Steve McQueen turns five corners of post-war London into a living archive: a cramped Notting Hill house party pulsing to Janet Kay, the Mangrove restaurant raided six times by police, a school where Black children are labelled ‘educationally sub-normal’. Each film stands alone, shot on 35 mm by Shabier Kirchner in saturated colour that makes Southall kitchens and Ladbroke Grove streets feel like memory made physical.
The casting folds newcomers beside veterans. Letitia Wright’s student leader Altheia Jones spars with Malachi Kirby’s Darcus Howe in courtrooms where wigs and accents still gate-keep justice; John Boyega walks a lonely beat as the Metropolitan Police’s first Black officer, his uniform never fitting. Archive footage bleeds into fiction so seamlessly that when Frank Crichlow’s real-life Mangrove defence team appear, you check the credits twice.
Premiering at the 2020 New York and London festivals before dropping weekly on BBC One and Amazon Prime, the cycle clocked 405 minutes yet felt like a secret theatrical release slipped onto television. A year later McQueen returned with the documentary Uprising, extending the timeline to the 1981 New Cross fire; both projects now share Criterion’s 2023 box-set, cementing the BBC’s single-season anthology as Britain’s most ambitious television event of the decade.
Production Details
BBC One / 1 Season / 5 Episodes / 2020
Created by: Steve McQueen
Showrunner(s): Rose Garnett, David Tanner, Tracey Scoffield
Writer(s): Steve McQueen, Courttia Newland, Alastair Siddons
Producer(s): Anita Overland, Michael Elliott
Cinematography: Shabier Kirchner
Music: Mica Levi
Main Cast
Letitia Wright as Altheia Jones
Shaun Parkes as Frank Crichlow
Malachi Kirby as Darcus Howe
Rochenda Sandall as Barbara Beese
Jack Lowden as Ian MacDonald
Sam Spruell as PC Pulley
Gershwyn Eustache Jnr as Eddie LeCointe Jnr
Nathaniel Martello-White as Rhodan Gordan
Richie Campbell as Rothwell Kentish
Jumayn Hunter as Godfrey Millett
Gary Beadle as Dolston Isaacs
Richard Cordery as Mr. Croft
