Ten Bob in Winter
- Westminster
- 1963
Three convicts escape from prison in British Guyana but cannot find personal freedom.
British Guyana, 1961: three convicts escape from prison but their botched plan immediately alerts the authorities to the breakout. Leader Sutlej (William Marshall) takes teenager Smallboy Dowling (Johnny Sekka) under his wing, but they soon find that pride and family ties threaten to ruin their desperate bids for freedom.
The Big Pride is a bold single drama made for ITV's challenging Drama '61 slot. The writers, Guyana-born novelist Jan Carew and Jamaican critic Sylvia Wynter, were among the leading Caribbean authors of the 1950s and 1960s. Star William Marshall would later find movie fame as William Crains' Blacula (1971).
For much of the history of British film and TV, black stories were overseen by white filmmakers. By the 1960s, black writers and directors were demanding to tell their own stories, in their own way. This collection celebrates the work of black storytellers who have enriched our understanding of the black British experience. Landmark features like Horace Ové's Pressure (1975) and Menelik Shabazz's Burning an Illusion (1981) stand beside earlier milestones in short filmmaking by Lionel Ngakane and Lloyd Reckord, and 1990s work by Isaac Julien and Julian Henriques. And you'll find hits by leading lights in new black British cinema, including Noel Clarke, Destiny Ekaragha and Debbie Tucker Green. The collection also highlights the work of Ngozi Onwurah, who became the first black British woman director to get a UK theatrical release with her extraordinary debut feature Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), a controversial dystopian fable unavailable for many years.