Michael Abbensetts Quotes

British playwright and screenwriter

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Michael John Abbensetts (8 June 1938 – 24 November 2016) was a Guyana-born British writer who settled in England in the 1960s. He was the first black British playwright commissioned to write a television drama series, Empire Road, which the BBC broadcast in 1978 to 1979.

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Alternative Names: Michael John Abbensetts

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We were filming Black Christmas [...] and I went to see a friend and it struck me that the atmosphere in Birmingham was very different from London. It was more relaxed and black people seemed to have more time for other black people and it was easier to see what their problems were. The rent, work and all that kind of thing. And you could hear all the black kids and the Asian kids talking in this brummie accwnt. That was strange, I thought I had to write about it.
I talked it over with the producer and the series started there. It's supposed to be funny but something peculiar happened ... [A]s I wrote it, the situation got darker and darker.
In Empire Road I start off with one character who's supposed to be comical and by the fourth episode I've got him turning round and saying—I've been laughed at all my life—by the next episode the situation is enough to make you weep. I can't write about black people just as funny characters, because that seems like an insult to lives we lead in Britain.

How many years have we got to live in this country before they stop calling us immigrants?

White people are not aware of the many differences within the black community [...] There differences of class, of generation. You can tell immediately when you go into a Guyanan home like that of the petit-bourgeois character that Norman Beaton plays, compared with the garish colours of the Jamaican ones—which I found are toned down in the Jamaicans of London.

[T]he best Black playwright to emerge from his generation.

Much of Abbensetts drama has focused on issues of race and power, but he has always been reluctant to be seen as restricted to issue–based drama. His dialogue is concerned with the development and growth of character, and he is fundamentally aware of the methods and contexts for his actors.

[On Empire Road] The television series was unique not only because it was the first soap operas to be conceived and written by a black writer for a black cast but also because it was specifically about the British–Caribbean experience.