Where it really goes wrong, though, is in the way its main characters – adults who may well make hot-headed mistakes but are certainly not children – talk: the open-hearted naivety of the books’ narrators has been replaced by a terribly stilted argot, where every line has a pained intensity that clunks against the actors’ clenched teeth. It airs late and features too much swearing, violence and politics for a young audience, while perhaps not being brutal enough for an adult saga with such a strong premise. Television tends to make the characters in YA dramatisations older, because the genre’s habit of placing teens in shockingly adult situations would seem inappropriate on screen in a way that it doesn’t in print.įailing to pull this transition off is what kills Noughts + Crosses as a drama. On the page, the twin protagonists are kids, 13 and 15 as the story begins, who have a simplicity of worldview and expression that is movingly at odds with the extreme horror of the events they are entangled in.

Malorie Blackman’s books – this second TV series is based roughly on the final few chapters of 2001’s Noughts + Crosses, with some of the 2004 follow-up, Knife Edge, mixed in and numerous changes made – are young adult novels.

Naughts and crosses book