Flasz On Film

And here I was, sitting there, minding my own business and thinking I could—y’know—take a day off or something because I thought I had already said everything I’d ever want to say about BAFTAs last year. And I surely did not expect any scandals to erupt in the wake of this usually tame ceremony. But it turns out I was wrong.

In addition to briefly corroborating my initial Oscar predictions (which were based solely on the fact that usually the second-most nominated movie goes home with the top award) and offering a few intriguing upsets—with Sean Penn bagging the Supporting Actor and Robert Aramayo beating all Best Actor Oscar front-runners with his performance in I Swear—it seems that the main takeaway from the ceremony is a media circus. In fact, it is directly related to I Swear, which was nominated for five BAFTAs. And because the movie was based upon the life and struggle of John Davidson, a man living with Tourette’s who became an outspoken activist and educator on this oft-misunderstood condition, the man was also in the audience. Which was a nice touch, to be perfectly honest.

However, the decision to invite Davidson to a highfalutin gala event came with understandable risk. Because of his condition he would frequently shout and blurt off-colour remarks. You don’t need to watch the movie to know that. At this point—to a solid extent thanks to Davidson’s grueling work and his lived experience that saw him bullied, belittled and marginalized—I’d expect that Tourette’s is a well-known, even if still poorly-understood medical condition. In short, if you invite a Tourette’s sufferer into a public setting, chances are you will hear random stuff, some of which might be too hot for TV. Although coprolalia (a tendency to blurt out abusive and offensive words and phrases) affects only a section of Tourette’s patients, it is definitely a symptom in John Davidson’s case.

The bombshell dropped the minute Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo took to the stage to announce the Best Visual Effects award, which also happened to be the first BAFTA of the night. “N——, bitch” was clearly heard from the audience. Lindo froze with his mouth agape for half a second before proceeding with his lines. Two more outbursts could be heard later in the show. And the aftermath was nothing short of mind-boggling.

First, The host Alan Cumming would produce a public service announcement later in the show. Over one hour later, to be exact. It is as though everyone on the production team was surprised that this might happen and chaos ensued behind the scenes. I’d have honestly expected them to produce a disclaimer at the top of the show so that everyone would know that a guy with Tourette’s is in in the audience and that these outbursts that are both well-known and involuntary. As in, he can’t be helped and he doesn’t mean a word of it.

What happened online is even weirder. Naturally, click-obsessed media outlets picked up on this and reported what happened at the BAFTAs spinning it into a sensation. This was good enough catnip for the perpetually aggrieved and the recreationally outraged who find themselves the most comfortable in the front ranks of anonymous pitchfork mobs. You wouldn’t have to scroll very far through your social media feed to find comments from armchair experts suggesting that they realize these tics are involuntary, but surely they could, like, pipe down with racial abuse. Even celebrities chimed in with their ill-informed takes. You couldn’t ask for clearer cases of gobsmacking irony than this. It would seem that the ire was frequently aimed at John Davidson himself, with some people suggesting that someone who can’t behave and is liable to blurting racist slurs should not be attending public events. Some others would open with understanding that that Tourette’s is what it is… but it’s still no excuse for racial abuse. Davidson himself came out later today with a statement that he is just as baffled at these suggestions that his tics may have been intentional.

I mean, come on… Davidson was in the audience for a reason, that’s first and foremost. He didn’t just buy a ticket or turned up on someone’s arm as a plus-one. He was there because a movie about his life and illuminating his personal struggle was being celebrated. And it turns out that a lot more people should watch I Swear, it seems. And it’s not the best movie to see, just in terms of quality. But at this point I think we could all stomach some prestige-adjacent boomer-aimed saccharine filmmaking, if it meant that more people would put their pitchforks down. Or at least aimed them at people who were in a position to avert this scandal completely.
It’s just a fact that involuntary tics are involuntary. And you just have to work around that when producing an awards show where you know that someone with Tourette’s will be in attendance. Therefore, if there’s any animus to be generated out of this debacle, it should be directed at the organizers of the event. I’d have expected the host to inform everyone in attendance right at the beginning of the show. I’d maybe even ensure that everyone gets an email ahead of time with relevant information and links to additional resources.

But most importantly, what the BAFTA organizers should have ensured—and they did have the means to do so—was that any outbursts were edited out of the broadcast. And that’s because the show. Was. Not. Televised. Live. It was broadcast with a two-hour delay, mostly to give producers an opportunity to edit out categories they deem uninteresting to general audiences—which is already infuriating, if you ask me—and to trim the show down to fit the slot it was allotted by the TV station. Which gave them ample space and opportunity to pull out the audio tracks and bleep or remove all outbursts. That way, any media sensationalizing would be throttled to an extent and at least one of the claims of the perpetually aggrieved—that hearing racial slurs in a media broadcast normalizes its use—would have been effectively defanged. In fact, BBC were able to remove when someone shouted “Free Palestine!” which makes this scandal even more bizarre.

But they didn’t. So please, if you need to be angry at someone today, get angry at the producers of the broadcast who had the tools to make sure that nobody outside of the auditorium would hear Davidson’s involuntary outbursts. But let’s leave Davidson in peace. The guy has suffered enough, I think. And if Queen Elizabeth II was able to take Davidson’s “Fuck the Queen!!” on the chin when he was being given an MBE for his work as a Tourette’s awareness campaigner, then I think a bunch of recreationally angry and terminally online look-at-me activists could get over what happened today as well. And while I fully realize that the shock of hearing the n-word shouted at black presenters is just as real as the harm this word has embodied for centuries—at the end of the day intent does not negate impact—we ought to be mindful of the medical reality of Tourette’s, however uncomfortable its consequences may sometimes be.