Lovers Rock was immersive TV at its most intoxicating
Steve Mcqueen’s series of films got off to an arresting start last week with Mangrove, an intense courtroom drama. This week he gave us something completely different. Where Mangrove pummeled you around the head, Lovers Rock (BBC One) drowsily enveloped you. It was a languid, lovely piece of film-making in which very little happened.
Well, very little happened for the viewer; for Martha (newcomer Amarah-jae St Aubyn), it was thrilling. We first met her sneaking out of her bedroom window and meeting up with her best friend en route to a house party. There she met Franklyn (Micheal Ward, Bafta Rising Star winner) and the chemistry between them was instant.
The film spanned the party, from set-up – women in the kitchen preparing the food, men in the front room preparing the sound system – to the next morning. It was set in a very specific place and time – Ladbroke Grove, west London, in 1980 – when nightclubs were unwelcoming places for black people and house parties sprang up as alternative, DIY club nights. There were incidents: an attempted rape, some threatening behaviour from a group of white boys in the street, a moment of tension when Martha’s cousin crashed the party. But they came and went.
Lovers Rock took its name from the romantic, melodic reggae of the time and what made Mcqueen’s film extraordinary was its focus on the music. If there is such a thing as an immersive TV experience, then this was it. A full 10 minutes was given over to Janet Kay’s Silly Games, half of it with the room singing a cappella in a sort of rapture. It was intoxicating. When the characters did speak their dialogue had an improvised quality that added to the agreeable messiness of it all, the sense that we had turned up at this party and didn’t know where the night was headed.
There is a problem here, though, and it is the scheduling. Mcqueen’s anthology (there are three more instalments to come) was first shown at film festivals, and his work loses something in the transfer to television. But it’s more than that. Mangrove only managed 1.1 million viewers (no doubt it will fare better when iplayer views are taken into account) and that is not the fault of the drama but of whoever decided to put these on BBC One at 9pm on a Sunday. That slot comes with expectations: of an undemanding, plot-heavy drama, a Poldark or a Bodyguard – not the work of an experimental filmmaker, impressive as it may be.
How many Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants can you remember, apart from the Coughing Major? For most of us, it’s Judith Keppel who springs to mind.
Keppel was the first winner of the jackpot and relived the experience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The Million Pound Question (ITV). It was such an event back in 2000 that her million pound question is still imprinted on my brain: which king was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine? Keppel knew the answer because, serendipitously, two months earlier she had wandered into a church on holiday in France, and that church contained the tombs of Eleanor and her husband, Henry II. Isn’t life strange?
Of course, the questions are only easy if you know the answers. I would have sailed through Keppel’s £250,000 question: “The young of which creature is known as a squab?” (A pigeon.) But I’d have been stumped at £64,000: “Duffel coats are named after a town in which country?” (Belgium.) It seemed rather mean of the programme to mock various past contestants for being “toe-curlingly clueless” when they had simply come up against questions that were beyond their knowledge.
There was no real need for the former celebrity contestants who kept popping up, or for the claim that this is “the most famous hot seat on television” (I think Mastermind would beg to differ). It was Keppel’s story that provided the interest. She was terribly posh by quiz show contestant standards – “a rather upmarket contestant for us,” said the producer, David Briggs – and appeared cool as a cucumber, although she insisted that she was a bag of nerves at the beginning. Chris Tarrant didn’t think she had a hope and the producers felt she would fold early on, but Keppel was a dark horse. “When she started to take a few risks, we sat up,” Briggs said.
The show has a new lease of life now under Jeremy Clarkson, but nothing will be able to replicate the excitement of that first million pound win. Although pity Pascal, the man in the studio who had waited two years to set off his confetti cannon, only for it to malfunction on the night.
Small Axe: Lovers Rock ★★★★ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The Million Pound Question ★★★