Tintin and the mixed race police team

Rufus Norris’s stage production of Hergé’s Adventures Of Tintin, currently running at London’s Playhouse theatre, will doubtless have come under the scrutiny of politically correct mandarins. The adaptation is of Tintin In Tibet, the plot of which concerns the ginger newshound’s search for his close friend, Chang, in the Himalayas.

Deftly avoiding the pitfalls of stereotype (unlike Tintin’s sojourn in the Congo, which played with images familiar to the imagination of Boris Johnson), this is actually one of Hergé’s most highly regarded works, and his favourite – it was published in Tibetan, and caused the ginger hack to receive a ‘Truth of Light’ award from the Dalai Lama, for services in bringing the country’s plight into the public eye. High praise, indeed. Still, Tintin seems keen to further rehabilitate himself in anticipation of his feature film debut. A glance through the promotional video for his previous stint at the Watford Palace theatre even reveals that one half of Thomson and Thompson is now black.

Publishers were reportedly concerned over Lindsey Gardiner’s plans to feature a dragon toasting marshmallows with his own flames in her latest book. These were removed on the grounds of ‘health and safety’. This makes perfect, 100 per cent sense. After all, many children have their own dragons and would be keen to employ them in such a fashion. Imagine the damage to bedspreads up and down the country – there’d be singed fringes and tears before bedtime as youngsters cajoled their scaly firestarters into melting marshmallows into the cocoa. Imagine the chaos.

The danger in this is that we slowly turn entertainment into ‘edutainment’, imbuing everything with a social message. You can see it in drama – the knack Spooks has for inventing new and increasingly bizarre splinter groups that-definitely-aren’t-everyday-Arabs to carry out terrorist acts in the series. Or comedies that are designed to reflect social and ethnic minorities, rather than to be funny. Perhaps we should simply be honest about the whole thing and bring back public information films – just lay the message straight on the line, then leave entertainment to be what it wants. The trend in publishing for re-inventing the 1950s, even reprinting them is all very well, but it is just that – a trend triggered by financial reward, not a fundamental shift in attitude. Obviously there is a need not to be unnecessarily offensive, but there is a line between this and being prescriptive. It’s a fine line but it’s worth finding.