External links
| TV series |
|
|---|---|
| Novels | |
| Banana | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Comedy drama |
| Created by | Russell T Davies |
| Written by | Russell T Davies |
| Composer | Ben Foster |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 8 |
| Production | |
| Executive producers |
|
| Producer | Emily Feller |
| Production locations | Manchester, Greater Manchester, England |
| Running time | 23 minutes |
| Production companies |
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| Original release | |
| Network | E4 |
| Release | 22 January – 12 March 2015 |
| Related | |
Banana is a 2015 British television series created by Russell T Davies and aired on E4. The sister series to Channel 4's Cucumber and the 4oD documentary series Tofu , Banana is a series focusing on LGBT youth in Manchester, around the narrative of Cucumber. Unlike Cucumber, which is a self-contained serial following the story of one gay man, Banana is an anthology series focusing on the wider LGBT spectrum. The series was nominated for the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding TV Movie or Limited Series. [1]
Banana develops some of the storylines of characters featured in Cucumber as well as introducing many new characters. Banana is primarily a self-contained series, occasional overlapping with the Cucumber narrative. Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu are all named after the same scale of erection hardness, with Banana symbolising the middle of the scale from the flaccid Tofu to the fully erect Cucumber.
Banana was commissioned in 2013 as a sister show to Davies' long-developed project Cucumber, along with the online documentary series Tofu. [2] The three series refer to a urological scale of erection hardness, which consists of tofu, peeled banana, banana, and cucumber. [3] Unlike Cucumber, which focuses primarily on middle-aged gay men, Banana focuses on LGBT youth in Manchester that are on the periphery of the Cucumber narrative. The two series are primarily linked through the crossover character of Dean Monroe (Fisayo Akinade), who appears as a major character in both series, and are contrasted by social acceptance of the characters; whereas Akinade's character is more "open and confident" about his sexuality, the characters of Cucumber are former activists whose sexuality had to be less open. [3]
Whereas Davies' 1999–2000 series Queer as Folk focused on gay men in the Canal Street club scene, Cucumber is a self-contained serial following the story of one middle-aged gay man, Henry Best (Vincent Franklin), Banana is an anthology series focusing on young characters across the LGBT spectrum. [3] The show notably casts the first transgender actor in a transgender role in a UK television series, with comedian Bethany Black portraying Helen, a transgender woman. [3] Davies insisted that a transgender actor be cast as Helen, going so far as to alter the script until Black was cast at the eleventh hour; Black was vocal in her praise for this, contrasting the decision with the casting of Jared Leto as a trans woman in the recent film Dallas Buyers Club , which she described as "a cisgender guy trying to play what he thought a trans woman would be like", and compared cisgender actors playing transgender roles to blackface portrayals in shows such as It Ain't Half Hot Mum . [3] Helen's episode also features Cucumber character Cleo Wilkinson (Julie Hesmondhalgh), in a scene that symbolises a "passing of the baton" between Hesmondhalgh—the cisgender actress who portrayed the transgender woman Hayley Cropper in Coronation Street between 1998 and 2014—and Black and the wider trans community. [4]
Filming took place from June to September 2014. [5]
| No. | Title | Central character | Directed by | Written by | Original air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Episode 1 | Dean (Fisayo Akinade) | Lewis Arnold | Russell T Davies | 22 January 2015 |
| 2 | Episode 2 | Scotty (Letitia Wright) | Lewis Arnold | Russell T Davies | 29 January 2015 |
| 3 | Episode 3 | Sian & Violet (Georgia Henshaw & Hannah John-Kamen) | Lewis Arnold | Sue Perkins | 5 February 2015 |
| 4 | Episode 4 | Helen (Bethany Black) | Lewis Arnold | Charlie Covell | 12 February 2015 |
| 5 | Episode 5 | Josh & Sophie (Luke Newberry & Chloe Harris) | Luke Snellin | Matthew Barry | 19 February 2015 |
| 6 | Episode 6 | Kay (T'Nia Miller) Amy (Charlie Covell) | Al Mackay | Charlie Covell | 26 February 2015 |
| 7 | Episode 7 | Aiden & Frank (Dino Fetscher & Alex Frost) | Luke Snellin | Lee Warburton | 5 March 2015 |
| 8 | Episode 8 | Vanessa & Zara (Lynn Hunter & Nikki Fagbemi) | Al Mackay | Russell T Davies | 12 March 2015 |
The series premiered on Logo in the United States on 13 April 2015 to a very low 24,000 viewers, which was less than half the viewership that had watched Cucumber before it. [6]
The series airs on SBS Two in Australia.
The series is also available on TVNZ OnDemand in New Zealand and on Hulu in the United States.
Queer as Folk is a 1999 British television series that chronicles the lives of three gay men living in Manchester's gay village around Canal Street. Initially running for eight episodes, a two-part follow up was shown in 2000. It was written by Russell T Davies and produced by Red Production Company for Channel 4.
