored interracial relationships and the tensions of racial prejudice in Britain, thinly veiled as ‘Albion’ in the novels.

The characters in Blackman’s novels are usually black like the author herself, but their stories play out without their race being the major or most impactful aspect of the narrative, a choice that Blackman has intentionally made to resist being cast as a ‘black writer’. Following the release of Noughts + Crosses on BBC iPlayer in March 2020, Blackman refused to engage in accusations that she was ‘anti-white’ saying, ‘I’m not even going to dignify your absurd nonsense with a response.’ She experienced profound racism at school and during her young adult life, but worked hard to overcome these traumas, though recalls a deep regret that her first book by a person of colour was Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple at age 21. She has long been an advocate for diversity, facing racist abuse on social media in 2013 for expressing the importance of representation in children’s literature. Book Trust Represents statistics indicate that in the last 11 years, fewer than 2% of all authors and illustrators of children’s books published in the UK were British people of colour. Since then, more authors have spoken out about the necessity for diversity in children’s literature, most notably the author Sharna Jackson.  

While Blackman is best known for her children’s fiction, she has also had success writing for the screen. Her science fiction novel Pig Heart Boy (1997) explores thirteen-year-old Cameron Joshua Kelsey’s experience of xenotransplantation (animal-to-human organ transplant). This became a BBC children’s television series, for which Blackman also wrote the script, which won a BAFTA for Best Drama and a Royal Television Society Award.

In 2008 Blackman received an OBE for her services to Children’s Literature and in 2013 she won the Black Tentacle at The Kitschies, Britain’s literary award for ‘outstanding achievement in encouraging and elevating the conversation around genre literature’. Blackman has been described by The Times newspaper as ‘national treasure’ and has been instrumental in diversifying the face and stories of children’s and young adult literature in Britain.

—Chelsea Haith, 2020

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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