Idris Elba’s career has taken a funny turn
Normally, a TV show will use its title to try to give you some idea of what it’s about, yet, even a couple of episodes in, I still can’t quite fathom
why In the Long Run is called In the Long Run. A period comedy on Sky One “created by” Idris Elba, it revolves around Walter Easmon (Elba), a first-generation immigrant who is living quite happily with his family in a block of flats in east London in 1986. When Walter’s younger brother Valentine (Jimmy Akingbola), a ladies’ man and a bit of a chancer, is sent to Britain from Sierra Leone by their mother to stay with Walter and make something of himself, fish-out-ofwater hilarity ensues.
Or at least it may ensue at some point – on the evidence of the first episode, this is a comedy looking not so much for hilarity as the occasional smile. Elba is known for playing tough guys who take no prisoners, but in this, his first attempt at producing a comedy with what is essentially a rose-tinted retelling of his own childhood with him playing his father, he’s tried to go firmly against type.
As such, the series makes a conscious choice to relegate the more testing issues of endemic racism and cultural integration that Elba must have encountered during his childhood to historical background music. Instead, it’s a broadly celebratory period piece, complete with jokes about microwaves and a relentless soundtrack of Eighties music (relentlessly good, if you like Eighties music, which I do).
Given that Elba was brought up on a council estate in east London in the Eighties and I wasn’t, it’s not my place to say what constitutes an accurate representation of what life was like, but In the Long Run certainly feels like its depiction has been bowdlerised. It’s a kind-hearted, generous show and so in that spirit let’s be generous – perhaps In the
Long Run has that title because in the long run it will become apparent that this gentlest of intros was the calm before the storm, and the series will explode into an enthralling exploration of race relations in the Eighties and the birth of modern multiculturalism (ideally with some jokes). For the time being, In the Long
Run is just too meek and mild to be anything more than a good soundtrack with pictures.
Ihave to admit that when one of the British teenagers sent to an Indian Summer School answered a multiple-choice exam question that asked him to “fill in” a certain box by literally colouring the box in with purple crayon, I laughed. I shouldn’t have – he had been given the opportunity of a lifetime to go to India’s illustrious Doon boarding school for six months and make something of himself. He’d failed all of his GCSES back in England. And yet, here he was mocking the system, sticking up two fingers at people who were trying to help him. O tempora, o mores!
The reason I laughed was because
Indian Summer School (Channel 4) was yet another in the long line of self-styled TV “social experiments” that are entertaining but signify very little. In this case, five British boys, all of whom had failed their core GCSES, were sent to a boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas with an exam pass rate of 100 per cent. Would some of the Doon factor rub off on them?
The set-up was pure Pygmalion or
Prince and the Pauper or Trading Places, and it’s the same one we’ve seen played out in countless TV reality series, from ITV’S Bring Back Borstal and School Swap – the Class Divide to
2015’s Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School. The results, at least after one episode (of three), were equally predictable: some of the boys appeared to benefit from going to a strict boarding school, others hated it and rebelled. Some of them said some quite funny things and so were granted screen time, others refused to play ball.
As ever, the social experiment was not only contrived, but meaningless. You need proper studies with multiple subjects and a robust methodology in order to make judgments about education, social mobility and the rest, not a three-part factual-entertainment show on a Thursday night in late March. So if Indian Summer School didn’t prove anything, what was it for, other than a few laughs at some unfortunates chucked in at the deep end and asked to swim? That was why when one of them said sod it to the whole enterprise, I was right behind him.
In the Long Run Indian Summer School