True Colours:Noughts + Crosses.

"What was it about the differences in others that scared some people so much?" - Malorie Blackman, Noughts + Crosses.

In some ways BBC1's ongoing (but all currently up on iPlayer) six parter Noughts + Crosses got overtaken by real life events. It's probably just as well that the remit wasn't to imagine a dystopian future as, a few weeks into the coronavirus crisis, anything but the most hellish and most fevered depiction would just play out like a reasonably accurate forecast for the planet's next few months.

Noughts + Crosses, though, was not set in the future but in a parallel world in the present time. Parallel, but with one very crucial difference. Race. Black people are in charge and white people are a suppressed, othered, and often beaten, underclass. The premise is that, seven hundred years ago, Africa colonised Europe. The British part of that colony became, and remains, Albion.

Albion has been under African rule, via an all black Albion government, ever since and everything that has happened, and is happening, is seen through the cultural gaze of black, rather than white, eyes. The London skyline, though recognisable, has elements of Wakanda about it (and it looks fucking amazing), there is black on white police brutality, white gang violence scars the areas of South London where the 'noughts' or, more racially charged still 'blankers', live, and 'cross' women juicily speculate if the rumours are true about what nought men are like in bed.

The naming of noughts and crosses sounds a bit silly at first but the idea that the underclass are noughts, that they are zeroes, that they are worth nothing in the eyes of their masters makes more sense as this tightly scripted, gripping, and powerful drama moves ever faster forward. In a black dominated Albion even the whites, under cultural hegemony, listen to black music (their midsummer festival has the feel of Notting Hill Carnival), wear clothes and style their hair in ways more associated with black, specifically African, people, and agonise and argue among themselves about the best way to deal with their grim lives and prospects.

Do they campaign for equality? Do they fight to usurp their colonial masters and take back control of their own country? Do they just accept their status as second class citizens and keep their heads down so as not to end up in prison, hospital, or dead? There are, of course, noughts that work with the crosses to maintain the status quo and are rewarded for doing so. Not handsomely, but these self-serving anti-spartacist actors are always vital in maintaining the hierarchies of power.

The attention to detail is fantastic. We see students being taught about the 1950s Segregation Act and how colonisation helped the 'savage' noughts, we hear it said of the noughts that "they're always so cheeful - but you get a few uppity ones", and we see a hospital where most of the cleaners are white and the doctors black. Following a tragedy, dead crosses are named, dead noughts are numbered. Even when we see the characters texting each other the emojis used are brown rather than yellow.

Some of the black characters, or crosses, are seen occasionally wrestling with their consciences about the imbalance of power and the cruelty and brutality that enforces it. But not much. Not as often. Because that's how privilege works. Those who have privilege are protected from even being aware of it, even having to think about it. It's something Laurence Fox, a rentagob bloviating blowhard who had his brief moment in the sun on Question Time earlier this year, seems not to have the intellectual capacity to register.

This reversal, and evisceration, of racial politics could easily be leaden, instructive, and sloganeering. A dull history lesson lacking subtlety. But it's anything but that. It's tense, dramatic, emotional, and, at times, terribly poignant. Characters motivations are not tied to their race or their position in society. Love, familial duty, and revenge all fuel the action in ways that, occasionally, remind me of Michael Dobbs' 1990 House of Cards and at other times of David Simon's epic, and beyond comparison, The Wire. High praise indeed.

There are even scenes that seem to have been lifted, and updated, from Shakespearean or Greek tragedies but if there's one series that Noughts + Crosses most reminded me of it's last years fantastic and terrifying Years and Years by Russell T Davies. That's because, away from the high drama and high stakes, there's a soap opera element underpinning the action.

Or two soap operas. The upper class, black, Hadley family would fit in with Dallas and Dynasty more than the white, poorer, McGregors whose lives feel more akin to some of Albert Square's more unfortunate residents. These two families are the core of the drama and if the multiple links between them are often implausibly made for the convenience of the script and the thrust of the narrative that can be forgiven because Noughts + Crosses tells a story that is sad, frightening, and, disappointingly, as politically pertinent as it's ever been.

Kamal Hadley (Paterson Joseph, you may know him best as Johnson on Peep Show, this is a very different character) is the ambitious, and ruthless, head of the family. He's the Home Secretary but he's got his eyes on the top job and is prepared to do what it takes to get there. But he's not a two dimensional character and he's shown to be a man who very much loves his family.

