The first black British playwright to be commissioned to write a television drama series in the UK is to be honoured with a blue plaque at his former London home.
Michael Abbensetts, who was born in Guyana in 1938 and settled in Britain in 1963, was one of the first black playwrights and screenwriters to give black British actors a voice on British TV in a series that represented the lived experiences of black people in the UK.
In 1973, he debuted with his first theatre production, Sweet Talk, starring Don Warrington and Mona Hammond. In 1977, the BBC aired Abbensetts’s Black Christmas, which has been described by TV historian Stephen Bourne as “one of the best television dramas of the 1970s”.
Abbensetts became the first black British playwright to be commissioned to write a television drama series with the BBC’s groundbreaking Empire Road. The series, which was described as the “black Coronation Street, was set in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. It ran for two series, the second of which having an all-black production unit.
A commemorative blue plaque will be unveiled on Saturday 29 July at Abbensetts’s former home in Buckley Road, Kilburn, north-west London, where he lived for 16 years.
Craig Riley, Abbensetts’s nephew, said the Black Lives Matter movement had driven him to commemorate his uncle in some way.
“For me, the journey began that day when everyone on social media was posting black squares, and I just sat there thinking I’ve got to do something, I can’t just post a black square,” he said. “Then it came to me that in the end of the 1970s, my uncle had been given this opportunity to write a drama for the BBC for primetime and it showed the lives of characters in black, Indian and south-east Asian communities that was very raw and honest.”
Riley and others in Abbensetts’s family reached out to writer and activist Michelle Yaa Asantewa, who was doing an online talk on the playwright’s work. “At that moment, me and Michelle got talking and she spoke about a blue plaque,” Riley said.
Abbensetts continued to write for television and theatre, and in 1990 bought the property in Kilburn, where he wrote the series Little Napoleons for Channel 4. His work ushered in a new age for black British artists, with Lenny Henry naming Abbensetts as a leading pioneer in black British television while accepting a lifetime achievement award at the 2015 Mobo awards.
Riley pointed to what historian David Olusoga describes as a national amnesia when it comes to black British history. “There’s massive bits missing here and they’re not even missing accidentally – there’s chunks of black history and black British history that are completely missing. So part of that effort is to fill it back in again.”
“My uncle was very interested in drama, in characters, and in essentially the human condition,” Riley added. “He never had a begrudging tone about the fact that he was a black writer, he was always more concerned about writing generally, about characters being right.”
Riley has a specific memory of Abbensetts feeling frustrated by a black character in EastEnders. “He was just like, he just can’t believe in this character. And then he was really worried about the actor, really worried that he was going to pick up more roles like this and then disappear into oblivion.”
Justine Mutch, Abbensetts’s daughter, said: “My dad would be so very proud to have his achievements and legacy marked in such a permanent and special way.”
Jak Beula, the CEO of the Nubian Jak Community Trust, who helped organise the blue plaque, said: “When it comes to black writers in Britain, Michael Abbensetts is like John the Baptist. He was the first to give black Britons a voice on TV. His work heralded in a new age of African and Caribbean acting talent which has gone on to change the world of TV and theatre.”
Asantewa said: “Michael Abbensetts wrote about people he knew. He rebranded the image of black people in British theatre and television to give a more meaningful representation of their experiences: their strengths, weaknesses, love, joy and pain, which make us all human.”
