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Steve McQueen's Mangrove (the first in five films the 1999 Turner Prize winning artist and 12 Years a Slave, Hunger, and Shame director has made for his Small Axe series, showing Sunday nights on BBC1 and iPlayer) aims, like the other films in the series, to tell the story of the British black experience and not only is it accurate, realistic, brilliantly filmed and acted and played out against recognisable locations for anyone growing up in the sixties and seventies, it pulls no punches when it comes to showing what life was like for black people in a country that had then, and still has now, a very big issue with race.
Notting Hill 1968 looks like a building site and, with the Westway being constructed at the time - cannily included by the team behind Mangrove, much of it was. The hills of concrete rubble and playgrounds that wouldn't pass even the most cursory health and safety inspections foreground walls covered in graffiti reading 'EAT THE RICH', 'WOGS OUT', and 'POWELL FOR P.M.' - a reminder of a time when racism in politics was even more overt and mainstream than it is now.
A refuge, or safe haven, in this unwelcoming environment comes in the form of Frank Crichlow's Mangrove soul food restaurant where the local black population meet to socialise, eat goat and mutton curry and crab and dumpling, and try to forget about the troubles of daily life - if only the police would let them.
When the nakedly and unashamedly racist local police aren't smashing up Crichlow's (an excellent Shaun Parkes) restaurant and business they're wilfully smashing up his home. Sam Spruell plays Police Constable Frank Pulley as an uneducated, violent, vindictive liar and bully, a small man whose uniform and his sense of being in a gang, an entitled gang, gives him a sense of power in a world he's too small to understand or engage in.
He's the most obvious villain of the piece but he's an unwitting pawn in a much bigger game. That of the rich white male establishment and its desire to not cede an inch of power to anyone who doesn't look like them, talk like them, or, most importantly, think like them. The vintage shots of London look amazing and the retro cars and pub facades cannot but help evoke a grim, slightly unrealistic, nostalgia for a time that was never that great anyway.
A time when, it seems, everybody smoked all the time and a time when crude racial epithets were bandied about as casually as police beatings. A time we really shouldn't be aiming to go back to. A time that was difficult for a lot of people but a time that was particularly difficult if you were living as a black person in Britain.
Uplift from being treated as a second class citizen in one's own country comes not just with the food of the Mangrove but the steel pan and reggae music imported from the Caribbean (Toots and the Maytals and Harry J Allstars feature on an excellent soundtrack along with homegrown British ska band Symarip and American country singer Jim Reeves) and a possible route out of constantly being crushed under the heavily booted foot of the British establishment comes when two of the members of the 'Mangrove Nine' (those who were arrested while protesting police harassment of the restaurant) decide to represent themselves at the Old Bailey.
They have their day, or nearly three months, in court. Darcus Howe (yes, that one - played by Malachi Kirby and first seen reading The Black Jacobins, about the Haitian revolution, by Trinidadian historian C.L.R.James much to the annoyance of his partner Barbara (Rochenda Sandall) who wishes he'd do some housework) and Altheia Jones-LeCointe (Letitia Wright), inspired by the tactics of Civil Rights activists and Black Panthers in the US and spurned on by the approach of maverick Scottish advocate Ian MacDonald (Jack Lowden) slowly, yet surgically, peel off the skin of a fabricated case to reveal the beating heart of a wholly exclusionary establishment of white privilege but will that be enough? Will their 'day' in court, ultimately, be a victorious one?
That's one for the history books but what McQueen does with his second act, essentially a good old fashioned court room drama that starts off somewhat dry but soon starts to wet my eyes, is show how interconnected and impervious various pillars of the establishment are but also how with constant, and measured, probing they can be tested thoroughly and proved to be unfit for purpose.
The court case leads to heated debates among defendants, family members, friends, and associates about self-representation and in a way - and future episodes will prove me either right or wrong about this - I think that's what McQueen is trying to do, or - more correctly - doing, with his Small Axe extended portmanteau of films.
As with many others in recent years, and following this summer's Black Lives Matter protests - now supported by the national broadcaster and put on its main channel, he's taking control of the narrative
and telling the story of his own people through their own lived experiences and on their own terms. When introducing Mangrove, the BBC's continuity announcer spoke of a 'hidden history' but the history of Black Britain was only hidden if you chose not to look for it.
For Black Britons themselves, their history was not hidden so much as it was partial or misrepresented. Steve McQueen is one of a number of film makers, artists, musicians, and writers who will no longer apologise for telling that story the way they want to and by refusing to sugar that pill McQueen, and others, are making British society fairer and more inclusive for everybody that shares it. Racism comes from fear and fear comes from ignorance. With Steve McQueen's Small Axe you can be educated out of that ignorance and fear while, at the same time, being entertained by quality Sunday night drama. As if you can't tell, I'm looking forward to the next four.
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