After their last flat was destroyed by arson, Elisha, her mother and her sister move into the W10 area of London. Within minutes Elisha has had a box of personal effects stolen out of the car and sets out to find it with whoever's help she can get. Meanwhile local rude boy Orin finds himself in possession of drugs belonging to local gangsters and trying to sell them on without getting hospitalised by the original owners.
This one-off (probably) drama was part of the ongoing rebranding of BBC3. Gone are the "magic number" blobs that so many students and twenty-thirty somethings found cool and in comes loud "youf" programming innit. W10 LDN got some faint praise in some of the papers the weekend before it was shown so I decided to watch it but found myself particularly underwhelmed by the whole thing and there seemed to be little to it that wasn't on the surface. I'm sure in some regards the dialogue, characters and setting are all very convincing but only on the level of packaging. Take away the heavy style of the delivery and let's look at the script for a while.
This doesn't take long because there is not much here. The characters do not stand out as people and even less as people within this environment. Yes they talk the words but there is nothing behind these words to convince that they are not just reading them (which of course they are). I hate to compare it to HBO's The Wire but I'm afraid once you have seen that series it is hard not to use it as a frame for many things; looking at the convincing scream of the underclass that The Wire delivers effortlessly, you can see where this all falls down. The film then quickly becomes about the two threads the search for the box and the sale of the drugs. Neither thread is interesting or engaging and just comes over as a way of dragging in as many undesirable types into the story as possible.
I'll give Clarke credit for doing something with his fame but it would have been better for him to done something smaller instead because this seems to have gotten away from him. Walters and Hassan turn up for no reason at all other than blind support. Madekwe is stunning no doubt but her performance is too "feisty" and little "reality". Likewise Henry, who is a cliché in every way that similar characters in The Wire are not. The rest of the cast follow suit all very good at spitting the dialogue but nobody able to go beyond that in any way.
Overall then this is a superficial and uninspiring British inner-city drama that screams "youf" from every pore. Happy to just paint with basic colours, Clark's script is clumsy and unsatisfying through, giving nothing more than events for the cast to work with.
