TV, FILM & RADIO
Capital gains
Small Axe / BBC One, continuing from Sunday 29 November, and BBC iPlayer, streaming now
In the late 1960s, the Mangrove restaurant, located in Notting Hill, was a meeting place for black British activists. It was also an eatery that was repeatedly raided, which in 1970 led to a demonstration against police harassment.
In the wake of the protest, as the first offering in director Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology series chronicles, came a trial where the so-called ‘Mangrove Nine’ faced charges including incitement to riot. But in court, things didn’t go as the authorities hoped. Most notably, the judge, Edward Clarke, talked of “racial hatred on both sides”. Whatever the truth or otherwise of Clarke’s assertion, this was the first-ever judicial acknowledgment of racism within the Metropolitan Police.
