A Blacker world under the spotlight
Being Blacker
BBC 2, 9pm
STEVE “Blacker Dread” Burnett-martin is a music producer and record shop owner in Brixton, and also an immensely popular, largerthan-life figurehead of South London’s storied Jamaican community. Molly Dineen, meanwhile, is a Bafta-winning filmmaker known for her witty, searching documentaries about British institutions old and new, including Home from the Hill, profiling retired colonial British Lieutenant-colonel Hilary Hook; The Ark, about London Zoo; portraits of Tony Blair and Geri Halliwell; and The Lie of the Land, chroncling British rural life on the eve of the fox hunting ban.
Blacker and Molly are old friends. Back in 1981, when Molly was still a student, she shot a film called Sound Business.
The work took her into British incarnations of Jamaica’s infamous Sound Systems, where she first encountered a young Blacker, who was desperate to make it on the music scene.
Thirty-four years on, Blacker asked Molly to film his beloved mother’s huge public funeral, and things rolled on from there.
Molly kept shooting and spent ample time with Blacker, his friends and family over three years, just as he was forced to shut down his famous shop on Coldharbour Lane. What emerged was Molly’s first film for 10 years. Shot in Molly’s inimitable first-person style, it is a sensitive portrait of a man at a difficult crossroads in his life.
It is in equal measures uplifting, funny, exasperating and tragic.
At the centre of the film is Blacker himself; the man whose extraordinary life has seen him experience three generations of educational inequality, racism, cultural isolation, lack of employment opportunities, crime and violence.
But Being Blacker also depicts an extraordinary sense of togetherness, community spirit, and a vibrant musical culture which has done so much to shape today’s UK music scene.
Speaking about the documentary and her old friend, Molly said: “When I reconnected with Blacker I stepped into another world. He’s a wonderful character who has lived the most incredible life and Being Blacker looks at the social and cultural issues which have forged his path.
“Blacker Dread as seen in this film could only exist in this extraordinary world where family and music are at the forefront, but racism and violence are also everyday occurrences. And if you think any of these are things of the past in London then Being Blacker will prove eye-opening to say the very least.”
The film follows the resilient street-sharp Blacker and his wide circle of family and friends through his incarceration for fraud and money laundering, his daughter’s wedding, his youngest son’s education in Jamaica, and the lingering ghosts of violence and criminality cast over his life by his other son’s murder a decade earlier.