BBC starts Uprising with Steve McQueen

UK pubcaster BBC1 has ordered a factual series examining three significant events involving black British people in 1981, with Small Axe and 12 Years a Slave filmmaker Steve McQueen directing.

Steve McQueen
(photo: Melony McGant)

Uprising (3×60’) series examines the New Cross Fire in January 1981, which killed 13 black teenagers; the Black People’s Day of Action in March, when more than 20,000 people joined the first organised mass protest by black British people; and the Brixton riots in April.

With James Rogan (Stephen: The Murder that Changed a Nation) also directing, Uprising will reveal how these three events intertwined and how, in the process, race relations were defined for a generation.

Rogan’s prodco Rogan Productions is producing the series with Lammas Park and Turbine Studios (Small Axe). Exec producing are McQueen, Rogan, Nancy Bornat, Soleta Rogan, Tracey Scoffield, Anna Smith Tenser and David Tanner.

McQueen said: “It is an honour to make these films with testimonials from the survivors, investigators, activists and representatives of the machinery of state. We can only learn if we look at things through the eyes of everyone concerned; the New Cross Fire passed into history as a tragic footnote, but that event and its aftermath can now be seen as momentous events in our nation’s history.”

Rogan added: “The New Cross Fire that claimed the lives of so many young people and affected many more remains one of the biggest losses of life in a house fire in modern British history. What happened and how Britain responded to it is a story that has been waiting to be told in depth for 40 years.

“In the series, survivors and the key participants will give their account of the fire, the aftermath, the impact it had on the historic events of 1981 and the profound legacy it has left behind.”