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Having a chat on BBC London re: riots when the third wave broke out in Hackney following an allegation of a heavy-handed stop and search. Considering all that has happened since, this was a very early and naive assessment. Throw in the incessant blinking and we have a potent recipe for cringe.

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I chat with photographer Simon Wheatley, ex-Charterhouse schoolboy, about his new book Don't Call me Urban (The Voice) - Click the pic for the story

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Unfinished Business - Ray Lewis is back doing what he loves best (The Voice)

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Gift of the Gab - How black pupils are changing the face of public speaking (The Voice)

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symeonbrown:

Can a Public school boy tell the story of a council estate in London?

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Cornish attacks the block, not those who live there

An alien film set on a south London council estate was always going to cause a stir. Chuck in a white director, a ‘gang’ of black boys who mug a white victim and you've got a cocktail of controversy.

Many have leapt upon Attack the Block for its portrayal  - a portrayal some haven't even seen - of the film’s protagonists: a group of friends: (black, mixed race and one white) who rob a nurse as she heads home from work then go on to become the film’s unlikely heroes.

  Others are equally upset that a white public schoolboy was given funding for his debut film that is denied to well-respected black directors hoping to address similar themes. Joe Cornish may well be a beneficiary of this disparity, but knee-jerk criticism of his work is unfair when he has offered something that is more than a hollow caricature. He doesn't exploit their situation, he attempts to explain it.

The person who tells the story absolutely matters, but this story is not a simply a white director talking about black issues. Attack the Block is not just about race, but the ever-changing dynamic of a multicultural city, the people who live in it and how they live in it together. It is a also a damning critique of the failures of tower blocks as social housing: insular, isolated and neglected. David Simon and Ed Burns were the first to do this kind of thing with The Wire and was well-received and praised for its authentic portrayal of Baltimore.

  This story was inspired by Cornish's own experience of becoming the victim of a robbery. This story is his to tell and his whiteness does not stop him from presenting a version (note: a version) of London that I, as a news reporter in inner London, have seen: disengaged youth who use knives to win Blackberries or stake claim on a postcode, white working class families whose identities are reshaped with each wave of migration, or those who fly the flag of St George to remind themselves and the world that they are still there.

  What was interesting was the introduction of 'the dickhead'-type character     (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVmmYMwFj1I) -- the white middle class person who ventures to the estate to pick up his weed, listens to rap music at full pelt on over-sized headphones and thinks these things make him cool.

  The nurse is representative of the many out-of-towners who move to London for work and, faced with crippling rents, find themselves stuck somewhere they, quite frankly, would rather not be. She is living alone while her partner is in Ghana saving the world, oblivious to the horrors on his own doorstep. Her character, in life and film, often go ignored. When the nurse confronts her attackers, she is told she was targeted because she was an outsider.

  So, the battle lines are clearly drawn: those who live on the block versus those who do not. The block is the ultimate prize, and what a disappointing one it is.

  Unless you live on a high rise council estate or are hunting for your next high like Hooray Henry (the people who help motor the engine of the drug trade but carry none of the blame) you have no reason to go there. Most importantly, the white characters are on the estate by choice and have the power to leave when they want to. The black characters lack that agency and are powerless to their poverty. The difference between their lives is most telling when we see inside the nurse's home, cosy and well-decorated, and that of ringleader Moses (squalid, empty with a few tatty sheets on his bed). They live in the same place, but are worlds apart.

  So when aliens invade, who are the ones who feel responsible for defending it? But the clash with the aliens is not just about defence: it’s about cause and effect. They attacked the alien first, and so the other aliens come back for revenge. Sound familiar? It happens between groups of boys in London every day.

  As the inter-galactic war wages, it becomes how hostile the council estate is: floors upon floors of people living on top of each other more akin to an institution than a home; peep holes on each door – some with bars, some without; intercoms; electric locks; a confusing web of walkways and winding ramps; mass of concrete that requires maps or experience to navigate. They are fortresses of poverty and suspicion. It is a place that is built for war and, naturally, it churns out boy soldiers - but the film shows they are so much more than that.

  I am going to leave it there, because a lot of stuff has already been covered.

Here’s what other people are saying:

  The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/08/attack-block-london-teenagers-interview

Diversity specialist Tony Warner: http://www.obv.org.uk/news-blogs/attack-block-frightening-racist-onslaught#comment-7847

Symeon Brown: http://symeonbrowns.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/defend-the-bloc/

Black filmmaker: http://lovetoincite.blogspot.com/2011/05/its-not-just-block.html

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Michelle Obama: 'I like to do good things' (Click the pic for my story featured in The Voice covering the first lady's visit to Oxford)

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Lord Puttnam tells pupils: 'whatever you do, do it well' [Enfield Independent, Oct 2010] Click the pic to read the story.