GLAAD is an American non-governmental media monitoring organization. Originally founded as a protest against defamatory coverage of gay and lesbian demographics and their portrayals in the media and entertainment industries, it has since included bisexual and transgender people.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) characters have been depicted in video games since the 1980s. In the history of video games, LGBT characters have been almost nonexistent for a long time, reflecting the overall heteronormativity of the medium. While there has been a trend towards greater representation of LGBT people in video games, they are frequently identified as LGBT in secondary material, such as comics, rather than in the games themselves. In 2018, Sam Greer of Gamesradar+ found only 179 games commercially released games with any LGBT representation, only 83 of which have queer characters who are playable characters, and only 8 of those games feature a main character who is pre-written as queer as opposed to them being queer as an option.
LGBT stereotypes are stereotypes about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people are based on their sexual orientations, gender identities, or gender expressions. Stereotypical perceptions may be acquired through interactions with parents, teachers, peers and mass media, or, more generally, through a lack of firsthand familiarity, resulting in an increased reliance on generalizations.
Bethany Black is an English stand up comedian, actress and writer. As a comedian, Black is described as "managing to balance dark-tinged comedy with being warm and chatty". As an actress, she is the first trans person to play a trans character in a British TV series and also the first openly trans actor in Doctor Who.
The transgender rights movement is a movement to promote the legal status of transgender people and to eliminate discrimination and violence against transgender people regarding housing, employment, public accommodations, education, and health care. A major goal of transgender activism is to allow changes to identification documents to conform with a person's current gender identity without the need for gender-affirming surgery or any medical requirements, which is known as gender self-identification. It is part of the broader LGBT rights movements.
Historically, the portrayal of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in media has been largely negative if not altogether absent, reflecting a general cultural intolerance of LGBT individuals; however, from the 1990s to present day, there has been an increase in the positive depictions of LGBT people, issues, and concerns within mainstream media in North America. The LGBT communities have taken an increasingly proactive stand in defining their own culture, with a primary goal of achieving an affirmative visibility in mainstream media. The positive portrayal or increased presence of the LGBT communities in media has served to increase acceptance and support for LGBT communities, establish LGBT communities as a norm, and provide information on the topic.
Laverne Cox is an American actress and LGBT advocate. She rose to prominence with her role as Sophia Burset on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, becoming the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in an acting category, and the first to be nominated for an Emmy Award since composer Angela Morley in 1990. In 2015, she won a Daytime Emmy Award in Outstanding Special Class Special as executive producer for Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word, making her the first trans woman to win the award. In 2017, she became the first transgender person to play a transgender series regular on U.S. broadcast TV as Cameron Wirth on CBS's Doubt.
Transgender pornography is a genre of pornography featuring transsexual or transgender actors. The majority of the genre features trans women, but trans men are sometimes featured. Trans women are most often featured with male partners, but they are also featured with other women, both transgender and cisgender.
Portrayals of transgender people in mass media reflect societal attitudes about transgender identity, and have varied and evolved with public perception and understanding. Media representation, culture industry, and social marginalization all hint at popular culture standards and the applicability and significance to mass culture, even though media depictions represent only a minuscule spectrum of the transgender group, which essentially conveys that those that are shown are the only interpretations and ideas society has of them. However, in 2014, the United States reached a "transgender tipping point", according to Time. At this time, the media visibility of transgender people reached a level higher than seen before. Since then, the number of transgender portrayals across TV platforms has stayed elevated. Research has found that viewing multiple transgender TV characters and stories improves viewers' attitudes toward transgender people and related policies.
Cucumber is a 2015 British comedy drama television series created by Russell T Davies and aired on Channel 4. Exploring 21st-century gay life, the series focuses on middle-aged Henry Best. Following a disastrous date night with his boyfriend of nine years, Lance Sullivan, Henry's old life shatters. He embarks on a new life with unfamiliar rules.
Tofu is a 2015 British online documentary series created by Russell T Davies and presented by journalist and YouTube host Benjamin Cook, available on All 4, Channel 4's video-on-demand service. The sister series to Channel 4's Cucumber and E4's Banana, Tofu is a documentary series that focuses on a range of sex attitudes in the twenty-first century from the viewpoint of everyday people. Like Cucumber and Banana, the name of the series refers to the same urological scale of hardness of the male erection which starts at tofu, goes through peeled banana and ends at cucumber from a European study that inspired Davies.
Homonormativity is the privileging of heteronormative ideals and constructs onto LGBT culture and identity. It is predicated on the assumption that the norms and values of heterosexuality should be replicated and performed among homosexual people. Homonormativity selectively privileges cisgendered homosexuality as worthy of social acceptance.
Lesbian erasure is a form of lesbophobia that involves the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or reexplain evidence of lesbian women or relationships in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources. Lesbian erasure also refers to instances wherein lesbian issues, activism, and identity is deemphasized or ignored within feminist groups or the LGBT community.
Cremisius "Krem" Aclassi is a fictional character in the 2014 video game Dragon Age: Inquisition. He is a former soldier in the Tevinter Imperium's military forces, and is currently a member of the Bull's Chargers, a mercenary company led by the Iron Bull. He was created and written by Patrick Weekes. Canadian-American voice actress Jennifer Hale voiced Krem in Inquisition.
Fisayo Akinade is an English actor, best known for his roles as Dean Monroe in Cucumber and Banana on Channel 4 and Mr. Ajayi in the popular Netflix series Heartstopper, as well as his work in theatre such as The Crucible at the Gielgud Theatre, London.