Fantasy collided with reality last month, when the Black British actor Adjoa Andoh, who plays Bridgerton’s Lady Danbury, was invited by ITV to commentate on King Charles’s coronation. Andoh described the lineup of waving royals on the Buckingham Palace balcony as “terribly white”. With the family’s solitary person of colour – the Duchess of Sussex – conspicuous by her absence, Andoh was technically correct. Even so, the comment prompted the highest number of complaints to Ofcom of any broadcast this year.
Perhaps Andoh had lost sight of the yawning gap between fiction and fact. Shows such as Netflix’s Bridgerton have been applauded for introducing actors of colour into the “terribly white” space of costume drama, but some people remain resistant to anything that upsets their ideas of the past (even if those ideas were largely gleaned from costume dramas).
