A Bird's Eye Review

Bafta Award-winning drama from the BBC.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5

This powerful and socially compelling drama by Bafta award-winning writer Abi Morgan, examines a clash of cultures and influences when an impoverished white family relocates to an exclusively Asian community in Bradford. The story is told by a young girl, Leah, played by first-time actress Holly Kenny, and concerns her eventual awakening in this new and strange environment from the dissolute and feckless shadow of her mother, Debbie (Anna Maxwell Martin, of Bleak House fame).

The contrast of a white-trash estate in Leeds to the ordered routines of Asian-dominated Bradford could not be more marked for Leah, particularly as they appear underpinned by a hub of religious faith. In this light of majority reversal (she and her two siblings are the only white children in school) she feels at first threatened. "We're Roman Catholic, we want our own assembly, otherwise it's racist." Then, as she makes friends with neighbour child Yasmin, becoming conscious of the complete lack of urban strife in their community, she warms to their ideals, eventually pursuing them as a just alternative to the moral laxity and feral nature of her own role models. There is a lot of crisp-eating and mattresses on the floors of Leah's house to buttress this justification, which makes her solace in a 'borrowed' children's version of the Koran plausible. It seems to express the missing things in her life as an ideological fairy-tale, the reality of which comes strongly to life when visiting a mosque for the first time with Yasmin.

After she begins sporting a fetching blue hijab, however, the issue becomes a main area of conflict. Debbie reacts with sudden and new-found maternal vehemence. Leah has been a surrogate mother to her siblings and neglects this duty as she spends more time in Yasmin's household. When step-father, Stevie, played by Daniel Mays, returns on the scene, the role of drug mule is passed to her young brother, Adam, admittedly in the innocence of his mother, and this, coupled with Leah's mould-breaking strive, appears a pivotal decision for Debbie in finding the strength to finally banish him, appropriately enough, with the mantra, 'I divorce thee' three times. The quickest of Muslim quickies; Reno, eat your heart out.



In summary the propagandist message is certainly overdone, the conclusion a little too neat and tidy and some of the juxtapositions tenuous (it's hard to believe that Yasmin's father would escape a brick through the window or a querying police visit for his studious harbouring of Leah). Abi Morgan's bold and instinctive writing is the Araldite of these precepts, however, preventing them from ungluing on us like so much sub-continental furniture.

There is often humour among the grit too, as Leah demonstrates early on. "199 names for the prophet Mohammed, was he fiddling his benefit too?" The cast upholds this sense of quality with brilliant and believable performances, even if Ms. Maxwell-Martin's syntactical posh does slip out on occasion.

Ultimately, the whole package is a crowd-pleaser, drawn carefully between the lines of Koran proponents and Daily Mail prophets of social decline. Where its mass appeal lies, however, is for armchair aficionados of intensely powerful drama everywhere, who may or may not care for sub-textual love notes.