Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling about the implausible and anachronistic diversity casting. Mangrove was the West Indian-owned restaurant in Notting Hill which, in 1970, became the subject for a landmark Old Bailey trial involving nine of its habitués on trumped-up charges of riot and affray.
Though it gets much better once we’re actually in court, the first hour’s build-up is awfully slow. I fear writer/director Steve McQueen is to blame. He has an artist’s eye for the visual side of things: the look and feel of late-1960s west London — just as the Westway overpass was being built and W10/W11 still looked more like a bombsite than London’s most bijou postcode — are well captured. I was going to say ‘lovingly’ but ‘punctiliously’ is probably a better word for a director who doesn’t seem terribly comfortable with warmth, humour or emotion.
It really is life-affirming to see a stuffy Establishment get its comeuppance at the hands of ragamuffin mavericks
Take his portrait of the Mangrove restaurant’s Trinidadian-born proprietor, Frank Crichlow.
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