They love him too. But they don't always like him. Wife Jasmine (Bonnie Mbuli) takes lovers and booze behind his back and while one daughter, Minerva (Kike Brimah), is the obedient and unquestioning type just right for family photo shoots, another, Sephy (Masali Baduza), most certainly isn't. An intelligent student with a streak of independence and a strong social conscience, Sephy has been brought up more by (white) housekeeper Meggie (Helen Baxendale) than she has her own mum, and she's grown up playing with Meggie's son, Calum (Jack Rowan), too.

Now, older, she's falling in love with him and their star crossed romance is the central relationship in the whole series and the one in which all the other action revolves around. Romeo and Juliet have nothing on these two. Callum's training to be a soldier at Mercy Point under a new initiative, from outgoing PM Opal Folami (Rakie Ayola), to allow noughts into the armed forces.

His brother, Jude (Josh Dylan), sees this a cop-out. Jude, made militant by the death of a friend at the hands of the police, links up with the Liberation Militia under the leadership of Jack Dorn. Played by Shaun Dingwall as a thin, ratty faced, straggly haired, speed dealer fresh from a 1980s crusty convoy and, occasionally, backed up by some textbook scowling biker baddies in cut off denim jackets a la one of Breaking Bad's more preposterous episodes.

Dorn's an amoral operator too, and nobody's left in much doubt about that. Callum and Jude's dad, and Meggie's husband, Ryan (Ian Hart - a great actor who I'd clean forgotten about), has been involved with the white liberation movement before but is reticent to re-engage, not least with Dorn involved, but in a land where his son has been stopped by the police over three hundred times in seven years ("about average") and where all black juries hand down life, and death, sentences to white people it becomes a mere matter of time before he's dragged into the fight.

Lethally so. Noughts + Crosses becomes a drama of two deeply entwined, but hugely unequal, families and the love across the barricades between Callum and Sephy whose snatched moments, often in wretched love hotels, are heavy with the ever present threat of violence. Sephy's partner Lekan is close to her father Kamal and he's a respected, and upwardly mobile, soldier.

He's played brilliantly by Jonathan Ajayi as a perfect exemplar of a small child in the body of a large and powerful man. His wounded pride and his toxic machismo give him the air of a bomb that could go off at any moment and whenever he's near Sephy you fear for her. You're never quite sure if Lekan is about to explode or implode but his mere presence unnerves.

It'd be very easy to hold a crude mirror up to society but in showing how historical racism, white privilege, and hierarchical power structures play out on both macro and micro levels Noughts + Crosses remembers to allow for nuance and grey areas. It does a great job of explaining the divide and conquer tactics that hegemonies use to maintain power and in shining a light on how the bullying of weaker members and outliers within the dominant group is played out it manages to expertly excoriate both the process and results.

Witness the boss who won't let his employee off for a funeral he calls a "daft, blasphemous, and un-African ritual" and witness Elaine (Jodie Tyack), a fellow white cadet at Mercy Point with Callum, and the ostracism and shame that is heaped upon her for partaking in an interracial relationship.

It's fun to see Stormzy crop up in a cameo role as a newspaper editor, the architecture of South Africa (where filming took place - and a country that knows more than a little about inequality) is a great fit for the series, and the soundtrack is exactly right. Run the Jewels, Jlin, Gaika, Fatoumata Diawara, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Sampha, Salif Keita, and Ebo Taylor all crop up and Matthew Herbert's official theme builds menace quietly and effectively. Best of all, Songhoy Blues appear live and The Comet is Coming's maelstrom of a track, Summon the Fire, adds urgent emphasis to one particularly dramatic scene.

All these little touches come together to back up some wonderful performances (Ajayi, as mentioned, was the breakout star for me but Joseph, Baduza, and Hart were all excellent throughout and not one single person disappointed) and a brilliant script from Clapham born Malorie Blackman. A script that didn't shy away from showing how extremists from either ends (far right/far left, ISIS/white power movements) can and do, when needs must, enable and empower each other and how, when they fall out as they inevitably always will do, it's often those who tried to hold the centre that suffer the most devastating blowback.

Tension was ratcheted up time and again in Noughts + Crosses and there were times I wondered how on Earth it could ever be resolved or even if it would. I'm not going to tell you that as I want you to watch the series yourself but I will tell you that by the end I was in tears and not just, I think, because - as mentioned at the start of this review, it's been a pretty emotional and intense week. What was required was a drama powerful enough to match the week we're all living through but one that could also distract from it. Noughts + Crosses, luckily, was that drama.