Is Guerrilla too hot for the BBC to handle?
The history of black activism in the UK barely gets a mention. So
Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic), set in London as the 1971 Immigration Act sought to restrict the numbers of non-white immigrants from the Commonwealth, has the field to itself.
The drama tells of a small nexus of youngish Britons who, in the face of police provocation, resort to direct action. This first episode tracked the path to armed radicalism of earnest but unemployed teacher Marcus Hill (Babou Ceesay), driven there by incremental humiliations.
The writer, and co-director, is John Ridley, who wrote 12 Years
a Slave and thus knows how to convey the sickening threat of white-on-black violence.
In this episode’s centrepiece, a seething encounter between National Front marchers and Black Power protesters, was filmed with a juddering immediacy. The eruption of violence, furtively triggered by Special Branch so they could dispatch an influential ringleader (Nicholas Pinnock), was unstinting: with each shocking thwack of the truncheon the screen blacked out.
It’s a shame Guerrilla didn’t find its way onto the BBC, where it would reach a wider audience. Perhaps its alltoo-timely enquiry into the question of national identity was deemed too hot to handle. “When you’re black and British,” says Nathaniel MartelloWhite’s fiery activist, “there’s a constant struggle to understand who you really are. A citizen or a visitor?”
Guerrilla works hard to feel viscerally real, rather than a dramatised lecture about a dialectical struggle. But it has its flaws. There’s an overload of information-rich dialogue, but the larger issue is the way a drama about black power disempowers black women. The main black female character is an informer bedded by Rory Kinnear’s thin-lipped Rhodesian operative from Special Branch.
As Marcus’s girlfriend Jas, Freida Pinto is certainly committed, but her South Asian ethnicity and silverscreen beauty feel somehow off-topic. The other female protagonist is a feisty Irishwoman played by Denise Gough. It’s her, rather than a black woman, who suffers physical and sexual assault by the police. Such brutality may have happened, but in this context it’s a double injustice.
You were entitled to feel confused by the opening credits to Bucket (BBC Four). It’s a new sitcom which shares its name with a celebrated gargoyle from an old sitcom. Imagine if someone wrote a comedy called Mainwaring or Meldrew. And then there was the epigraph from T S Eliot, not commonly associated with ribtickling hilarity. “In my beginning is my end.” It’s the way he tells them.
Then it started and such anxieties evaporated. Bucket stars Miriam Margolyes as Mim Morgenstein, a septuagenarian mother from the depths of hell – flatulent, pottymouthed, greedy, reckless behind the wheel and beyond. Her primary project is undermining her daughter/ chauffeur/dogsbody Fran (Frog Stone), who at 35 is jobless and partnerless but manipulated into joining Mim as she ticks off a bucket list of things to do before she snuffs it. They started in Norfolk’s answer to Disneyworld.
That date seems imminent as cancer cells are “eating away at me,” Mim explains, “and not in a way I’d like.” Don’t bet against this being an outright lie, because Mim is not in possession of a filter and will say literally anything for attention. Her specialist subject is Fran’s unvisited “bat cave”.
The script is cluttered with such euphemisms, malapropisms and neologisms (“checking for squirrels” is a new one on me.) Mim suspects Fran of batting for the other lot. “What type are you?” she enquires maternally. “Lipstick? Joss stick?” Fran denies any such allegiance. “I don’t care if you’re LBO or QTI,” replies Mim. “Everyone’s gender liquid these days.”
Margolyes was born to play Mim. What other short round septuagenarian would gladly bare quite a lot in a crimson negligee? But let’s hear it too for Frog Stone, whose baby this is. She wrote the script and plays the stooge with a nicely judged mix of petulance and weariness.
There’s a lovely turn too from Stephanie Beacham as Mim’s supercilious cousin (“I’m sure you’ll have fun but I have an Ocado coming”), and a hot soundtrack courtesy of Fleetwood Mac and Janis Joplin. Tenderness, fury, and lashings of gynaecology: Bucket has everything you could possibly need in a motherdaughter comedy. A riot.