Double take on tragedy
AT the time, and for much of the 25 years since, the murder of Stephen Lawrence has been an occasion for speeches. There were speeches at the marches and rallies and speeches from world leaders, politicians and high-ranking police officers.
The amount of words spoken over the young man’s body and the level of decibels were justified. In the midst of them, though, there is always been a risk of the quieter, human loss being overshadowed.
While taking us through the events and the political backdrop, STEPHEN: THE MURDER THAT CHANGED A NATION (BBC1) gives equal weight to the people at the heart of the crime and its effect upon them. Doreen Lawrence, mother of the promising teenager killed in an unprovoked gang attack in Eltham, South East London on April 22, 1993, spoke about coming to Britain, aged nine, moving in with a family she barely knew.
She smiled as she remembered how Neville, her husband-to-be and now ex-husband, would trek from one side of London to the other to have lunch with her and how he had looked like one of the Four Tops at their wedding. She smiled, too, remembering how Stephen, her first child, had called her “dad” and his father “mum”.
However much nation-changing might have gone, these were just people, living ordinary lives. Their memories were very direct – Doreen recalling a bit of tape stuck to her son’s body in hospital.
Stephen’s cousin, Mat Bickley, said Neville had always been one of those men who chuckled all the time. Until one day he stopped.
“We were just at a bus stop,” said Stephen’s friend, Duwayne Brooks, a sense of despair still coming through decades later. These interviews served as the emotional anchor-point in a tale that billowed about with big names and big issues. Were the police genuinely too stretched in those first, vital days after Stephen’s murder due to the IRA bomb at Bishopsgate?
Were the marches and the demonstrations hijacking a family’s grief or the only way to get justice?
What did it say about British justice that Nelson Mandela had to intervene? With further instalments screened tonight and tomorrow, this documentary forces us to see Stephen’s death in two ways.
In the Britain of the time, the murder of a young black man was both politics and personal tragedy.
A better title for PARADISE HUNTERS (Ch4) might have been “The Recruitment Consultants From Hell”. Many of us dream of a change, ditching the daily commute for a job grilling fish in a Fijian beach shack or whatever.
Luckily most of those dreams remain unfulfilled, largely because we have not got a recruitment consultant and a TV crew turning them into living nightmares.
Charlie, 25, got off lightly, replacing the monotony of a dry, warm call centre for the monotony of flinging feed pellets off a pier on a Highlands salmon farm.
He wanted to use his degree in Environmental Science. And there he was, environment all around him, rain and shine but mostly rain.
Katie, 35, meanwhile, was sent off to a Mexican ranch to undergo a form of psychological bullying.
Between them, the boss and her underling Jenny set out to break (their words) Katie as you might a wild palomino. She had only wanted to work outdoors.
Be careful what you wish for, I guess – and whatever it is, do not tell a recruitment consultant.