London's Burning - Or One Toyshop Is (review of the Channel 4 docudrama)

'London's Burning', a docudrama on Channel 4 about the riots that sprung up in London in August, resorted to that old staple of drama – concentrating on one or two individual stories to illustrate the bigger picture.

Unfortunately, in this case it didn't. Instead, it made the whole story seem very small.

The docudrama obviously wasn't bestowed with a very big budget as the dramatised sequences only had riot scenes in a couple of streets of Clapham. Ample use was made of news footage, which again only emphasised the paucity of the dramatic scenes.

There was a good vignette of a female hairdresser exchanging glares with a woman rioter. After sneering and using the rioters' codeword 'innit' on several occasions, the female rioter encouraged her cohorts to attack the salon. The hairdresser and her partner made a daring escape on a motorbike, beating away a succession of rioters specially lined up to throw things at them.

The police didn't fare much better.

That fantastic actor, David Morrissey, played a senior police officer in Wandsworth, who had few resources on the night Clapham was attacked, apart from a deputy who took great pride in her superior knowledge of the threats being issued on Twitter. But aside from looking stretched there wasn't much for Morrissey to do. What a waste.

Apparently the police didn't co-operate in the making of the docudrama and you could understand why. According to the show, there were only seven riot trained police officers on duty in an area populated by 290,000 people.

There were other unconvincing scenes in which actors representing members of the public spoke the opinions of the people, one after another. You could almost hear the programme's makers counting up the facts they had included, ticking them off on the checklist.

There was a dramatic scene in which a toyshop was torched and a young, black guy tried to save it with a solitary fire extinguisher. All very heroic and exciting but not enough to be THE story of the riots.

It was all a little disappointing.

A drama or docudrama about the riots is screaming out for a state of the nation treatment on TV.

Although glibly characterised as a shopping trip for consumer goods hungry youths, it's surely more than that. A country that lets bankers drag the country to the brink of financial disaster, bails them out, then lets them receive bonuses for the privilege, has some serious flaws in the way it runs itself. It's not hard to imagine a group of youths getting together and saying, 'Hey lads, looks like anything goes. Let's have some of that.'

TV needs a big drama or big documentary to explore the questions we all have about how and why this happened.

Like many docudramas, 'London's Burning' wasn't a good enough documentary and it wasn't a good enough drama. The traumatic days of August deserve a more considered treatment than this.

Mark Capell has written 'Riot Murder', a novella inspired by the riots. It's available from Amazon U.K. and Amazon U.S.