This year's UK riots made gritty dramas such as Kidulthood and Shank look all too real. But could these films be part of the problem, asks Live magazine's Zindzi Rocque-Drayton
It looked a little like a movie. Cars on fire. Groups of youths in hoodies, their faces covered, running from corner to corner. Shop windows being smashed, and people climbing inside to fetch trainers or TVs or designer cloths. Was it Shank? Kidulthood? Who's starring in this one?
What unfolded on the nation's TV screens between 6 and 10 August wasn't a Sky Movies season of British urban cinema, of course, but the English riots, leaving five people dead and causing an estimated �200m worth of damage to property. And even as they unfolded, there were voices linking the violence to popular culture. On Newsnight, for example, the historian David Starkey huffed and puffed: "What has happened is that the substantial section of the chavs ? have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion." Starkey did not respond to interview requests for this piece, but it's easy to imagine his disgust at seeing one of the recent British films set on an inner-city estate, with black and white characters alike taking and selling drugs, carrying and brandishing guns and knives, talking in identical accents. Maybe he would note the predominance of black characters, and instead of wondering what that said about the British film industry, he would make the assumption that this was everyday black British life.
That is certainly a concern for David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, whose constituency was where the riots began, and which was especially badly hit. "I think it is a great shame," he says, "something of a travesty that every time we see a portrait of Hackney, Tottenham or Brixton, it is a familiar limited portrait, and it perpetuates a particular imagery and context, when there are many other stories to tell."
Lammy's not the only person to have experienced inner-city life who fears the portrayal of it as a race from one drugs deal to another sends out a particular message. "The effect on our young black people can only be negative when you constantly see your community portrayed, not just in films but on TV programmes, on the news, [with] so much negativity," says Katharine Birbalsingh, who taught in inner city schools for many years. "Young people see that, and yes I do think it helps to glamourise it."
The actor Ashley Walters thinks that is missing the point. "It would be nice for the press and a lot of media people to blame the riots on the urban genre of drama or film," he says. "I guess that's the way to make someone else the scapegoat so that they don't really have to do what they have to do to change it. Things like [the Channel 4 series] Top Boy and Bullet Boy are usually made and produced and put together by people who have a message, and the message they try to get across is that something needs to be done."
That was certainly the intention of Top Boy's writer, Ronan Bennett. "Dramatists over time have tried to grapple with big important issues, and obviously one of the major issues we face right now is the economic and social deprivation that the riots exposed," he says. The questions facing writers, directors and producers now is "how we deal with that in drama, and it can't be by delivering messages, because nobody would watch that show. It has to be cleverer than that: somehow you have got to mix the art of drama with your subject, what you are trying to say about the world. Top Boy really did get people talking. It had an incredible response. I think I probably prefer to think of it as asking questions of the audience and even getting them to ask questions of themselves, how they respond to this culture."
Even when there's an outcry about an urban drama, it at least means it has got people talking about the issues raised. "The majority of people I have spoken to about Top Boy were happy about it," says Walters, one of the show's stars. "But at the same time [some] people despised it and I've had several debates and heated arguments with others who are like, 'Why can't we show black youths in a positive light?' [But] not every ending has to have a moral that suits everyone, and the reality of life is that the majority of time the good guy never wins, it is the bad guy that is on top. There are black kids that do well and don't sell drugs, but that's not what [Top Boy] was about. It was about a drug dealer's lifestyle, and we made it as authentic as possible. It may seem like it is sensational or glamourised ? people having their fingers cut off, people being shot in the head, and no value for life ? but that is a lot of people's way of life every day."
I'm a 22-year-old from London, and I love urban films. To me, they bring the rich culture and inventive dialogue of inner-city life to the big screen. They are made for young Londoners like me. We can relate to the surroundings, the characters, the themes. We understand that they are there for entertainment: it doesn't mean we are all going to copy what we see on screen. And no one worries about the consequences when entertainment aimed at white audiences portrays violence.
It's certainly a thought that has occurred to Adam Deacon, a nominee for this year's Orange Bafta rising star award, who played Jay in Kidulthood and its sequel Adulthood. "The problem we get with our genre [urban film], is that we always get put in the spotlight," he says. "We could make a hundred Lock Stock and a hundred Snatch movies, but whenever it is a film representing the young generation of today, there is a big problem."
That spotlight creates problems for those who want to make dramas about urban life. When the makers of Top Boy wanted to film in the east London borough of Hackey, they were refused permission. The mayor of Hackney, Jules Pipe, was fearful of the damage a negative portrayal of the area could have on its reputation. That seems likely to become an increasing problem in the wake of the riots: after all, what community leader hoping to regenerate an area is going to want to see the criminality of a small minority portrayed, with the risk that the wider viewing audience won't realise that isn't the everyday life of most people?
Deacon tried to break that vicious circle with his spoof of the urban genre, Anuvahood. "I knew just by talking to young people out there that they didn't want to keep seeing their life on TV or film all the time," he says. "They want to be able to escape from that world and actually be entertained. It is not all negative in these areas, and I think if we were focusing on the positive in the media a bit more then we would have different stories out there. It is just that we are bombarding people with these images all the time."
Are we likely to see a change in the way the inner cities are portrayed, now the dust is settling on the riots? It all depends on what's going to make money at the box office. "I was speaking to Adam [Deacon] the other day," Walters says, "and he was saying it is time we started making things that weren't so negative, and in my mind I was thinking, 'Fair enough, but in order for you to get Anuvahood made, the producer still made you put a gun in there and violence.' You can't get away from it, even though it was a comedy, you're still selling weed in it; you still had to have a violent scene at the end to have anyone interested in watching it in the first place. That's the reality of life.
"If you take a script to producers and financers who invest in TV shows and films, you pitch scripts to them about a boy who did really well in uni and he's black and from an estate in Peckham and he becomes a lawyer, no one is going to take that off your hands."
Deacon, though, holds out hope. "I'm all about trying to put a more positive light on the whole hoodie genre," he says. "I think the 'real street film' was needed. Not only was it made as entertainment, but I think without even realising it, it just opened up a lot of people's eyes ? David Cameron was talking about 'hug a hoodie' way back. He's not talking about that now, but it got people talking. I'm not saying it solved anything,but now, for me, I think that there are other ways to tell that story."
? Ashley Walters stars in Inside Men on BBC1 next month. Zindzi Rocque-Drayton is a writer for Live magazine.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/dec/15/portrayal-of-urban-communities
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