“I’m thinking of joining the force,” says John Boyega’s Leroy Logan early in Red, White and Blue (BBC One, Sunday, 9pm), part three of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology series. It takes nerve to chuck a Starkiller Base-size Star Wars reference into a grim and gritty interrogation of the racism encoded for decades into British policing. Boyega, as everybody knows, became famous for starring in the Disney Star Wars trilogy before taking the brave and necessary step of criticising the Mouse House for writing former Stormtrooper Finn – one of the few major black Star Wars characters – out of his own space epic. So he gets away with a Star Wars nod. That’s how decent people make the world better, even when the world wants to keep them down.

Source: The Irish Times November 29, 2020 22:18 UTC