Last Sunday night, I filed a largely merry report on a Bafta ceremony that seemed to have gone well for Jessie Buckley, One Battle After Another and the folk behind the inspiring British film I Swear. At that point, few outside the auditorium were aware of the biggest scandal ever to hit the British equivalent of the Academy Awards.
As all but cave-dwellers will now be aware, John Davidson, the Tourette syndrome campaigner whose life story inspired I Swear, was heard yelling various offensive remarks during the ceremony. “This arose from involuntary verbal tics associated with Tourette syndrome,” the BBC eventually explained. The most controversial came before the first award of the evening. As Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan, stars of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, prepared to read the nominees, Davidson bellowed the N-word from the belly of the auditorium. Or so it was eventually confirmed.
Watching again after the event, the word is, to viewers at home, barely intelligible even with the benefit of hindsight. Lindo and Jordan briefly flinched before, with great professionalism, moving on to open the envelope. Early reports in the British broadsheets made no mention of the incident. By breakfast time we were left in little doubt as to what we had missed. And the debate has raged all week. At time of writing, there are at least 12 articles on the fallout in The Guardian.
“The hounding of Tourette’s sufferer after Baftas slur shames the Left,” Alexander Larman thundered in The Daily Telegraph. “Sinners actor Delroy Lindo condemns Bafta for failing to speak to them after Tourette’s sufferer shouted the N-word,” the Daily Mail raged in one of many, many headlines on the topic. (We don’t say “sufferer” in The Irish Times, but that’s a column for another day.)
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One can scarcely imagine dumping a tastier bucket of chum for sharks circling in social media. It is a serious story that asks us to tackle a tricky moral knot: what to do when accommodating the disabled risks causing genuine hurt to other minorities?
Kirk Jones’s I Swear, for which Robert Aramayo won a shock best actor award on Sunday, takes Davidson from troubled adolescence to fulfilled adulthood as he comes to terms with his propensity for involuntary outbursts and violent physical twitches. The film makes implicit argument that we should not shut those with Tourette syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder, off from society just to protect the sensibilities of the neurotypical.
I Swear begins with Davidson shouting “f**k the queen!” before receiving an MBE from the now-late British monarch at Holyrood Palace. “Her majesty was very kind,” he later said. “She was very good about it.” Hardly the words of a man who hates the queen. Just as his more recent outburst indicated no latent racism.
Bafta did make some effort to communicate these truths. Alan Cumming, the evening’s host, talked the audience through “how Tourette syndrome shows up for some people” and thanked the crowd for “understanding and helping create a respectful space”. Not everyone appeared compliant with that appeal on Monday morning. “Nah he meant that s**t,” the Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx, who seems never to have met Davidson, posted on Instagram.
Dig deeper into social media and the moral knot feels ever more entangled. One strain of counterargument suggested that no act of contrition was appropriate as this could be seen as apology for Davidson’s disability. Nonetheless, various apologies did filter out. Davidson, who left the auditorium early, said he would be “deeply mortified if anyone considers my involuntary tics to be intentional”. Inevitably that did little to quell the bubbling fury. There was just so much here to agitate the recreationally bellicose.
One can wax on various rights and wrongs, but virtually everyone agreed the BBC’s decision to broadcast Davidson’s most offensive outburst two hours after the live event defied all reason. This seemed all the more troubling when it emerged the corporation had cut a call from Akinola Davies jnr, winner of best British debut for My Father’s Shadow, to “Free Palestine!”
The news that Warner Bros executives immediately raised the N-word issue with Bafta and, according to Variety, “requested that the incident be removed from BBC’s time-delayed broadcast” caused more brows to furrow in bafflement. Meanwhile, the corporation argued that engineers, working in a truck, had not heard the offensive word.
The incident has done nobody any good. Lindo and Jordan were put in an awful position. Broadcasting the slur opened Davidson, a brave man, up to endless ill-informed commentary from those who make no effort to understand Tourette syndrome. Aramayo’s delightful win was slightly tainted. There is no easy fix. But a viewing of I Swear should, at least, add some context for those confused as to how Bafta got itself in such a pickle. It’s a fine film.
