This drama may jerk tears but it pulls its punches
Knowing the subject matter of My Name Is Leon (BBC Two, Friday), I was prepared for it to make me cry. Sure enough, half an hour in and I was sobbing away. Leon is a 10-yearold boy who adores his baby brother, Jake. But their mother is floored by depression and fails to look after them. Leon does his best to keep the show on the road, feeding and changing Jake as best he can, but eventually social services are called in and the pair are taken into foster care. Then, awfully, the brothers are separated. Jake is adopted, and Leon is left behind. As Jake’s new parents take him away, Leon tries to press his favourite Action Man toy into the baby’s arms. “He’ll keep you safe until I get you back,” the little boy promises. At this point, I was half way through a box of tissues.
The film, based on a novel by Kit de Waal, is held together by two strong lead roles. One is from the reliably good Monica Dolan as Leon’s loving foster carer, Maureen. The other is from newcomer Cole Martin as Leon. What a find he is. The drama is heavily dependent on him plucking at your heartstrings, and he does just that with a beautifully guileless performance.
This is a story told from a child’s perspective – sometimes literally, with the camera at Leon’s height – and the viewer understands what is happening before Leon does. He is told that babies are easier to place with adoptive families, which is undoubtedly true. But the brothers also have different fathers: Jake is white and Leon is mixed-race. A 10-year-old mixed-race child will struggle to find a home. Over the course of the drama, Leon comes to realise that the colour of his skin will affect his life chances.
And yet what promised to be a pummelling film ended up pulling its punches. The adaptation is populated by characters who could have come from a CBBC show, such as Sir Lenny Henry’s old timer (Henry is also the executive producer).
Everyone Leon meets, save for Maureen’s ungenerous sister (Olivia Williams), has his best interests at heart. The allotment where he hangs out, populated by kindly black people such as Tufty (Malachi Kirby), is a sundappled idyll. Christopher Eccleston is a grumpy allotment holder who we are initially led to believe might be racist, but he turns out to be a decent sort.
The issue of race is central to the story and yet is portrayed in such a mild way, as if the programme-makers are reluctant to scare the horses. The Birmingham race riots and police brutality make a fleeting and unthreatening appearance. It all ends on a warm and fuzzy scene around the dinner table, reassuring the audience that everything is all right, really. If this is a show designed to gently introduce older children to tough themes, it feels right. But for a 9pm BBC Two drama, it’s a cop-out.
Some people found the opening of the Elizabeth Line terribly exciting. Hundreds queued for hours to be the first passengers aboard this Crossrail service. One of them was a “transport Youtuber” who flew in from Toronto. A man turned up in a waistcoat made from Elizabeth Line purple seat fabric; counting the cost of the sewing machine he’d bought especially, he’d spent £2,000.
If you live elsewhere in the country, you probably couldn’t give a hoot. But BBC Two has been following the project for 10 years and produced The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway (Sunday), which has now reached its final series.
Crossrail is an impressive feat of engineering, involving the construction of a new tunnel beneath the Thames and nine new stations – described here as “an enormous architectural challenge”. But that fascinating work was explored in previous seasons. We’ve now reached the stage of snagging issues and software problems.
The latter are admittedly quite significant. Alarm bells ring when we learn that the new service depends upon “the most complex train computer software in the world”, controlling trains, tracks and platform doors. “The new Elizabeth Line trains must be able to run seamlessly between three signalling systems,” explained the programme. “The safety of passengers relies on a glitch-free nanosecond transition between them all. This has never been attempted on any other railway anywhere in the world.” Uh-oh.
The software failed during a test run. Elsewhere there were faulty doors, something leaking, a problem with the auto-reverse. A mammoth amount of work went into this project but the programme reduced it to just another dull fly-on-the-wall look at things going a bit wrong behind the scenes. The peak was someone saying: “We’ve got four trains queuing up to go into Stratford.” And you hear that every day of the week on London Underground.
My Name Is Leon ★★★
The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway: Inside the Elizabeth Line ★★