Small Island, BBC One, review

From The Telegraph.co.uk Online | Read original post

I don’t know how people spoke in 1930s Jamaica, but I bet they didn’t say things like, ‘To what do I owe the honour, Miss Hortense?’ They did in Small Island (last Sunday, BBC One), though – all the time. So much so that even Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh would have sounded a bit yobby by comparison.

Paula Milne and Sarah Williams’s two-part adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel began in 1948 with the arrival of Miss Hortense (Naomie Harris) in postwar London; she’s come to meet her husband, Gilbert (David Oyelowo). It then flashbacked nine years to take in the story of Londoner Queenie (Ruth Wilson) who’s being courted by dull boy Bernard (Benedict Cumberbatch). Then came a two-year jump to 1941, and then another one to 1946 where the twin stories finally converge.

Now that’s a hell of a lot of hops even for a kangaroo. In the hands of bolder, more adroit scriptwriters, this might not have mattered so much. But here, whenever the time changed, it was as if a grandfather clock had just fallen downstairs. It also made it extremely hard to settle into the story.

And then there was the language. Plainly, there was a subtext involved. The Jamaicans were portrayed as being an exquisitely courtly lot, while the English were altogether rougher and nastier. So when the Jamaicans came to Britain, they were leaving behind their earthly paradise and stepping into a country beset by meanness and racism.

I suppose there may be something in this, but it does seem a little, y’know, simplistic. It also falls into that wearisomely familiar trap of showing the Brits being beastly, sticking it up some poor wretches whose only crime is to come in search of a better life. ‘Thwack!’ goes the whip as another self-admonishing lashing is delivered.

Still, it wasn’t half as simplistic as the narration, which served up large gobbets of the Bleedin’ Obvious in a homespun sort of way. ‘There are times in life when a moment can be missed and an opportunity lost,’ it announced. Yup, knew that already, thanks. Or how about: ‘The pain of lost dreams is too much for any human soul to bear.’ Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t…

What became increasingly clear was that Small Island was trying to do two different things at once. On the one hand it wanted to be a lush, Hollywood-style melodrama – to reinforce this everything had been shot in a browny-golden glow, rather as if it had been drenched in molasses – while on the other it was proudly proclaiming its relevance by sticking in knobbly chunks of socio-realism. Tonally and narratively the result was a mess.