PickS of the week
YOUR CAN’T-MISS TV SHOWS FOR THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS
ENSLAVED WITH SAMUEL L JACKSON
Tonight, BBC2, 9pm IT’S Black History Month and we’re about to see a plethora of programmes linked to it hit our screens.
This documentary series, fronted by Samuel L Jackson, tells the terrifying story of some of the 12 million Africans who were enslaved by European traders and shipped against their will to the Americas over 400 years.
Two million of them died en route due to the hideous conditions in which they were kept.
ADULT MATERIAL
Tomorrow, Channel 4, 10pm
MOST of us have probably been to parties that haven’t ended in the way we expected, but hopefully few of them turned out quite like Carroll’s. He and Jolene are left picking up the pieces while trying to control any fall-out, something that won’t be easy now that Tom is in hospital and Amy is at the police station.
THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF
Tuesday, Channel 4, 8pm
IT’S chocolate week and there’s a deceptively simple signature in the form of a traybake. Then, the bakers take on a technical packed full of chocolate and nuts. Finally, there’s a celebration showstopper involving white chocolate.
NADIYA BAKES
Wednesday, BBC2, 8.30pm NADIYA HUSSAIN looks at recipes that can be rustled up on a budget, including a potato rosti quiche. She also explains why home-baked bread offers value for money, shows how to turn a few store cupboard staples into rhubarb and custard biscuits, and makes an indulgent, but thrifty, chocolate fondant.
THE TRUMP SHOW
Thursday, BBC2, 9pm
THIS new series looks at how Donald Trump brought the persona he had honed as a businessman and reality TV star to the White House. The opening episode focuses on his first 18 months in office.
SIR CLIFF RICHARD AT THE BBC
Friday, BBC4, 9.50pm
CLIFF RICHARD turns 80 on Wednesday and the BBC pays tribute, starting with the movie Summer Holiday (8pm) and continuing with this look back through the Beeb’s archives, while Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia (10.50pm) puts his early records into the context of the UK’s first rock acts.
THE MILLION POUND CUBE
Saturday, ITV, 9pm
PHILLIP SCHOFIELD hosts a special edition of the game show ahead of a new run of weekday episodes in which the prize fund has been increased to £1m. Two teams, consisting of Mo Gilligan and David Ajao, and Jason Manford and his brother Stephen, compete to win the million for charity.
‘I’VE had to learn to blow my own trumpet because – as a black female singer – no-one was going do it for me,” explains Skin down the phone from her Ibiza home.
As the frontwoman of Skunk Anansie, Deborah Dyer – AKA Skin – offered an alternative voice to the machismo of Britrockers such as Oasis and Blur during the 90s.
“If I am modest I disappear,” she says.
“I don’t like to sit here and say, ‘I was the first black woman to headline Glastonbury’. That’s not my personality. But one of the ways that racism works is that it erases what black people do... It erases our successes.”
Black, British and queer, Skin, now 53, was a rarity in the fairly homogeneous landscape of 90s pop and rock.
Her autobiography, fittingly titled It Takes Blood and Guts, charts a difficult but warm childhood in Brixton, south London, through to her years in Skunk Anansie.
The book also touches on Skin’s activist work, campaigning against apartheid and for LGBT rights, and glitzier turns like her stint as a judge on the Italian version of The X Factor.
Add to that her late reinvention as a globe-trotting DJ and close relationship with the fashion world.
“I have three brothers so I was raised in a house of boys,” she recalls.
“There was a lot of man energy around. In Jamaican families, in Jamaican culture, if someone is hungry you feed them. If someone comes to your house then you put down an extra plate. That’s cultural. And my mum, a nurse, was like that. Lots of Jamaicans were like that. They showed their love by filling your belly.”
Skin’s memories of Brixton in the 70s and 80s are mixed, she says. The riots of 1981 and 1985 left an impact – spurring her on to activism.
“The negative things that were happening to people were literally happening outside my front door.
“You just see a lot of things growing up that you just don’t think are very fair, so you want to change things.”
Today, the gentrification of the area is something that concerns her.
“The wonderful thing about Brixton is Brixton Market. But it has been under attack for years now. Eventually we are going to see it disappear because the new people moving in don’t really get it. They don’t really get the black food. They don’t really get that it is supposed to be a bit edgy and a bit messy.”
Skunk Anansie’s peak originally stretched from 1995’s Paranoid & Sunburnt to 1999’s Post Orgasmic Chill, before the band split for a decade.
Aided by journalist and friend Lucy O’Brien, Skin began her book before the pandemic, but it was finished during the first months of lockdown.
In September, she announced her engagement to her partner, performer and events organiser Rayne Baron.
“I spent the first four months of proper serious lockdown in New York with my wifey and we literally didn’t go anywhere.
“New York was really serious about it.”
Skin finally made it to
London before arriving in Ibiza about a fortnight before we speak. It’s a jet-set lifestyle, and much of the book explores Skin’s struggle to maintain connection with her family, friends and partners as she tours the world.
Has she got the balance right now?
“Yeah, totally,” she says without hesitation.
“WhatsApp groups change everything.”
The book offers a fascinating look back at her years in the spotlight. The first act of Skunk Anansie’s career peaked with a slot on Glastonbury’s Pyramid
Stage in 1999, alongside fellow headliners REM and Manic Street
Preachers.
“Headlining
Glastonbury for us was a double-edged sword because, if you imagine, we were one of the biggest bands in the UK at the time, and also in Europe.
“Our second album was triple platinum.
“We absolutely deserved to headline Glastonbury in terms of statistics, in terms of record sales, in terms of the size of the band.
“And yet, we had so many journalists that were anti-Skunk
Anansie headlining Glastonbury.”
Their detractors dressed up their criticism, she says.
“But what they really meant was there is a black female lead singer and she shouldn’t be singing rock music anyway. That was what was really behind it.
“You can say that now, but if we had said that at the time we would have been told we had a chip on our shoulder.”
Skin is quick to point out a catalogue of black artists or predominantly black groups who could have headlined over the years.
“Goldie could have done it at one point, Dizzee
Rascal could have done it at one point, even Eternal could have done it at one point! It’s not that we aren’t there. It’s that we don’t get the dibs and we don’t get seen as someone who can fill a field.”
One of the ways that racism works is that it erases what black people do... It erases our successes.”
Skin on the necessity of highlighting Skunk Anansie’s achievements