The first thing you notice as you enter the school gates are the turrets. Huge, spiky turrets that look as if they might impale a passing bird. The grounds stretch out, endless and glistening emerald in the afternoon sun, stripes carefully mowed into the lawn for cricket. It’s the sort of place that might once have housed royalty; a church combined with a castle, all stained glass windows and stone. But it’s also the location of a brand new BBC comedy called Boarders, about five Black teens from inner-city London who receive scholarships to an elite boarding school, St Gilberts, and the hurdles and shenanigans that follow.
The show’s creator, Daniel Lawrence Taylor, didn’t pluck the idea from nowhere. A few years back, he was shown an article from 2013. Five Black boys from east London had been sent to Rugby school – a private boarding school costing about £15,000 a term – as part of their “social outreach programme”. The idea struck him as ripe for comedy. He reached out to the boys. They’d had a great time, he said. It reminded him of his time at university, when he’d moved from Lewisham to the gilded halls of Royal Holloway, University of London. But also of being a Black TV writer in a largely white industry. “When Black people are in white institutions, we deal with it in very different ways,” says Taylor. “That’s what I wanted to do with the characters. When you put them in these environments, how do they survive? Some try to assimilate. Some rebel against it. Some play it to their advantage.”
Boarders has a knowing, playful touch, lines often delivered like a sly wink to the camera. The characters – Jaheim (Josh Tedeku), Leah (Jodie Campbell), Omar (Myles Kamwendo), Femi (Aruna Jalloh), Toby (Sekou Diaby) – are constantly having to reckon with insidious racism; the kind that sits just below the surface, often not loud enough to call out. In the opening episode, Jaheim tells one of his white classmates that Stormzy is his cousin. “Really?” “Yeah, yeah, so is Skepta and Giggs.” “Ah, small world.” Later, the headteacher asks Leah to call him “master”. “I’m not gonna be calling you master,” she says, before pointing out that one of the oil paintings in the school depicts an enslaved boy. “It has already been brought to my attention; an unfortunate mistake,” he replies in crisp, awkward tones.
“It sounds so weird, but I find racism quite funny,” says Taylor now, eyes glinting. Not in a funny ha-ha way, but because British racism can be so absurd, so sneaky and ridiculous. “When you live an experience, sometimes you just have to laugh, because it’s how you move forward,” he says. “I feel like it’s the only way you can sometimes survive in Britain. When you experience a bit of racism – particularly in the industry – it’s really fun to go to a party that evening and be like: ‘Guys, the racist shit that happened today is hilarious.’ Maybe it’s a defence mechanism – but it’s how we survive it.”
He cites Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and Donald Glover’s Atlanta as shows that are very funny but also explore institutional racism in ways that hit home. “I just love seeing Black characters persevere, regardless of the ending,” he says. “When there are shows about racism and you have characters that carry it with them in a dramatic way, that’s not the stuff I like. I like it when people power through – because that’s what I feel we’re made to do, and we do it very well.”
Taylor has a fondness for plucking his characters from one place and planting them in another. In the 2017 sci-fi sitcom Timewasters – which he wrote and starred in – a south London jazz quartet find themselves stranded in the 1920s, then the 1950s, after getting into a lift in a rundown block of flats. The characters encounter blatant racism (white people screaming in the streets), whereas in Boarders, set in the present day, “the waters are much murkier”, which Taylor finds interesting. “Institutional racism is, a lot of times, not intentional, but a system has been set up, and if you’re in a position of power, why would you change it? Why would you see it? People go: ‘Well, we let you in so I don’t understand why you’re complaining!’ That’s where the clashes come in, and that’s where it makes for fun TV.”
It is odd watching a TV show being filmed in a real-life location; a curious blend of fact and fiction that lends itself well to what Taylor’s doing with Boarders (it’s a fictional comedy, with truth baked into its core). To the untrained eye, it’s very hard to tell the difference between the genuine oil paintings in the school halls and those that have been made as props (the artwork with the enslaved boy was a recreation). They’re all of white men with puffed-out chests in wigs and robes – not a Black face in sight. Meanwhile, the library – endless towers of dusty books, dramatically lit up in the colours of stained glass – couldn’t be further from the basic grey rooms of your regular inner-city state school. Class and race divides are plain for the eye to see. “Even when I came to visit … there were all these white faces on the wall, and Black people are supposed to step into it and be OK,” says Taylor.
It wasn’t a huge stretch for the cast to embody the experience of existing in majority white spaces. Tedeku (A Town Called Malice, Moonhaven, Supacell), who plays our kind but complicated protagonist Jaheim – a gifted boy torn between his tougher Lewisham mates and his more studious, thoughtful side – spent his early years in London, before being sent to a school in Hertfordshire as a preteen. “Being in mostly white-majority schools is a very different experience,” he says. “I saw that in the script and was like, that’s a story that’s very good to tell – and it needs to be told. But you’ll see that Jaheim struggles – I connected to that. Throughout the whole thing, you never know where he’s going, you never know how he adapts.”
Tedeku’s right. You often don’t know where the characters are going – whether they’ll make impulsive decisions or smart ones, react in ways they want to or ways they should. In one of the more brutal, horrifying scenes, we watch as Jaheim gets absolutely battered by a gang of smarmy rich boys, who are safe in the knowledge that they’ll remain unpunished. Later, Jaheim exacts his revenge, leaving the ringleader bawling like a baby. It’s a twistedly satisfying scene; an itch immediately scratched. But it also raises questions about how people fight against forces of oppression: is it better to stay under the radar, using the system to their advantage? Or does violence require violence when all else fails?
For Campbell (Bulletproof), who plays the smart and canny Leah, a warm character you’ll end up rooting for (in the first episode, she’s big enough to help do another Black girl’s hair, despite the girl having given her the cold shoulder), the script resonated for some of the same reasons as Tedeku. “Leah is forced to navigate a space in which she feels like an outcast being the young Black woman that she is,” she says. “This is something that isn’t new to me at all – whether that be in school, the workplace or even friendship groups. Expanding on that, I feel like the whole premise of Boarders is definitely something a lot of people can relate to – most people have felt out of place in their life.”
The idea that Boarders is relatable to anyone who’s felt out of place is something that Taylor is keen to emphasise. This is a comedy, he reminds me, not a serious study on the ripple effect of white colonialism. But the two ideas can coexist – and in Boarders, they do so effortlessly. It’s not a show only about race; it’s about teenhood, partying, romance, perseverance, growing up. It’s about trying your best despite the forces that work against you.
“Racism can be like any type of trauma that you go through. This is a show about Black trauma in white institutions – but people go through trauma related to sex or sexuality; we’ve all got our traumas,” Taylor says. “I don’t even like using the word ‘trauma’, it’s such a heavy word, isn’t it? But you also don’t want to shy away from it.”
For Taylor, Boarders is about working with what’s already there. It’s about plucking the uncomfortable elements from real experience, but doing so with a sense of fun and mischief: “I’m trying to take a step back, and put it on a piece of paper and go … ‘Do you see how absurd this is?’”
Boarders is on BBC iPlayer and BBC Three from 20 February.
• This article was amended on 12 February 2024 to explain that Taylor was shown the article about Rugby school, rather than seeking it out himself. It was also edited to clarify that a scene starring the character Leah appears in the first episode, rather than the second, as an earlier version stated.
