Nowhere Boy

It's a good job you don't have to be a Beatles fan to get what's going on in this biopic of John Lennon's early days, based on his half-sister's memoirs.

I say that because I've never got the fuss over the Beatles, and I'm not alone in that. So I dreaded a film soaked in Beatles references and trivia that was only going to make sense to the die-hard fans, whilst also angering half of them for not being loyal enough to the memory of the demi-god Lennon.

Thankfully, that's not the case. There are references to the Beatles, but they're not especially prominent. For example, a young Lennon cycles past a gate with a sign by it that identifies the fields on the other side as 'Strawberry Fields'. Okay, tick that 'early influence on the later music' box – but only if you happened to notice it because you weren't watching the cocky kid on the bike.

Instead of creating a sickening Beatles-fest, director Sam Taylor Wood focuses on a story about a boy growing up torn between his biological mother and the aunt who has raised him as her own. Yes, he's precocious, yes, he's cocky, but he's a teenage lad with the problems you could easily expect to face any lad of the early 1960s. The hint of coming greatness is left as just that – a hint.

Which is why Nowhere Boy is just as good as social commentary of the 1960s as a history of the early Beatles (back in their days as the Quarrymen, before they were allowed anywhere near the famous Cavern Club). Fun as it is to play 'spot the future Beatle' as more promising, fresh-faced lads join Lennon's band, that's not the point. It's a story about boys getting together and singing music. So absent is the Beatles music from the score – which features instead some undervalued, rousing hits of the late fifties and early sixties – that the arrival of the first of their tunes comes as a mild surprise.

Charisma seems to have been a large part of Lennon's appeal, something that Aaron Johnson has plenty of. While there's an awful lot of teen swaggering and surly scowls, Johnson captures the look and feel of a boy who knows that he's the object in a tug-of-love between two women. More, he's prepared to exploit that, playing up to it, knowing that he'll be alright because they both love him deep down. It's a slightly sickening display of ingratitude and unnecessary cruelty. Partially, it seems alright to blame that on teen angst – all teenage boys are like this a bit, right? - but there does seem a little too much of Lennon expecting some sort of concession or special treatment because of his mother's abandoning him.

Luckily he has Thomas Sangster alongside him, giving a measured, thoughtful and thoroughly endearing performance as a young Paul McCartney. In many ways, McCartney comes across as the stable, understanding heart of what would become the biggest (commercially, anyway) band the world had yet seen. He's demure and slight, but looks easily capable of shouldering his future knighthood.

There are strong performances too from Kristin Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff as Lennon's aunt and mother respectively. Hard though it is to believe that they're sisters, they both provide a striking contrast as motherly roles for Lennon. Thomas is the epitome of middle-class respectability, refined and sensible, but heart-breaking when the ice melts a little. Duff, meanwhile, the exuberantly bubbly woman who couldn't keep her son lights up the screen as a woman far younger at heart than in body.


Nowhere Boy is a film that – helped by the quiet dedication and hard work of Sangster – goes a long way to confirming my belief that McCartney was by far the nicer man, while Lennon was – as Sangster's McCartney politely puts it – just a bit of 'a dick'. But at least it tries to explain why.

Small Island on BBC One

Jamaica is a small island. Britain's not much bigger, thinking about it.

The discovery of that fact by two Jamaican immigrants of post-war Britain is the crux of this two-part BBC drama adapted from Andrea Levy's novel. What they also have to learn is something those of us that have lived here for a while could have told them from the start: Britain ain't all that great.

In their defence, Hortense and Gilbert (Naomie Harris and David Oyelowo), have come over as part of the SS Empire Windrush migration from a Jamaica that still recognises imperial Britain as the 'mother country' and have been told countless stories about how wonderful (though cold) the place is. Electric lights in every room! Visits to the King in Buckingham Palace! Yeah...

So partly we're watching the gradual demolition of dreams in the dreary London boarding house and streets of the late 40s/early 50s. Partly, we're trying to ignore the Desperate Housewives-style voice-over that trots of proverb-sounding bits of trite wisdom (stuff that's okay on DH because none of that show can be taken seriously anyway). Luckily, Harris and Oyelowo don't let it get too mawkish, and their early innocence is touching and plausible. They aren't exactly naïve, just unworldly and unprepared for the reality of a post-war 'mother country' that – as Gilbert says – doesn't know where her children live.

My church in Wolverhampton has several members who were onboard the SS Empire Windrush, and I think it's this familiarity with the cadence of the Jamaican accent that made me wince whenever one of the Jamaican accents here went off towards America or somewhere else. Shaun Parkes – a fine black British actor (better known for playing British-Ugandan characters) – carries it off well, but Oyelowo occasionally sounds like a caricature Jamaican. Harris has moments where she could be from America's east coast (which is odd because her mum's Jamaican) – were there no genuine Jamaican actors the BBC could call on?

The ingratitude and blatant racism of the locals is also marked, and sits rather uncomfortably with an audience reminded again and again that the male 'darkies' here are all men who served in the RAF against Nazi Germany and are now full British citizens like their paler associates. That doesn't seem to matter to the cockney postmen who subject Gilbert to a 'noble savage' moment on his knees.

