Hiding in the Front Room

The front room was the prime signifier of achievement for the pioneering West Indian migrants to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, now known as the Windrush generation. A version of the Victorian parlor, the pristine front room was emblematic of the quest for respectability, with a settee whose protective transparent plastic covering was never shed, crocheted doilies adorning every item of furniture, and a glass, gold-trimmed drinks cabinet in the shape of a ship’s bow.

The dapper seventy-four-year-old Barrington Jedidiah Walker (Lennie James) is the embodiment of the spirit of the West Indian front room in Mr Loverman, the BBC TV series adapted from Bernardine Evaristo’s novel of the same name. He is rarely seen without a fedora and often wears a starched shirt with tie and clip; the most important word in his lexicon is “respect.” Barrington and the Walker family’s code is of bella figura and informs how they present themselves to the world. With its gorgeous palette of Caribbean pastel pinks, purples, browns, yellows, and blues, the design of the series, right down to the retro pineapple ice bucket, is in lockstep with their self-presentation.

Barrington and his wife, Carmel (Sharon D. Clarke), eked out a humble existence back in Antigua, but the couple have prospered in the UK, largely because Barrington shrewdly bought, sold, and rented out properties over several decades. He drives an expensive Daimler and has sufficient disposable income to pay the private school fees for his entitled grandson Daniel.

Played with an endearingly nerdy, wanting-to-be-cool guilelessness by Tahj Miles, Daniel is waiting to hear if he has been admitted to study at Oxford or Harvard. His chances might improve if he didn’t waste time writing gangsta, homophobic drill lyrics for his white middle-class schoolmates, who mistakenly equate his blackness with working-class bona fides. However, Daniel is savvy enough to resist sharing details of his pastime with his single mother, Donna (Sharlene Whyte), and his grandparents, who take vicarious pleasure in the prospect of his elevation to the top tier of tertiary education. All members of this migrant family seem to have signed up for the project of betterment, and the series explores the burden and the emotional cost of self-sacrifice.

Barrington’s focus on his grandson’s social mobility has to compete with his own self-indulgent attitude toward whiskey and overproof rum. Not inclined to wait until the sun has crossed the meridian, he is ever ready to pour himself a small one—actually, let’s make that a double. “Never gone a day without the sweet sauce blessing my lips,” he confesses. Barrington is a functioning alcoholic whose addiction, mostly considered part of his wry charm by his friends, is not so easily dismissed as the series progresses.

Over five decades of marriage, relations between Barrington and Carmel have soured. In tone and language the script tacks closely to Evaristo’s satirical novel to represent their combative alliance. Barrington adopts a weary, placatory otherworldliness, while Carmel is anything but reticent in her disapproval of her husband’s many apparent shortcomings, including the clandestine affairs she imagines he is having with women she calls his “trampy cows.” But it’s Barrington (not Carmel) who is given a disparaging internal monologue, which is heard only by the TV audience and is in opposition to what he says or does. He muses to himself, on returning home late at night: “Into the lion’s den.”

Clarke’s formidable intensity radiates heat through the screen; she excels as the wronged wife on a permanent edge of rage. She is always ramrod straight and battle-ready in word. As described by Evaristo, Carmel has a sharp tongue, the “bite of a saltwater crocodile,” and is not averse to delivering a “bone-crushing ba-daow” across her husband’s chops when he deserves it.

Of late, though, the unspoken détente between the couple has reduced them to shadowboxing, with neither willing to land a knockout blow. The first episode opens at an inflection point as they appear to be accelerating toward a moment of truth they’ve both been avoiding. Barrington yearns increasingly for the marriage’s dissolution and to spend his remaining years not with one of the phantom trampy cows but with Morris (Ariyon Bakare), his best friend from when they were boys back in Antigua and his secret lover for the past fifty years.

With the camera up close but respectfully preserving their dignity, flashbacks show their love and lovemaking, an intimacy that dared not reveal itself in homophobic 1950s Antigua and that has continued in Britain, albeit on and off, ever since. This time Barrington swears to Morris that “the mask has to drop and the charade has to stop.” He’s prepared to follow through with their dream of a public relationship that might even involve moving to Miami and into “a bungalow with sprinklers on the lawn and a naked butler serving us our evening aperitif.”

