1) I've never wanted to be a TV critic. The only way to “on topic” when discussing ITV’s adaptation of The Singapore Grip would have been to not talk about what got erased in @ ITV’s adaptation of The Singapore Grip i.e. the Asian population of Singapore https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000mcz9

2) If I’d stayed “on topic I’d have spent four minutes talking about White actors doing awkward posh comedy. Like reviewing some weird pastiche of 1950’s Frinton Rep.
Because that’s the politics of exclusion. You can’t talk about what they don’t put there...

3) Except they are now, bizarrely, attempting to argue, that the whole story is in fact about the sole Asian protagonist, Vera Chiang, who has morphed from “mysterious Chinese woman” who “casts a spell” over White Hero (early PR release) into “resourceful intelligent heroine”

4) In the book Vera does indeed volunteer to be a nurse in the latter part of the story but she is absent for large swathes of the narrative. Her only real function is to wait around to be rescued. She speaks in word Malaprop English which results in unlikely double-entrendres

5) (at least one of which made it to the TV version). She feeds the White hero monkey soup without telling him (as an aphrodisiac). Among the books at her bedside is a Chinese-language treatise on sexual techniques “for Vera took such matters seriously”...

6) She is attracted to Matthew because she has “been brought up, as Chinese girls had been for centuries, to find stooping, bespectacled, scholarly young men attractive…no doubt there was an economic motive originally buried somewhere…”

7) I make no apologies for talking about the book. Because the production team/adapter talk about the book *constantly*. About how wonderful it is. Not once has anyone said “there’s some problematic elements we had to think about in terms of adapting it for now”...

8) And also because defenders of this Whitewashed “Downton Abbey With Durians” are lightning quick to demand “Have you even read the book???” Well I have. In detail. And IMO it’s attempted skewering of colonialism is fatally undermined by its 1970s race and sex mores...

9) And you can’t take down colonialism with… colonialism.

In My Humble Opinion