Small Island, Big Drama

By Olly Grant | Published: 4:45PM GMT 04 Dec 2009 on The Telegraph Online | View Original Post

Are period dramas about to become a thing of the past? A rather ominous debate is unfolding at the BBC concerning October’s Jane Austen flop, Emma. On paper, the series was dynamite; it had big names (Jonny Lee Miller, Michael Gambon), strong performances, and, of course, the Austen factor. What it didn’t get, however, was decent ratings. And this has set tongues wagging: are audiences tiring of bonnets?

The short answer is: not really. The recent successes of Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford suggest that television’s love affair with the 1800s remains in good health. But one thing has become clear: if viewers are temporarily wearying of Austen, the door is now opening for some less traditional takes on British history.

A sleet-spattered Port of Belfast provides the unlikely setting for one of the newest, and most fascinating, of the lot: BBC One’s Windrush epic Small Island. This well shot, beautifully acted two-part drama, based on Andrea Levy’s best-selling 2004 novel, is set in more recent times: the Forties. It has a plot that takes in racism, immigration and the end of Empire, and – most unusual of all – features a multiracial cast.

Five Days star David Oyelowo is one of them. “As a black actor, there are very few opportunities to be in a period drama,” he says. “We only tend to get contemporary stuff. And yet, here I am, wearing RAF clothes and trench coats and three-piece suits…” Small Island centres on two groups of black Jamaicans and white Londoners whose lives become intertwined as the West Indians emigrate to Britain. In Kingston, Hortense (Pirates of the Caribbean star Naomie Harris) dreams of a new life with her childhood crush, Michael (Hustle’s Ashley Walters), but sees her hopes dashed when he falls for a white woman.

In London, East Ender Queenie (Ruth Wilson) longs to escape her dreary sweetshop job – but ends up settling down with a bottled-up bank clerk Bernard (Benedict Cumberbatch). When war breaks out, the Jamaican men enlist and quit their “small island” for Britain, a place they have never seen, but that has accrued a mythic significance in their minds.

“The drama highlights just how dear the idea of Britain was to West Indians,” says Oyelowo, who plays mechanic Gilbert. “They called it the Mother Country. They sang the national anthem. They talked about the steelworks of Sheffield and the china firms of Stoke-on-Trent. They knew more about Britain than they did about Jamaica.”

In Britain, however, the arrivals are treated with bafflement and creeping hostility. Shops put up signs saying: “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. A race riot erupts when American GIs challenge Gilbert for standing in a whites-only queue. Racism was the other legacy of the Windrush generation, says Oyelowo, who is himself of Nigerian descent.

“My father came to this country in the Sixties and he experienced awful things: someone throwing hot tea over him, someone spitting in his face. It was really only when I got to play Henry VI in 2001 [Oyelowo was the first black actor to play a Shakespearean king at the RSC] that he felt the country was genuinely different.”

That those early immigrants stuck it out says much about the bloody-minded pluck of the wartime generation, adds Walters, an ex-member of rap group So Solid Crew more often seen in gritty modern roles. “It’s a time where you’d expect black people to retreat, maybe, from the abuse and stigma that was attached to them,” he says. “But what you find instead is that they were strong. They stuck through a lot of nasty situations to give me and my generation what we have today.”

Rummaging around 21 Nevern Street – Queenie’s home, reconstructed in an old ship-spraying hall on Belfast docks – brings home another truth about the period: how drab Britain had become. The carpets are soiled, the curtains faded, a wall has been ripped back to the wattle and daub. London’s soupy gloom plays off against the exoticism of the Jamaicans. Dull financial reasons explain why the British-based scenes came to be shot in Belfast. One intriguing aspect of the shoot, however, was that it took place a stone’s throw from where the Titanic was built. The opening scene was filmed in the Harland & Wolff Drawing Rooms, where the fated ship was sketched out.

Even more imaginative leaps were required for the Blitz sequences. “When the explosions went off,” Ruth Wilson says, “we had the first assistant director slapping the wall with his hand. We had to react as if a bomb had just landed.”

Wilson is no stranger to period dramas; she stood out in the BBC’s 2006 adaptation of Jane Eyre and, with Walters, is exceptional here. “We’ve never viewed this period from a black perspective before,” she says. “And though we’ve talked about the spirit of the country, we’ve never explored the turmoil or the divisions that erupted, either. In that way I think it’s a unique piece of television.”

It’s a different kind of turmoil, admittedly, from the travails of Emma Woodhouse. But bombs and guns aside, it is still love, death and human drama that are the forces at play in Small Island. And in those things, perhaps, it may not be so very different from Austen after all. Who knows, it may even get better ratings.