On DVD and (in 2017) on BBC First - GUERRILLA (John Ridley, UK, 2017)

Here’s how it happened. 

In Lawson’s Record Store in Pitt St, now gone, a DVD of a TV series called Guerrilla. On sale for $7, marked down from $10. The one selling point was in one of three actors listed above the title. This was Idris Elba, one time Stringer Bell from The Wire  and more recently the eponymous star of Luther now into Series Five, one marked by the return of Alice Morgan, played by the silky voiced Ruth Wilson, the murderess who offed her parents in Series One and got away with it, thanks to Luther’s infatuation/love for her. But I digress….

Idris Elba plays a small role in Guerrilla  as Kent, a community figure who perceives revolutionary violence as the action of hooligans and who ultimately informs on his friends. For the part Elba has a wig and an earring. Elba also gets a credit as an “Executive Producer”, one presumes for lending his name to the project and maybe having bought a share in the series via a deferred salary. The small role is a key because it defines a very particular attitude to the righting of the wrongs done to the black community in Britain in the late-60s, early 70s.

The mover and shaker of Guerrilla  is John Ridley. He gets the first credit as “Created by”, the writer’s credit on five of the six eps and the director’s credit on four. He is the ‘showrunner’ and must be a rarity, a black man working at the highest levels of Brit TV in a production presented by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky and by the US cable network Showtime. One of the producers is Endemol Shine, a company jointly owned by Disney and a big private equity firm. Endemol started out making Big Brother but in recent years has made among many, The Fall, Peaky Blinders and  Black Mirror. Ridley’s previous work is similarly devoted to key moments in black oppression most notably in his script for Twelve Years a Slave

Guerrilla  starts off following a group of friends who are radicalised to the point of undertaking revolutionary violence against the state. The allegation is, and this is a second narrative thread, that within the Special Branch and surveillance activities there exists a group informally known as the Black Power Desk whose job it is to clamp down on radical political behaviour. The key copper (the blacks always refer to the police as ‘The Filth’) is an expat Rhodesian Pence (Rory Kinnear) trained in the very same heavy-handedness and happy to resort to violence in dealing with his task. The plain-clothes police all carry, and use, metal coshes, the uniformed police who act at the direction of the Black Power desk frequently use their batons to deal with demonstrators.  The Special Branch practices torture on those from whom it seeks information, including in one case where a member of a German revolutionary cell member has the handle of a cricket bat rammed up his anus.

After a series of run-ins with the police, a cell of four Brit blacks goes underground and prepares two pieces of revolutionary violence. The first is the simultaneous assault on four airline offices. One of these goes disastrously wrong, the police are waiting and one of the cell is killed. The second involves an elaborate plan to put a bomb inside the office of the Black Power desk, the planning and execution of which takes up the second half of the six episodes. A shame to give away the plot because it builds to a genuinely thrilling, and unexpected ending. The misleads throughout the last episode in particular are superbly created and managed.

Guerrilla  went out on BBC First, the Foxtel cable channel back in 2017. The DVD was released by Acorn Entertainment.