I could have directed it better: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe reviewed

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.

Take his portrait of the Mangrove restaurant’s Trinidadian-born proprietor, Frank Crichlow. As played by Shaun Parkes, Crichlow comes across as a grouchy, introspective sort, which may well be accurate, but he’s not the kind of engaging character for whom you find yourself rooting. None of them are, in fact. Some, like the orotund Marxist Darcus Howe (Malachi Kirby), are too pompously full of themselves. Others, like Altheia Jones-LeCointe (Letitia Wright) and Barbara Beese (Rochenda Sandall), are slightly tiresome, humourless revolutionary harridans. Sure, the court victory they and fellow members of the Mangrove Nine won was sociologically and historically significant. But McQueen should have tried harder to show us and persuade us of this, rather than merely tell us. If Top Boy could make us empathise with murderous gangsters, how come McQueen can’t manage it with wronged innocents?

And where is the cultural context? We know that the Mangrove — and its predecessor, El Rio — were hubs of the 1960s counterculture, where black icons like Jimi Hendrix and Nina Simone could have rubbed shoulders with white lefties and hipsters like Vanessa Redgrave, Colin MacInnes and Richard Neville.