You in Your Small Corner

You in Your Small Corner (Play of the Week)

Brixton
1962-06-05
Sound
82m

Lloyd Reckord stars as a gifted student confronting the race and class divide in 1960s Brixton.

This rediscovered ITV Play of the Week offers a rare non-white perspective on Brixton's cultural and ethnic mix. Initially written for the stage by Jamaican-born dramatist Barry Reckord, the play stars his brother, the late Lloyd Reckord, as a gifted student confronting the race and class divide. 1960s south London life is evoked largely through studio-based scenes of a Jamaican social club and white, working-class households.

You in Your Small Corner is bold and frank in its depiction of interracial relationships; though the 1959 play Hot Summer Night can claim the first interracial kiss on broadcast television, this is altogether more explicit. It's passionate and impressively sophisticated in its exploration of the complexities of class and racial prejudice, and deserves its place in the pantheon of early black-authored British drama.

Black Lives

Portraits of public and private lives against the shifting social climate of 20th century Britain.

Black communities, like many Global majority groups, have long been ill-served by a mainstream British media accustomed to reflecting predominantly white, middle-class lives - a problem entrenched in the second half of the 20th century with the rise of television. Yet a rich tapestry of work from across the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, film and TV, made for (though not always by) black people, does exist. This selection contains many surprises – some joyous, some sobering, some heartbreaking – and highlights the often painfully slow progress in addressing negative representations and stereotypes on screen. Impassioned and sometimes violent dispatches from the front line in the fight for racial equality can be found here, but so too can records of progress: in the pioneers breaking new ground in culture, politics and sport, and in the more mundane glimpses of everyday life. And this story is not just London’s story: the selection takes a journey around Britain, to a Nigerian wedding in 1960s Cornwall, an ‘African village’ in Essex and a Caribbean restaurant opening in West Bromwich; Newcastle