Lester explains away black Doctor Who

The announcement that 26-year-old Matt Smith will take over from David Tennant as Doctor Who has not been greeted with enthusiasm in all quarters. There had been rumours that the BBC would, for the first time, choose a black actor to play the Time Lord, with Adrian Lester (pictured), the star of the BBC's Hustle, being a prime contender.

However, from an interview in this week's Radio Times, Lester appears to think the odds of landing such plum roles are still stacked against him and his fellow black actors. "If you don't get called for an audition, or if you do and don't get the job, you never know the real reason," he observes. "If there's racism, I'm out of the room when it's discussed, so can only guess at it. But you realise something is not right when you look at the evidence – how many black actors in Britain are given opportunities? There's an imbalance."

Piers Wenger, the executive producer of Doctor Who, insists that is not BBC way. "We saw a dozen or so people, some of them black," he says, adding that the best actor "irrespective of ethnicity or age" was young Smith.

The good news for Lester is that following the election of Barack Obama, offers are now flying in for him to play a US president.