Bodyguard fever is finally over. Take the thermometer out, slow down your heart rate and have a good nap. If you haven’t caught up yet, stop reading; spoilers abound. No BBC drama has gripped the nation this much since Doctor Who’s Christmas day episode in 2008. A whopping peak of 11 million viewers watched Bodyguard as the series drew to a close on Sunday.
The story centres on former soldier David Budd in his new role as principal protection officer for Julia Montague, a controversial home secretary. The audience is taken on a rollercoaster ride of twists and turns as we try to figure out who is behind the assassination of the Home Secretary and a series of foiled terror attacks. What a shame then that my hope for a creatively explosive Universal Studios ride in sunny Orlando ended up being an underwhelming (and wet) trip to Thorpe Park.
The plot had some brilliant and refreshing nuances to a typical terror drama – the soldier suffering from PTSD, a disgruntled former advisor to the Home Secretary and some shady MI5 characters. This nuance was sadly lost when it came to Nadia, the show’s only female Muslim character. Bodyguard reverted to the typical tropes that TV loves to regurgitate about Muslim women. They are either oppressed victims or threats to our society. We were lucky enough to have both versions in Bodyguard.
We first encounter Nadia strapped to a suicide vest on a train and feel sorry for her as the unwilling participant in her husband’s terror plot. Our hero David Budd manages to talk her out of it and assure her that she need never see her husband again (thank you white male saviour). The plot then twists in the series finale and Nadia morphs into the unoriginal second trope of willing terrorist. How underwhelming. As Love in a Headscarf author Shelina Janmohamed commented on Twitter: ’the worst part is I bet those minds involved in this “surprising” finale thought they were being really smart by “challenging” the stereotype of oppressed Muslim woman by instead depicting her with er… another stereotype of being a terrorist.’
I also had the impression that the writers thought they had turned the trope on its head when Nadia said, ‘You all saw me as a poor oppressed Muslim woman. I am an engineer. I am a jihadi’. Firstly, the term jihadi is a Western neologism that is inauthentic for Nadia to use and indicates that her character has been shaped by a Western perspective. If she were researched better, she would have used the Arabic term mujahida. Secondly, and more importantly, this sort of lazy scriptwriting contributes to a stifling environment for British Muslim women. In a time of rising Islamophobia we are cornered in by tired stereotypes and used by the likes of Boris Johnson as political footballs for personal ambitions.
When will TV execs learn to portray Muslim women as multi-layered individuals who might actually be a decent police officer, annoying government official or even bored receptionist? When actor Riz Ahmed spoke to the House of Commons last year about diversity on screen he implored producers to answer a few questions, now dubbed the Riz Test. Is the Muslim character either linked to Islamist terrorism, presented as irrationally angry, culturally backwards or a threat to a Western way of life? If male, is he misogynistic, or if female, is she oppressed by her male counterparts? Bodyguard fails the test on multiple levels.
The creative industries are crucial to how society views, portrays and understands itself. The reason the Riz Test is so important, now more than ever, is that if we fail to portray diverse and multi-layered Muslims on screen, we risk alienating a whole community. What if all the Muslim women you know in real life are doctors, teachers, mothers and students but when you turn on the TV you’re told their roles are limited to being oppressed or terrorists? If you are constantly told you are ‘the other’ how would you feel?
Bodyguard is a drama at the end of the day – it doesn’t profess to be a social commentary. But wouldn’t it be great if we could both have excellent drama and be creative enough to stay away from tired character tropes? We might just humanise Muslims along the way.
Farah Jassat (@farahjassat) is a former BBC Newsnight journalist and producer. She now heads up editorial innovation at Intelligence Squared (@intelligence2) and hosts their weekly podcast.