Fallout (Channel 4)

Given the number of teenagers being knifed and murdered on our streets, Channel 4’s drama about the death of a teenager in a black-on-black stabbing attack was inevitably going to have a depressing timeliness. The killing of the teenager Ben Kinsella in North London last weekend made it especially piercing. But Fallout, despite worthy intentions, was strangely lacking in impact. You kept waiting for a skein of intrigue or a character who felt real rather than a character with a message. But it just didn’t go anywhere, or show any profound “fallout”.

Lennie James played Joe, a black policeman who was sequestered to investigate the death of a young teenager, Kwame, the investigation centring on the same run-down estate from which Joe had escaped years earlier.

The teenage suspects were known to police from the beginning: could Joe break the wall of silence to secure a conviction? A lot of predictable boxes were ticked: the white policemen Joe was working with were uniformly racist. They saw him as a “poster boy”. Some might say this was based in truth, but if racist attitudes are as entrenched in the police as Roy Williams’s drama suggested, would they be expressed so openly during an investigation like this (references to “your people” and the like)? Would such openly racist detectives be placed on such a race-sensitive investigation? Really?

Joe himself was equally implausible. His behaviour, manner and logic skittered this way and that. He seemed as much at ease joshing with the black suspects (to gain their trust supposedly) as he was castigating them for their wasted lives and limited aspirations. His anger at the cycle of violence and hopelessness around him was palpable – the saving grace of the drama was that James gave such a powerful performance vocalising it – but it was undermined by inexplicable shifts in tone and deed, particularly in his relationship with one of the teenagers, Shanice (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).

The first time I thought Joe was sexually sizing up Shanice I dismissed the thought because his decency shone like a beacon. But Joe’s glances became more lingering, his leering more obvious. Shanice tried to kiss him but he drew away, apparently disgusted at this turn of events – he was just desperate for her to escape the estate. The brilliant performances of Mbatha-Raw, alongside Bunmi Mojekwu as Ronnie, her friend who partially witnessed Kwame’s murder, make them young actresses to watch.

Joe’s uneven characterisation was baffling rather than believable. He was apparently cool under fire, so would his frustration at the murderous gang lead him to get Ronnie to make a false statement, which would undermine the case? Would he really brutally attack Emile (Charles Mneme), the boy who had murdered Kwame?

The motivations for Joe’s attack on Emile seemed to be a burning sense of injustice, not about Kwame’s murder but his own past and his anger that the likes of the reprobates had dragged him down again. Their malign presence was why he had escaped the estate. Now they had killed Kwame and destroyed him again. But in such a short drama, we weren’t told why Joe was determined to expunge this past. He oscillated between professional detective and avenging angel, giving a young boy a fierce lecture after he stole a magazine from a newsagent. Another audience-pleasing moment came when he chucked a maddeningly noisy mobile out of a bus window. Learn respect and respect others was the simple and – let’s be honest – inadequate message.

Fallout didn’t fulfil its dramatic or political potential. The black kids’ patois was authentic but the story didn’t progress or the characters surprise. Kwame was a brainy good boy with a God-fearing mother. The boys who killed him were no-hopers. Shanice was a good girl who revealed her own part in Kwame’s murder: the gang murdered him because they thought he was after Shanice who was going out with Emile. The truth, she told Kwame’s mother, was that she had fancied Kwame and he had turned her down.

Williams intended a big drama with a big message, but the canvas and characters remained too small, the focus blurred between Joe’s inner conflict and Kwame’s death and its consequences. Fallout ended with no sense of justice being served (although Kwame’s mother forgave Shanice). The cycle of violence continued. The murderers sauntered free. This depressing end was sadly (and bravely) true to life, but we had hopscotched over a patchwork of righteous anger and rackety plotting to get there. Fallout didn’t interrogate what breeds knife crime – its lack of clarity marked a missed opportunity in a sad week.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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