anortherncod wrote:karnsculpture wrote:
My dad thinks some voters might have chosen other artists because Andy is black.
I didn't see it, but I'd be inclined to agree with your dad.
I think Leona Lewis was the first non-white person to win a talent competition in recent years, and without meaning any disrespect to her, she is light-skinned enough for a lot of white people to find her acceptable - look at the actors who are or were in soaps (Angela Griffin, Craig Charles, etc). The lighter-skinned you are the more acceptable you are, it seems.
You may all have guessed that with the Halle Berry comparisons I'm actually mixed race myself, and I could go on about this all night, but I'll get off my soapbox and leave my ambition to follow in Martin Luther King's footsteps till tomorrow!
Natasha
I'm glad you raised this, Natasha, because it hadn't occurred to me before and I'm absolutely shocked that voters are so narrow-minded in the 21st century.
I'm not a regular viewer of TV talent contests (unless you count Eurovision), so it's difficult for me to comment. A friend made me watch an episode of the X Factor the year that Andy was in it, and I thought that both he and Maria had much, much better voices than the person who won, but I assumed that it was their age that had counted against them, not their race (the X Factor has a large teenage audience and older contestants rarely win). But I caught the end of "I'd Do Anything" the other week by accident while waiting for something else to come on and I was surprised that the black Nancy was voted off, when she was patently better than most of the others.
When it comes to TV actors, it annoys me that black and Asian actors usually seem to be cast in supporting roles, rarely the main part, unless the drama is actually about race. And it really annoys me that you rarely see black and Asian actors in adverts.
But having said that, I've met a lot of black and Asian actors who believe that their ethnicity actually gives them an advantage over white actors in finding TV work, as the BBC and Channel 4 have strong multicultural casting policies (not that that's necessarily a good thing, it can be very patronising - I know one excellent actress who often complains that she wants to get roles "because I'm good, not just because I'm brown"). And Ray Fearon, Adrian Lester, Josette Simon amongst others have all done major primetime roles, despite not being as pale skinned as Griffin and Charles. So I need to think about this.
Going back to Eurovision, I think it is the introduction of televoting that has led to odd results, not the decision to let the former Communist countries in. As you've demonstrated, Western audiences, too, are liable to use televotes to exercise all their personal prejudices and biases, rather than to vote for the person they genuinely thought was the best.
There was a cereal advert not so long ago with a Deaf lady signing what was great about the cereal in question, which I liked, but she wasn't the only person in the advert.
I went to an interview a few years ago and the interviewer, who owned the company, said to me, "Now you're not going to go and do something stupid like get pregnant soon are you?" I was gobsmacked. He was perfectly serious and thought that was an ok question, what an idiot.
