Mr Loverman 

Fable Pictures / BBC

Review by Mendez

I’ve heard it said that Bernardine Evaristo, being a woman predominantly of English and Nigerian descent, should not have written about queer men of Caribbean heritage. For a long time, she has been a consistent, generous and vocal supporter of black and queer writers and artists. Her oeuvre is celebrated for locating her narratives in the broader stories of colonialism, gender, migration and identity. The only difference, really, between peoples whose ancestors were enslaved (she is also of Afro-Brazilian ancestry) is which territory they were deposited in, depending on which nationality of European bought or kidnapped them and inflected their languages, religions and cultures. Towards decolonisation, we all write about the qualities that define us to ourselves and in the eyes of others.

In Mr Loverman, the BBC/Fable Pictures adaptation of her 2014 novel, Barrington Jedidiah Walker (Lennie James), an Antiguan-British pensioner, is stuck somewhere in a Thatcherian Hackney hinterland, from his dapper, behatted dress sense to his sage Daimler Sovereign. As teenagers frolicking in the warm Caribbean, unable to keep their hands off each other, Barry and his playmate Morris are caught and chastised by Barry’s older brother who, wielding a cricket bat, warns them to be careful lest they destroy everything. Morris (Ariyon Bakare) moved to England and married Odette (Suzette Llewellyn), becoming a father to three sons. Barry stayed in Antigua and married Carmel (Sharon D. Clarke) before they migrated together so that, unbeknown to their wives, Barry and Morris could rekindle their love.

Now in his mid-seventies, Barry is prominent in his local community, having lived there so long. He might have bought his Dalston townhouse with his own money and survived waves of gentrification, but Carmel made it a home and it remains, in the present day, decorated in the codes of the Caribbean-British front room circa 1970. Married for half a century, their dynamic is one of open hatred. If looks could kill, Barry would be dead in the first ten minutes of episode one, and if he was still twitching, his elder daughter Donna’s cut-eye would have finished him off. It’s fun to see Sharlene Whyte in this role, angry but perpetually misdirecting it; her lack of self-awareness manifests in her Freudian courtship of her son Daniel (Tahj Miles), whom she’s grooming for Oxford.

Even though Barry and Morris seem joined at the hip, Carmel and her church girls are convinced that Barry is a philanderer. Out and about, the two men dance a metre apart and in the company of women-friends; they dap and fist-bump rather than express their love romantically. Barry is triggered by a car engine blowing near him; an acquaintance of his was shot in the head sometime in the early 1990s to avenge him cheating on his wife with a ‘battyman’ (memories of other flashpoints crack every paving stone). Odette comes home early and catches Morris and Barry having sex. Barry flees, regretfully leaving Morris to face the consequences alone. Odette resolves to separate Morris from his sons and questions whether he is infected with the ‘gay disease’. Three knocks on a pub table for “I love you” as Morris and Barry have to temporarily part speak of a lifelong code between them. ‘This is what happens when 75% of your life is in the past; each step forwards triggers a step backwards,’ Barry says. ‘All these memories haunting me, but they are also the making of me.’

The vicissitudes of parenthood are explored tenderly in the novel but, for streamlining, Carmel’s severe postnatal depression after second daughter Maxine is reduced to Barry whispering to his unborn in the womb then dandling her lovingly as a baby. In the present, Maxine (Tamara Lawrance) is an indulged daddy’s girl pleading with Barry to finance her ill-conceived fashion venture. Being his only familial ally, she is the one person Barry can be honest with; hers is a coming-of-age story that lacks the novel’s resolution. We also lose one of the most quietly resonant threads from the novel, the impregnation of a twelve-year-old by her father in a remote part of Barbuda.

Barry refuses to accompany Carmel to her despised father’s funeral in Antigua, a small place haunted by domestic violence. Odette returned home long ago and takes Carmel into her care. A misunderstanding divides Barry and Morris, and words exit Barry’s chest that cannot be unsaid. Both he and Carmel, in their isolations, realise that they have yet to process their trauma, and that the world has left them behind. Younger versions of themselves sit next to them in these lonely moments, vaguely fearful for the people they will become.

Mr Loverman is well-written and produced, beautifully acted and designed. It feels both contemporary and like a period piece, and fits perfectly as a tried-and-tested BBC limited drama series we’re accustomed to seeing. It has a fine team behind it: writer Nathaniel Price is also adapting Andrea Levy’s Small Island for film; director Hong Khaou made Lilting; Fable Pictures produced Rocks. Of course I enjoyed seeing two old black men fucking on screen with the BBC logo up in the top-left corner – I enjoyed it all – but the challenge, as ever, is to make more room on TV schedules for nuanced queer content. Coming out is only the beginning, even if it is near the end.