Disappointed with “Fallout” drama
Last Thursday, Channel 4 broadcast Fallout, a feature-length drama about a stabbing in London and its aftermath. Its star is Lennie James, who wrote an article for the Observer a couple of weeks ago in the form of a letter to young men who carry knives (brother Abu Eesa reproduced it and there are a few comments, including one from me). He played a detective named Joe who is sent back to the estate where he grew up, in the hope that he would use his knowledge of the area to try to crack the locals’ silence. However, he does not have much success.
The story begins with a teenage boy walking back from a sports session, talking on the phone to a potential girlfriend about what he’s been doing. He is waylaid in the street by a gang of local Black youths, who call him various names relating to his “white” studious nature. He manages to fight his way through them, but one of the yobs challenges another not to let him do that to him; the gang then chases him onto an estate, where they beat him up, stab him and steal his trainers, which they promptly discard in a lake. The police quickly realise who did the deed, and go in search of actual evidence, focussing on two girls who hang around the gang, one of whom is mainly concerned about getting the five-figure reward for her testimony. In the end, their tactics prove unsuccessful, and the black officer is thrown off the case and resorts to beating up the murderer in the street.
I found aspects of the drama rather unrealistic; in particular, I find it difficult to comprehend that police would resort to hanging round the gang in some sort of effort to provoke them into incriminating themselves. Clearly, the focus was on the drama rather than giving a realistic portrayal of either “street life” or policing. Neither of the two main detectives, but especially the black one, can conceal their contempt for the gang, or other local youths, or the two women. On one occasion, Joe reacts when a group of youths who are loudly playing music through a mobile phone on a bus call him a “pussy”; he seizes the phone, twists its owner’s arm, then drops the phone through the window of the moving bus. Of course, such an act – theft and assault – would result in an officer getting disciplined, but it does not in this case. Joe clearly identifies with the young lad who got stabbed, being as he is someone who grew up on a nearby estate and did well for himself and got out; he seems to resent being sent back in and the white officers regard him as a poster-boy. None of them are ever shown showing their police ID cards, or do they really only do that in The Bill?
The two girls are Shanice and Ronnie, the former a pretty, light-skinned girl who is clearly more “in” with the gang, and the latter a heavier-set, darker-skinned girl with an awkward way of speaking and of apparently lesser intelligence who is also keener on other people’s approval, both the gang’s and Shanice’s. At one point she calls Shanice a “ho” (whore) and tells her she can look after herself; Shanice only has to give her a hug for her to be won over again. When she finally tells Joe and his colleague what she saw, Joe cannot resist the temptation to correct part of her story and the white colleague provokes her by asking her why her friends call her “Troll”; when Joe’s very middle-class female superior officer goes over her statement with her, and puts it to her that she stood and watched the incident and did nothing, she panics, recanting her whole story and throwing a tantrum. The upshot is that Ronnie is thrown out and Joe is thrown off the case.
In the end, aside from Emile (the killer) getting a beating from Joe after narrowly avoiding a stabbing from his two mates, there is no real justice delivered and no real wrapping-up of the story and no real dramatic climax either. Perhaps it is just my old-fashioned tastes but I prefer a story to be wrapped up like a story, even if in real life, things often do not happen this way. I found the conduct of the police to be so awful as to be unbelievable; they broke the law in public, they showed no patience whatsoever (keep in mind that Joe was a detective sergeant, so he had had one promotion), they insulted and provoked both suspects and witnesses, and they seemed to get away with all of it. Pretty much everyone in the story is shown in the worst possible light and an awful lot of stereotypes were reinforced. I thought this programme was ludicrous and, and I don’t believe it is helpful at a time like now either.
