It’s just after noon in Birmingham and, in the hidden depths of a city centre nightclub, a singer is about to perform at a pretend fashion show. Dry ice billows across a set bathed in blue light; catwalk models scurry back into position, while an army of extras are shushed by the camera crew. The performer, Déja J Bowens, takes a deep breath and readies herself for another take. “Action,” comes a call from behind the camera. And then, just as she opens her mouth … a fire alarm starts to wail. “Oh, don’t even,” says Bowens with a despairing laugh – as 40 people drop what they’re doing and troop off to stand in a side street.
This is the set of Champion, a landmark new BBC musical drama from award-winning author Candice Carty-Williams. It’s set within a fictionalised version of the UK’s rap and R&B scenes and is an exuberant show on a huge scale. Its four-and-a-half-month shoot has encompassed filming in the Caribbean and proven a tricky, demanding project – even when it doesn’t involve a highly-conspicuous cast in statement jewellery and teetering pink heels hanging around outside while they wait for the all-clear.
“One of our music coordinators told me that I freak them out, because I’m so calm,” says Carty-Williams, when we talk about how she is handling the pressure. “To which I was just like, ‘Well, I’m not going to die.’ Genuinely my way of living is to remind myself that that’s the worst thing that can happen. If it’s not happening, everything else can be sorted out.”
Another source of her confidence may be the creative team she has put together for Champion. A key component of the show (which is loosely based on an initial idea by Skins co-creator Bryan Elsley) is the original music that has been created by Carty-Williams and an all-star cast of collaborators.
“We’ve worked really hard – we’ve created two albums’ worth of music,” she says. “It’s like 78 music moments across the series, around 25 actual songs.” To write the songs, she enlisted grime expert Hattie Collins as a music consultant and, through her, reached out to the lauded MC Ghetts, as well as artists including Ray BLK, Shola Ama, Toddla T and Stormzy producer PRGRSHN.
From there, it was a matter of briefing the artists to create tracks that spoke to the story – which follows a building rift between acclaimed MC Bosco Champion (played by ex-Top Boy star Malcolm Kamulete) and his younger sister/former assistant, Vita (Bowens – a relative newcomer). “It was amazing to be like, ‘OK, here is a brief of a song we want Ghetts to write’. And then Ghetts would send it back and we’d be like, ‘Woah’” says Carty-Williams. “I’m in a group chat with him and Hattie … it’s like all my dreams coming true.” To be among the first to experience Champion’s suite of tracks was its own privilege – which range from soundclash bars to neo-soul ballads like Stolen (23 remix) and the Shola Ama and Toddla T cut that Bowens sings in that fashion show scene. “Every day I listened to newly recorded songs and I was like, no one else can hear this yet,” she beams.
Picking people to play the show’s characters was its own battle, however. Champion’s songs occur in real-world contexts like live performances and studio sessions, giving them an authenticity that avoids feeling theatrical. “It’s done in a natural way, as opposed to people bursting into song and jumping on the tables,” says Ray BLK, who appears in the show as Vita’s best friend Honey as well as being a songwriter. But the drama needed a cast with real, musical-theatre level chops – which is harder than you might think.
“It’s not massively easy to find actors who can sing or rap and act to a high level,” says Carty-Williams. That the show has pulled it off – with a mix of relative unknowns and familiar faces – is one of the things that makes the music portions feel both electric and authentic. Not least because the performances are anchored by some similarities between actors and the people they’re depicting.
“From the moment I read Bosco, I saw like five people in my life,” says Kamulete when we chat, “both in terms of their talent and their PTSD.” Kamulete – who despite being best known for his youthful star turn as Ra’Nell in the first two series of Top Boy – has, he says, “made music since I was about 12 years old”. And so, as well as feeling experienced enough to do justice to Ghetts’s dextrous flows, he also had the confidence to imbue Bosco’s lyrical performance with clues about his character – someone whose forceful, swaggering exterior hides a degree of buried trauma and anxiety. “Bosco’s style is raw and authentic,” he says. “In my head, [he’s] a guy who carries a lot of baggage, so music is his escape.”
For Bowens – who grew up singing in church choirs in her native south-east London and was practically fresh out of drama school when she won the part – she and Vita “had a similar journey in trying to find confidence, step out and become singers”. She notes one pivotal scene – where her character becomes an artist in her own right – as transformative for both her and the put-upon, limelight-averse woman she plays. “From that scene I had to become a totally different person – discover a whole different side of myself.”
One of Carty-Williams’s bigger aims with Champion is to ensure that thorny social issues are as prominent as the music. As the show unfolds, we see sexism and racism in the music industry, plus mental health and heavy-handed policing in Black communities. “The initial Black [cultural] movement was the Black trauma movement, right?” she says. “And then suddenly it was Black joy, and you had to be happy about everything and have beautiful natural hair. This is sitting somewhere in the middle. Like, there’s real shit that affects us, the music industry is fucking horrible and if you’re a Black woman it’s horrifying. But there’s something in between that’s not just the pain in everything or the joy in everything.”
Photograph: Aimee Spinks/BBC/New Pictures Ltd
Fundamentally, it’s an attempt to reflect life as it really is. And it feels like Carty-Williams in particular, and the show’s broader creative team more generally, have used any relative experience in this world to their advantage. After our interview, I overhear Carty-Williams asking some young women their advice on how best to word an exchange about a man’s attractiveness (One suggestion is: “‘Is he peng?’ Or: ‘What’s his look saying?’”).
One key question, naturally, is whether the storytelling will yield a second series. Bowens is bullish about a return. “I have no doubt in my mind that there’s going to be a season two,” she says. “I’ve not been told but I’m bigging us up.” Carty-Williams, who went straight from wrapping this show into filming Channel 4’s forthcoming adaptation of her bestseller Queenie, is a little more circumspect when I ask about her continued career as a TV writer. “No, no. I want to retire tomorrow,” she says, laughing – but the challenge of bringing recognisable realness to a made up musical landscape seems to have been especially fulfilling. “A lot of it has been trying to make fictional the things that I knew existed, while also making them real, if that makes sense,” she says. “It’s like a parallel universe.”
I get a last look at this parallel universe taking shape before the end of the day. With the fire alarm situation resolved, the whole cavalcade of cast and crew returns to the subterranean club set. Wearing a gold dress, Bowens gets to run through some uninterrupted takes; her voice comes through with a clear, honeyed poise despite the palpable pressure and mass of onlookers. She is a fictional pop star performing to a crowd of fellow actors. But, just as Carty-Williams hopes and wishes for this show, there is – even if just for a moment – absolutely nothing fake about it.
Champion starts on BBC One on 1 July at 9.15pm
