One of the hardest places to set a scene is modern-day Britain, and the shows that get it right do so because of carefully observed atmospheric details. In Utopia, the violence seemed more horrifying because it was laid against the New Labour neons of academy schools and motorway service stations. Top Boy’s version of London gang life felt authentic because of the small inflections: the 80s-style shopping cities; the hydroponic glare of every scene.
Been So Long (from Friday 26 October, Netflix) is a musical set in contemporary Camden, north London, with songs propping up a story about single parenthood, gentrification, knife crime and drug arrests – a kind of Annie Ket Your Gums, if you will. The big draw is Michaela Coel, who plays a mother who puts her daughter ahead of her own love life until she’s dragged on a night out and meets Raymond (Arinzé Kene), who has just been released from prison.
Coel doesn’t just carry so much as benchpress every scene she’s in. But the realness of her performance, especially her raw, gasped singing, makes everything else feel phony by comparison; particularly a plot about Gil, a crazed blade-wielding teen who seems set on killing Raymond for no reason whatsoever. I can only assume he got lost in Netflix’s algorithm and was meant to be in another show entirely.
A lot of it is filmed in Camden Town, but many scenes feel oddly generic. It opens with a song-and-dance in a market full of fabrics and fruit stalls, but there’s nowhere in 2018’s Camden that feels like that: it’s all street food and vintage boutiques. The songs, apparently “influenced by the backdrop of London’s historic music scene, from Caribbean soca … to acid house”, are so watered down they may as well be homeopathic. Even when the show tries to address the changing nature of London it feels like a fraud: the community pub that’s being closed down looks like a generic sitcom bar; and the crucial date scene, which is loudly prefaced by the line “Do you want to get some ungentrified food?”, is filmed in a famous Iranian restaurant in Peckham, on the other side of the city.
It’s strange, because Che Walker, who wrote the screenplay, has lived in Camden his whole life. He’s adapted the film from his stage musical but, perhaps in a bid to be faithful to the original, has created something unfit for screens. The story lurches through every formulaic plot point going (the sudden appearance of an absentee father at the school gates; the spurned lover being caught with another woman just as he was about to get a second chance) but gives no personality or backstory to anyone but the two leads. It’s less like a film, more like the Children in Need musical episode of a soap you’ve never seen before.
Of course, musicals don’t have to be realistic. No one gives Grease a hard time for it’s non-representative portrayal of high schools. But Been So Long is neither fantastical enough to be magical nor well-observed enough to be real. Some scenes feel so childish they could be on CBeebies; others are explicit sexual come-hithers. This inability to retain its identity means a film that tries to make Camden the star ends up belonging nowhere.
