Lenny Henry and Christopher Eccleston had top billing, but you may have blinked and missed them in BBC2’s My Name Is Leon on Friday.
You can’t help but feel slightly duped – I mean, honestly, they had about four lines each and I can barely remember their roles.
Fortunately newcomer Cole Martin is absolutely captivating as nine-year-old Leon, a mixed-race boy taken into care and separated from his blond, blue-eyed baby brother Jake.
Set in 1980s Birmingham, the story, adapted from Kit de Waal’s bestselling novel, follows Leon as he is taken from his family and struggles to understand why.
There’s a vague sentiment that it’s about his quest to reunite with Jake, but that journey never really gets going. It’s more about Leon coping with the hardships he encounters.
It starts with Leon forced to look after his newborn brother while his single mother (Poppy Lee Friar) lies in bed, catatonically depressed and unable to care for them.
There’s no food, no money, and dirty nappies lie all over the floor.
When a concerned neighbour realises what’s been happening, the boys are taken into care.
Kind and tender Maureen, played by an always excellent Monica Dolan, can solve Leon’s problems with a hug and a Curly Wurly.
But with her own health problems, she can’t take care of the baby too.
Underlying racism is touched upon, although not too deeply.
What remains unsaid, but that Leon comes to understand, is that it’s easy to adopt a white baby. Less easy to adopt a black nine-year-old.
“Why did they take him away from me?” asks Leon. “Is it because he’s white and I’m not?”
Olivia Williams is almost unrecognisable as Maureen’s coarse, chain-smoking sister Sylvia, who is the first to spew racism.
Although she turns out not to be all that bad, caring for Leon when Maureen ends up in hospital.
Leon then stumbles across a local Caribbean community which takes him under its wing– there he meets Tufty (Malachi Kirby) and gets caught up in protests against racist police.
It ends with a saccharine scene of everyone enjoying a Sunday roast, talking of “planting roots”.
While the uplifting 90-minute drama does well to touch on lots of issues – racial tensions, the death of a black man in police custody, the foster care system, the meaning of family – it whips past everything too fast, glossing over them without exploration.
It would have worked better as a series.
Maybe then a certain couple of big names might have earned their star billing.