Who is he kidding? Well, maybe in Miami. But in 2024 in the UK, the sight of two elderly black men kissing on-screen, never mind in person, would still create an electric charge of shock reminiscent of that spiked by Lieutenant Uhura and Captain Kirk’s interracial kiss on Star Trek in 1968.

Bakare, as Morris, is a subtly physical actor whose simple gestures, such as folding up a newspaper at the end of yet another fruitless conversation with Barrington, capture the years of disappointment. Mostly, though, Morris masks his exasperation with Barrington’s past failure to act on their seemingly mutual desire to move in together. Doubt remains about whether Barrington has the courage to face down the likely dismay of his family and friends over his betrayal of Carmel and, worse, the “narsiness” (sodomy) that will surely be highlighted by West Indian detractors as soon as the lovers break cover.

Barrington still holds on to the notion that it’s possible to come out discreetly, an attitude reflected in his eternal vigilance and his watchful, peacockish fastidiousness. He may be a sweetback (a dandy) with an extraordinary saga to tell, but he lacks the language and inclination to do so. James’s exceptional performance conveys the truth of Barrington’s dilemma in every scene. Most of the tension, jeopardy, and drama is held in his increasingly rheumy and sorrowful eyes; they’re working overtime, those eyes, and it’s inevitable that tears will eventually burst through the dam.

Although Mr Loverman is constantly captivating in its storytelling, the portrayal of minor characters sometimes edges toward caricature. Notably, Carmel’s churchgoing girlfriends sometimes act as ciphers for Carmel, rather than being given space to reveal their own more robust personalities. Stopping by for lunch with her after Sunday service, they make their presence forcefully known as a group of malodorous gossips, a spiteful amen corner sanctimoniously spouting verses of fire and brimstone.

Over the years they’ve been frequenting the Walker home, they surely have rehearsed their bigoted belief that homosexuality “like any disease…is best to catch it and to cut it out early.” When the women trot out such noxious assertions one day, Barrington demands that they leave. As far as Carmel is concerned, her husband’s rudeness to her friends is yet another mark against him, alongside his refusal to accompany her to Antigua to reconnect with her ailing father, from whom she has been estranged for decades.

The battle lines between Carmel and Barrington are mirrored in the tetchy relationship of their daughters, Donna and Maxine (Tamara Lawrance). The daughters’ conflict moves beyond the archetypal roles they initially appear set up to play: Maxine, the quirky one whose every transgression is apparently charming and who resists judging Barrington, and Donna, the strident, unforgiving elder sister who is a soured proxy for her enraged mother.

The sisters’ differences are accentuated by the joyously bouncy soundtrack that accompanies Maxine’s entrances and by the edgy, skittish cinematography that is more often reserved for Donna. Both effects, fresh a decade ago, have become mainstays of British TV drama and have outstayed their welcome. Even so, they don’t distract from Lawrance and Whyte’s deft portrayal of the rekindling of their sisterly love. Increasingly, despite their contrasting allegiances, they display an awkward generosity to each other, as if they were auditioning to be better versions of themselves, better sisters.

Carmel has lost sight of her own better angels. But she finds her former self coming back when she flies to her birthplace. A penitent Christian, Carmel pulls distractedly on a necklace bearing a crucifix as she makes her way to the family home. There she surrenders to the role of dutiful, if reluctant, daughter showing up to bid a final yet perfunctory farewell to the other man in her life she despises: her dying father, a philandering, wife- and child-beating brute.

She has returned hesitatingly to Antigua as a victim might to the scene of the crime, but there she undergoes a beguiling transformation. Her scowl disappears as she makes contact with the Caribbean soil; her movement becomes lighter, freer. Lowering her emotional guard, Carmel recovers her allure in an encounter with a widower, a former childhood sweetheart who is cloyingly and a little annoyingly good-natured, and who reawakens in her the idea that she is attractive. The effect is dazzling and in stark contrast to a disturbing incident playing out at the same time four thousand miles away back in her London home.

In the early hours Barrington wakes to the bewildering sound of shouting, laughter, and loud music coming from downstairs. He descends in his silk pajamas to find Daniel stoned with inebriated school friends in the family’s prized front room, which is now trashed. The carpet is soaked in beer, ornaments have been smashed, and the sound system blasts the homophobic dancehall song “Run Batty Man.” (“Batty man” and “batty boy” are Caribbean slurs for gay or effeminate men.) One of the unrepentant faux bad bwoi private school boys repeats the violent homophobic lyrics “burn batty bwoi.” Barrington screams in response: “You want to run batty man? Then come run me, ’cause I suck dick…. You want to burn cocksucker? Come burn me. I dare you!” Exhausted, his rage spent, Barrington throws them all out of his house, including his grandson.

