A jaw-dropping drama foiled by its own grandiosity
‘Do not play it,” Rwandan politician Alice Munezero (Noma Dumezweni) warned her husband Frank (Treva Etienne) from her hospital bed, handing him a voice recorder and urging him to keep it safe in last night’s Black Earth
Rising (BBC Two).
“What is this?” Frank asked, not unreasonably. And like every other viewer who has sat through this perplexing thriller, my ears pricked up in hope of finally getting a clue as to what is behind it all. But alas, as with every other line of dialogue involving a “who?”, “how?” or “what?” in this drama, writer-director Hugo Blick left us hanging. And by now an uncomfortable suspicion is growing that this supposedly serious drama might turn out to be one long, empty tease, surfing on the horrors and moral murk of the Rwandan genocide.
Let’s hope not, as Black Earth Rising is still an entrancing watch, exquisitely shot and acted, even if it stretches credibility to the limit. The episode opened with Kate (Michaela Coel) witnessing the attempted assassination that left Munezero in hospital and, finally, setting off for Rwanda herself.
She was accompanied by the guardian angel who’s been shadowing her through the series; now revealed as Florence (Emmanuel Imani), a fellow Rwanda-born exile hired by US State Department bigwig Eunice Clayton (Tamara Runie) to keep Kate safe.
Their inspection of the Rwandan justice system was not especially convincing. But the staging of it was impeccable, and some of the set pieces were jaw-dropping. Kate’s wordless, emotion-freighted visit to a genocide memorial, beautifully filmed and perfectly backed by a spine-tingling rendition of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, was a particularly accomplished sequence, and a reminder of why this series continues to exert such a strong grip.
In Kate and Florence’s developing relationship, too, Blick again proved his sharp eye for tiny but significant intimacies. For all that he offers fresh perspectives on complex international tangles, and reminds us of the world’s brutalities and injustices, it is hard not to wish that, next time, he might abandon grandiose drama like this and return to the kind of smaller-scale, more contemplative work with which he made his name.
As the literary world awaits the announcement of the 2018 Booker winner tonight, Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the
Booker Prize (BBC Four) was an enjoyable, if workaday primer on how the literary fiction prize has been keeping book-lovers agog, and sales figures spiralling higher, for decades.
Unlike many of the books nominated for the prize, the emphasis here was firmly on entertainment. A fairly easy task given the self-regard of some of the authors, critics and judges featured. But despite the title and an introduction that spoke of back-biting and bitchiness, fierce rivalries and bruised egos, it was a mostly straightforward history occasionally enlivened by pithy anecdotes and footage of well-known public incidents – such as 1972 winner John Berger’s speech lambasting then sponsors Booker Mcconnell for their colonialist past, or Fay Weldon’s 1983 speech tearing strips off the publishing industry for treating writers badly.
As with so many other things now, the urge to smooth, spin and Prmanage every aspect of the major event that the Man Booker has become means that almost all of the really good scandal came from the early years of the prize. As publishers and authors became more media savvy – and the financial stakes got significantly higher – the gaffes and ding-dongs dried up.
As such, the latter half of the film confined itself to what a good thing for book sales the prize has been, and the spectacular effect a win can have on a writer’s career and a publisher’s bottom line. Jamie Byng, the founder of Cannongate, spoke revealingly of the impact Jan Martell’s winner Life of PI had on the fortunes of his then small publishing house.
In the end, everyone agreed that what mattered most was the manner in which the prize has always put the word out, introducing evermore readers to successive generations of writers who really do deserve to be read. The 2005 winner John Banville summed it up: “To have a prize that will raise a book – a good book – from 5,000 sales to 500,000 sales, that is an achievement. Long may it last.” Amen to that.
Black Earth Rising ★★★ Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the Booker Prize ★★★