EXCLUSIVE: Aysha Rafaele, the quadruple-BAFTA winning creative behind a string of hit British factual drama, has bemoaned a lack of improvement in on-screen portrayal of Black and Asian people since the BBC’s Murdered by my Father broke the mold a decade ago.
Rafaele has written, directed and produced Channel 4’s Vengeance: Murder on the Heath, about the notorious “Honeytrap Murder” of Gagandip Singh, which she says will tell a new story about Britain’s Sikh community. She says she expected richer diversity gains by now after Adeel Akhtar became the first non-white actor to win a Best Actor BAFTA for her hit drama Murdered by my Father in 2017.
In Murdered by my Father, Akhtar played a complex British Asian character, but Rafaele said “since then, f**k all has materialized on screen.” “And to put it bluntly I’ve spent years developing ideas that could be in that space,” she added. “It’s just very hard to make those projects happen.”
She said there has been progress in terms of casting diversity in recent years but “Asian girls are still often shown as passive” and Asian boys are portrayed as “goody two-shoes,” while “a lot of the time when you get Black and Brown actors in shows they are effectively just living middle-class white lives.”
“So the most simple motivator for me wanting to tell a story like [Vengeance] is that I don’t see enough real stories about the community I come from,” she added. “Painfully, that still remains the case.”
Adeel Akhtar winning a BAFTA for ‘Murdered by my Father’. Guy Levy/BAFTA via Getty
Starring Industry actor Asim Chaudhry and Laila Rouass, Vengeance tells the story of Singh, a Sikh TV executive who was accused of sexual assault by his close friend, 19-year-old student doctor Mundill Mahil. Mahil and her friend Harvinder ‘Ravi’ Shoker, along with an accomplice, Darren Peters, then hatched a plan to lure Singh to their student house. He was beaten, left unconscious and subsequently set on fire in a car, where he died.
As with many of her previous projects, Rafaele said she was motivated by feeling that each of the characters in the story were both perpetrators and victims. “There aren’t any bad guys or villains,” she added. “Everyone is more complicated. The only way to give everyone a fair hearing was to understand all of them because at the end of the day, even though everyone was convicted, I don’t believe any of these young people at the beginning of that night thought that what happened was going to happen.”
‘Adolescence’ comparisons
‘Vengeance’. Image: Channel 4
Rafaele and her creative partner Joseph Bullman have just got the nation talking with Channel 4’s Dirty Business, about the shocking water and sewage scandal, which starred David Thewlis, Jason Watkins and Posy Sterling and delivered a clear societal message. While Vengeance may appear more murky in its messaging, Rafele said there are comparisons with some of the biggest, most zeitgeist-shaping shows today.
Singh was a “young man who didn’t really know how to be around a girl that he liked,” which draws comparisons with Netflix’s Adolescence, while Mahil “didn’t feel she could go to the police when she was sexually assaulted,” a theme explored in Believe Me, Jeff Pope’s latest drama for ITV.
“We are in an age of anger, rage and violence and every day we are subjected to the worst horrors that are livestreamed to us,” said Rafaele. “So I can see why at this moment humans are really obsessed with trying to work out who we are and the darkness inside us. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a lot of this exploration going on.”
Creatives like Adolescence’s Jack Thorne and Pope have spoken at length about the difficulty of getting their brand of quintessentially British factual drama on screen in an age of ballooning budgets and intense competition. Rafele, who made her name with award-winning BBC factual dramas like Murdered by my Father, Murdered for Being Different and Killed by my Debt, has a workaround, which is to eschew broadcasters’ drama commissioning teams and pitch directly to factual. Both Dirty Business and Vengeance were greenlit by Channel 4’s unscripted teams, for example.
“We find the development process in drama just incredibly slow but factual commissioners move much quicker,” she added. “If this was done through drama commissioning you’d get a lot more money but that would also mean the different sources of money you are getting would want editorial control and input at all stages. We’re swapping creative freedom for a bit less money.”
Rafaele acknowledges she and Bullman have to operate at “lower budgets” but feels they are skilled in this realm. Vengeance’s lead cast, for example, is mostly comprised of talented up-and-comers.
The show launches on Channel 4 on Sunday night.
