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The real Black British experience Steve McQueen’s five films under the umbrella title of Small Axe are a television first. Shilpa Ganatra examines the project’s genesis
BBC
n 2010, Tracey Scoffield, co-founder of Turbine Studios and executive producer of the Emmy-winning movie The Gathering Storm, received an email that would change not only the course of her next 10 years, but the boundaries of television drama. It was from Steve McQueen’s agent. At the time, the London-born director had just made a name for himself with his debut feature film, Hunger, the story of Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikes. McQueen and the BBC were interested in creating a drama series depicting the experiences of first-generation West Indians living in London. “Their lifetimes were spent during an era of real struggle with authorities like the police, and also the system,” recalls Scoffield. “But this generation was starting to die without their stories having been told or recorded.” So began Small Axe, a reference to a Bob Marley song based on an African proverb – “So if you are the big tree/ We are the small axe/Ready to cut you down.” The films are about to air on BBC One as five standalone cinematic episodes, varying from just under an hour to just over two hours in length. The five stories are: Mangrove, the story of the so-called Mangrove Nine, whose trial was the first judicial acknowledgement of behaviour motivated by racism in the Metropolitan police; Lovers Rock, a romantic drama set in unofficial blues clubs, where youngsters would go to dance the night away; Red, White and Blue, focusing on the trailblazing black policeman Leroy Logan; Alex Wheatle, the coming-of-age story of writer Alex Wheatle, and Education, highlighting racial segregation in our schools. For McQueen, the 10 years between then and now, of course, weren’t solidly spent bringing these films to life: after Hunger, he went on to shake the film industry with movies such as Shame and triple-Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave, in the process earning an OBE, CBE and a knighthood. Meanwhile, Helen Bart, a former West Indian BBC News journalist was busy uncovering the stories of everyday people in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. “She conducted some 126 interviews, which we then read, listened to and filtered to the point where, four years ago, we put together a writers room,” says Scoffield, Small Axe’s executive producer. “It was only at that point that
Small Axe episode 4: Alex Wheatle
