The wrong side of the river

That right there is why I couldn't be doing with The Lord of the Rings. I grew up in England's stockbroker belt, and far too many of our neighbours were smugly insular like those hobbits -- gossip-loving, distrustful of outsiders, and appalled by people who didn't live the way they did. The hobbits of the Shire would all have voted Tory -- or probably Fascist if they got the chance. I didn't mind if Sauron did invade and shake up their lives.

It's what Andy Serkis was trying to say in the recent interview that has caused such an uproar in Guardian-reading circles: "The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know..." Mr Serkis mumbled, probably sensing the Damoclean threat of cancellation above his head. "They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of the Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in."

And he's right. That casual xenophobia is what I disliked about the damned hobbits, but it is at the heart of Tolkien's story. If the Shire and every other region of Middle-Earth featured the same multi-ethnic mix as 21st century California then it would be a very different place (quite likely better) and you'd have a different story (quite likely more boring) to tell.

Ten years back, Jamie and I had a TV show that we were developing for the BBC when a partner absconded with all the BBC development money, scuttling our production partnership with Andy Serkis's company. (Small world; Mr Serkis's involvement was just a coincidence.) We needed to come up with a new show in a hurry, and Young Asgard was born. Wanting to give decent opportunities to today's actors, we had a different ethnicity for each realm: Asgard, Jotunheim, Alfheim, and so on. What we didn't do was make every realm the same racial mix, because that would suggest a universe without borders, and therefore free of fixed cultural attitudes and the perpetual knife-edge of conflict.

Personally I want to live in the 23rd century of Gene Roddenberry, not the 21st century of people like Victor Orbán. And I guarantee you Andy Serkis feels the same way. He didn't present us with an ethnically homogenous Shire because he's a nasty old racist. He did it because that's true to the story, and he didn't want to infantilize his movie just to pander to America's pathological issues regarding race. (Though he needn't have made the hobbits white; they could just as well all have been Hausa, or Han, or Inuit, or Tuareg, or Tamil.)

I won't be going to see the movie because I don't give a fig for Gollum or any of those narrow-minded hobbits. But movie-goers aren't interested in seeing Roddenberry's utopian, colour-blind vision of society any more, so I guess we're stuck with endless Tolkien spin-offs.