The unconscionable desecration of the front room is a metaphor for Barrington’s own violation, one that has prompted his public I’m Spartacus–like avowal of his formerly secret life, and there’s no going back now. The confession throws him into an emotional tailspin, forcing a long-overdue reckoning with an interior life that is unfamiliar and unsettling for a man of the Windrush generation.

Growing up in the 1970s in a Caribbean community in Luton, thirty miles north of Hackney in East London, the setting for Mr Loverman, I constantly heard the refrain of parents bemused by their children’s emotional needs: “Dem have food in dem belly, roof over dem head, and shoe ’pon dem feet. What more the pickney need? Dem jus’ too damn ungrateful.” If my parents’ generation, who were Barrington’s peers, did not attend to their children’s emotional needs, neither did they attend to, or interrogate, their own emotional needs.

So what happens when what you always wanted is realized, when the abstract turns into the concrete? “I know why the caged bird beats his wing/Till its blood is red on the cruel bars,” wrote the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. But Barrington is in a cage of his own making. He’s a bird who, when the cage is opened, doesn’t quite understand the parameters and shape of his newfound freedom. He’s in need of rescue and seeks out his true love.

In the most poignant scene of the series, Morris takes Barrington to a party populated by exuberant young gay people brimming with high jinks and teasing mischief, kissing and dancing with abandon. He’s exposed to an environment in which shame about one’s sexual orientation has no currency. He fidgets and squirms, discomfited in an alien world that is boldly and overtly gay, in contrast to the life he has spent in the shadows. The sight of Barrington wrestling with this recognition while nursing a fortifying drink is almost too unbearable to watch. It’s one of the most tender moments in a British television drama that I’ve ever seen.

In 2020, Steve McQueen surprised audiences with Small Axe, his revelatory TV film series shining a light on the integration of West Indian migrants and their descendants in Britain between the 1960s and 1980s.^* Small Axe’s collection of stories, inspired in part by true events, was most successful in portraying the texture of an emerging black British culture, especially in Lovers Rock, which depicts an hour-long bacchanalian dance party. An immersive and impressionistic art film, it opened a window into a world previously unexamined in British TV. Mr Loverman goes even further. In focusing on a single family, it dives deeper than McQueen’s series and rewards viewers with a richly nuanced, taboo-breaking portrayal of black lives.

Mr Loverman, then, is a landmark in British cultural history, challenging the simplistic, prideful, virtue-signaling portrayal of the Caribbean presence in Britain. In recent years, in response to Britain’s shameful betrayal of the Windrush generation, the commissioning of cultural programs and artworks for public spaces has increasingly promoted the heroic but mythic foundation story of the arrival of West Indians on the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948.

Before leaving their islands in the 1950s and 1960s, Antiguans, Trinidadians, and Jamaicans considered themselves individual islanders; they didn’t know one another. Experiencing Britain’s hostile environment forced them into comradeship; they became West Indians in Britain. We will not witness their like again. Barrington Jedidiah Walker is representative of the many Windrush pioneers whose stories were underreported, and Mr Loverman, like a jewel discovered in the attic on Antiques Roadshow, reveals what we’ve missed these past decades. Like the West Indian front room, Barrington was on display, but he was hidden.

The front room was a response to migrants’ need to settle, to no longer exist in a temporary and uncertain state, holding on to the romance of return to their Caribbean homelands. It was an affirmation of arrival, of saying “we reach,” we’re a success. But the front room was also a propagandistic fiction, promoting an illusion of happiness achieved through objects. Too often, despite all the noise and color, those rooms felt like mausoleums, dead spaces, rather than spaces where you actually, fully lived.

Mr Loverman bravely drops the charade. It scrapes beneath the artifice of the pristine West Indian front rooms and opens up the suitcases containing the secrets and lies that Barrington’s generation stored on top of their wardrobes. It explores submerged emotional lives and relationships, especially through the extraordinary and intelligent performance of Lennie James. His candid, artful portrayal exposes Barrington, but he is not naked; he is nude.