FOR THE HIGH-MINDED: SMALL AXE
You have to admire the timing: in what can only be described as a cataclysmic year for cinema, British film has decided to have a bit of a moment. Exhibit A – and, for that matter, B to E – is a collection of five sensational new features from Steve Mcqueen, the
Turner Prize-bagging artist turned Oscar-winning director of 12 Years a Slave. And yep, you’ve guessed it, they start on BBC One on Sunday Nov 15.
Known collectively as Small Axe, from a West Indian proverb about strength in modest numbers, Mcqueen’s suite of stories is about late 20th century black British life.
Crucially, it’s no starchy history lesson or dutiful quota-crunching exercise, but a five-course feast of truly great cinema in your front room.
The feel for period detail is so precise that you could be watching some rediscovered lost instalments of Play For Today, the BBC’S longrunning anthology series from the Seventies and Eighties – and Mcqueen’s films feel very consciously placed in that tradition, offering as authentic a perspective on Britishness as Scum by Alan Clarke, or Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh. In that respect alone, Small Axe feels like an instant cultural landmark: in the years ahead, you’ll want to be able to say you were right there for the premieres of these, even if “there” is just the sofa.
Courtroom drama
Mangrove (pictured left) is a gripping dramatisation of the (real) 1970 trial of nine black activists from the Notting Hill area of London who were charged with inciting a riot. Coming the following week is Lovers Rock, a heady and intoxicating dance movie set at a west London house party in 1980.
Among the three further instalments is Red, White and Blue, which stars John Boyega, who’s a familiar face from Star Wars, though every episode is shot through with names to watch.
Look, I adore The Crown, and, ahem, will concede that I’m a Celeb exists, but over the next few weeks there is something new and wonderful to share in. Mcqueen – already a sovereign of cinema – is the new inarguable king of Lockdown TV.