But what's interesting is that, while Small Island lays stress on racial difference, the sexual discrimination of 40s/50s Britain (and Jamaica) is left largely untouched. It's all very well to pull on our heartstrings about the poor RAF men derided as monkeys by their new Royal Mail colleagues, but what of the wife they've left in the boarding house with no idea how to cope in this strange, cold land? It's a classic case of bullying when the disgraced Gilbert comes home to treat his wife to an angry outburst that she can't possibly understand, having not seen his day at work. Time and again, these Jamaican men complain of being oppressed or looked down upon, while treating their women in a strikingly similar way.

It's not all gloom though. Landlady Queenie (Ruth Wilson) gets to have her fun with the RAF and is an extremely progressive female figure. She sleeps with who she wants, she has economic independence, and she bosses her husband, Bernard (Benedict Cumberbatch), around threatening to throw him out in favour of her Carribean lodgers. Well, good for her. Sort of. It would be if she hadn't fallen for completely the wrong man.

Michael Roberts (Ashley Walters) – the Jamaican airman prone to copping off with married white women – doesn't do any favours for the stereotype of black men. As the father of Queenie's illegitimate child he lends some weight to white reservations about hiring black men in places that employ white women. What's worse is that the two thoroughly decent men (Bernard and Gilbert) are always left to pick up the pieces that he leaves behind. Gilbert is often mistaken for him, to his and everyone else's confusion/dismay – as Gilbert says, he's not the only black man in England, but everyone else seems to forget that. While Gilbert takes the reproachful looks on suspicion of impregnating Queenie (adultery twice over), the real father is swanning off to Canada, leaving the woman who has never really loved anyone else.

So we can learn that neither island is the idyll we may have thought it, and that you've got to work at your dreams if you want them to come about. It's not always comfortable for a white audience to hear the sorts of things said to the Jamaican people; there's a smug air of adult to child throughout, and sometimes a genuine fear of physical contact in case the black skin rubs off. But there's also the reminder that without such immigrants Britain wouldn't have made it through WWII never mind the ten years that followed.

We as a nation (a multi-ethnic nation, all of us that appreciate the freedoms won in the 1939-45 war) should be grateful to the passengers of the SS Empire Windrush and those that followed.

A Christmas Carol @ Hull Uni

Just before Christmas, Hull's Drama Department gives us yet another production of that perennial festive favourite: A Christmas Carol.


It seems to be especially common this year, with Scarborough's SJT, London's Southwark Playhouse and Birmingham's REP (among others, probably) tackling the famous tale of Scrooge and the spirits that visit him and turn him from an anti-Christmas miser into a man whole-heartedly embracing his fellow humanity at Christmas. Oh, and there's Jim Carey and that film version. Dickens is still a popular festive choice in other cases, as Bolton Octagon's Oliver Twist shows.


Scrooge's supernatural transformation never strikes me as entirely plausible, so it's a tribute to Joel Redgrave's acting that he almost makes his Scrooge believable. Only almost though – the fault lying with Dickens' ghost story, not Redgrave. What he does do is capture the physicality of the stooped, aged man who has spent his life on building his business in Victorian London. He is warned by the ghost of his old friend (though Scrooge never appears (here or in Dickens) as the sort of man to have friends) Jacob Marley – here played by Jonathan Miles with a commanding presence despite the lights not being set to hit his face. He picks up several other roles later on with aplomb and gusto, featuring as a highlight alongside Redgrave's Scrooge, both of them sensitive to the comedy in Bryan Hodgson's script (80% of which he claims is from Dickens).


For those of you who don't know, Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by three Ghosts of Christmas (the Ghost of Christmas Past, Christmas Present (snigger) and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come) who show him scenes from their respective Christmasses in an effort to remove Scrooge's virulent misanthropy and hatred of the festive season. So Dickens ticks two boxes by having a ghost story that is also heart-warming and re-affirms the joy of Christmas and human companionship. Well done, Charles.


But it's hard to know if you should blame Dickens or adaptor/director Hodgson for the fat on the bone of this Christmas offering from Hull Uni. Dickens is always a bit wordy and takes his time with plots, which undermines Hodgson's stage production. Part of me wants to blame Dickens for the occasionally slow pace and slack moments, but Hodgson must take some responsibility for not cutting and trimming his source material. Adding in a whole bunch of traditional carols adds a certain nostalgic feel to the piece, but also creates several halts in the action that really aren't needed.


It's lucky that the large ensemble cast don't let the clunky revolve and scene changes slow them down nor damp their vigour too much. Their (surprisingly modern) choreography is still dashed off with skill and enthusiasm. Also coming up well out of some dubiously staged moments are the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present (Sian Bennett and Huw Allen). Alas, Scrooge's maid is underused, played as she is by an actress (Elizabeth Perry) very much in tune with the comedy under her brief scenes – it's lucky that she gets to shine as Miles' exuberant wife Mrs Fezziwig as well.


Rather like most of Dickens' work, this is longer that it really needs to be, and the transfer to the stage hasn't done much to smooth over those imperfections. But there are some strong central performances and some of the singing is pretty good.