It was over lunch at Liverpool’s Blackburne House that Gee Walker asked her friend Jimmy McGovern to write her boy’s story. The pair had been friends for years; brought together because of the 2005 murder of her 18-year-old son, Anthony Walker, whose life was devastatingly ended by two white men in a random, racially-motivated attack. It was a tragedy that sent shockwaves through the Merseyside community and is now the subject of McGovern’s new TV drama, Anthony, written with Walker’s blessing. “I remember thousands converging, all supporting Gee,” he recalls over a video conference call, with Walker and stars Toheeb Jimoh and Rakie Ayola. “It was a huge event, a horrendous event, but a very Scouse event.”
Not long after, the Scouse writer, known for series like Cracker, Accused, and the TV film Hillsborough, sparked a relationship with Walker. “Jimmy and I have a friendship,” Walker explains, “that when he wants to know about grief, he’ll tap on my shoulder. He was kind of like my grief therapist too.”
After 12 years of McGovern tapping Walker for guidance on how to approach grief and loss in his work, and with the 15-year anniversary of Anthony’s death approaching, she realised it was his turn to repay the favour. “I thought this would be a fitting tribute to [Anthony],” Walker says. “[Jimmy] knows the story and I didn’t have to relive it all. We get each other.”
The result of that lunchtime conversation in 2017 is an 86-minute feature-length drama that avoids painstakingly relaying the events that led to Walker’s death, and the traumatic aftermath, by instead imagining his life had he lived. It’s a heartwarming exploration of what could have been for a young man with so much promise and is the only way both McGovern and Walker felt this story could have been told.
“When I spoke to Gee about the possibility of doing Anthony,” McGovern explains. “The BBC had just done the Damilola Taylor story [2016’s Damilola, Our Loved Boy] so I couldn’t go back with anything that was close to that: the build-up to the incident, the incident itself and the aftermath. We had to think of something new.”
“A family member said to me, ‘If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to do it differently.’” Walker adds. “The story evolved because I wanted it to be about the things I’ve missed. As a mother, you’re searching for the things that he might have done but will never do.”
The film begins with Anthony aged 25, at an awards ceremony celebrating a close friend, before the reverse-narrative drifts back in time to the night of his murder, with imagined milestones of him having a child, getting married and even, most entertainingly, appearing on Pointless.
Anthony is played by newcomer Toheeb Jimoh (23). Playing a fictionalised version of Anthony, who both did and did not exist, gave him the freedom to find his way into the character. “The way people speak of his charisma, of his charm, his lust for life, his joy, his confidence, his dance moves, his cheek,” the actor says. “I could grab all of that, and with the clues that Jimmy had left me in the writing, we just pieced together this person. I got to do real-world research but I also got to be creative and just dig in.”
Rakie Ayola, who has appeared in Holby City, Black Mirror and Noughts and Crosses, was “nervous” when she was cast as Gee. She watched “a lot of Gee’s interviews beforehand” so she could not only capture her accent but also get a sense of who this person was. “Of course, all her interviews were after Anthony’s death and so I didn’t know who she was in the years before,” the actor says.
Walker was a vital resource for McGovern to write this story because, “Nobody knew Anthony more than Gee did.” But this drama couldn’t just be celebrating his memory. It had to celebrate the representation of a black, Liverpudlian family, too: a regional image that is too rarely seen. “There is something about the fact that people will hear black voices that aren’t from London,” Ayola says. “[TV is] very London centric and growing up in Cardiff, I’m particularly aware of that. It would be great if the reason that [black regional stories] have the space to be told isn’t always because they’re so tragic.”
As the conversation veers into the territory of racial representation, an elephant joins the conference call. For as much as this is a Black-led drama telling a black story, the creatives behind-the-camera telling it are white. Right now, there is an expanding conversation about black creatives, the lack of opportunities afforded to tell black stories, and the struggle for career mobility into more senior positions across the TV industry.
McGovern is aware of this deficit, praising Steve McQueen’s recent comments about the racial and class discrimination within the industry, but he’s also aware of the optics of Anthony’s all-white creative team. “A few years ago, I said, in an interview, that you’ll see lots of black faces down at the BBC but they’ll all be in the canteen working,” he offers. “I know that things are improving, but there’s still a long way to go. I accept that totally.
“In this case, I still defend my right to write this film because Gee, Anthony’s mother, asked me to write it and the producer was always going to be a white man because I’ve known him 40 years,” McGovern says, his voice cracking with emotion. “I’ve worked with him for 20, there was no way I could jettison that relationship and that’s as far as it went with me.”
A quick check of the end credits shows that of the 97 people working behind-the-scenes, only five crew members appear to be of black heritage, four of which worked in junior positions. Jimoh is quick to defend the production’s near-absence of black creatives but both he and Ayola admit working in underrepresented crews, where even a black hair and make-up artist is hard to come by, is tough.
“It sounds like a ridiculous conversation to have when you’re talking about something as important as Anthony’s story,” Ayola says. “But most of the time somebody looks at you like your hair’s a ball of wool. It’s soul-destroying.”
“I’m not really surprised when I walk into a set and there’s one other black person, or I’m the only black person, so it has to change because it gets to a point where it becomes detrimental to the work,” Jimoh adds, “There is no doubt that black stories told through the lens of a black writer or a black producer, or director, [will have] influences put into that. But on the other hand, sometimes you’re working with one of the greatest writers around and there’s a blessing in that as well.
“It’s so important that we’re having this conversation and I think it’s incredible that Anthony and his story can enable us to do it.” McGovern says he wants to see progress, wants to be part of the change, and promises to use his position of privilege to help diverse writers tell stories in the future, just as he promised Gee Walker to tell Anthony’s.
“Yes, I will do that,” he says. “I’ve learned from this, I’ve learned from the whole experience.”
Anthony airs Monday 27 July at 8:30pm on BBC One
The Anthony Walker Foundation was established by Anthony’s family following his death to promote racial harmony through education, sport and the arts in Merseyside. You can find out more here.