A riveting study of race, class and good intentions
‘Starring Sarah Lancashire” has become a cast-iron guarantee of great television. Whether playing a lesbian headteacher in Last Tango or a resilient police officer in she’s consistently unshowy and unsentimental, with a knack for breathing not just life into a character, but a lifetime. In (Channel 4), a powerful new four-part drama from Jack Thorne (National Treasure), she’s no different.
Summoning a solid West Country accent, Lancashire is Miriam, a trusted and dedicated social worker in Bristol, who takes care of her charges with a breezy confidence and has a propensity to overshare. Sure, she drinks a bit too much, but who wouldn’t want to numb the pain when their mum is terminally ill and they have lost a teenage son to cancer?
Thorne, a nuanced screenwriter fascinated with society’s hypocrisies, teed all this up within the first half of last night’s opener while also introducing us to Kiri (Felicia Mukasa), a young black girl in the process of being adopted by Alice and Jim, a middle-class white couple (played by Lia Williams and Steven Mackintosh). On the day everything was to be finalised, however, Miriam went off piste: she allowed Kiri an unsupervised visit to her grandparents for the first time. “Don’t you start,” she said, responding to a querulous bark from her rescue dog. “It’ll be fine.”
Except, of course, it wasn’t, as we soon cut to the nub of the drama: Kiri’s abduction by her drug-dealing birth father and the witch hunt that ensued once her body was found in the woods. Just as Miriam was dragged through a media maelstrom, so this story became depressingly familiar: the social worker blamed for failing to safeguard a client and the subsequent chorus of handwringing about race and class.
It was riveting. Far from relying on soothing moral platitudes, Thorne’s script was a complex study of human frailty, concerned with raising difficult but vital questions. In someone else’s hands, it may have felt didactic; instead it was open-minded, allowing the viewer to forge their own opinions. That the performances – especially Lucian Msamati as the grandfather whose grief could only manifest itself in paroxysms of anger – were so compelling across the board certainly helped.
Recently, Thorne has spoken of how the series was inspired by his own mother – “a carer with a capital C, a giver with a capital G… she rolls up her sleeves and assumes confidently (perhaps arrogantly) she can make any situation better”. Kiri suggests that no matter how caring a person is, society will ruin them if their best intentions aren’t seen that way.
It may be largely invisible but air pollution is responsible for 50,000 premature deaths in Britain each year. Taking this grim statistic as a cue, Dr Xand van Tulleken, the more buccaneering yet equally ubiquitous twin of fellow TV doctor Chris, set off on a mission to change things singlehandedly in the call-to-action documentary Fighting the Air (BBC Two). Well, not quite single-handedly. Visiting the traffic-swarming Birmingham suburb of Kings Heath, the 39-year-old enlisted the help of its community, among it a lugubrious local butcher, to conduct a one-day experiment in pollution reduction.
The suburb, we learnt, is used by drivers as a rat run to the city centre. As a result, its air is on the cusp of breaking legal limits, so filled is it with nasty substances – the most harmful of which, emitted by cars, lorries and buses, are nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. To the strains of indie trio the xx, the task force pinpointed how they could reduce emissions: suspending parking, putting up hedges, improving the flow of traffic, and persuading parents not to drive their kids back and forth from school.
There were more statistics along the way – a study, for example, recently revealed that air pollution costs the UK £20billion in medical costs and lost labour. But mainly this was an exercise in determination. When the big day came, however, a miasma of self-doubt seemed to collectively cloud their optimism. Was this just an attempt to pull the rug from under us come results time? Probably. That said, the results were encouraging: nitrogen dioxide (NO2) was down 10 per cent on the high street and 20 per cent around St Dunstan’s Catholic Primary School, where particulate matter was also reduced by 30 per cent.
As a galvanising documentary, then, Fighting the Air served its purpose.
Kiri Fighting for Air