Michael Abbensetts

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.

Quotes

• How many years have we got to live in this country before they stop calling us immigrants?
  • From Abbensett's play Sweet Talk, as cited in a review: "Sweet Talk at the (Royal Court) Theatre Upstairs", The Guardian (1 August 1973), p. 8

• 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.
  • Interviewed by Mike Phillips, as cited in "If it's hard for black actors in Britain, it's hard too for black playwrights", The Guardian (5 June 1978), p. 8

• 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.
  • Interviewed by Peter Fiddick for "How to handle a euphemism in black and white", The Guardian (30 October 1978), p. 10
  • The first episode of Empire Road was screened the following evening.

About Abbensetts

• [T]he best Black playwright to emerge from his generation.
• [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.
• 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.
  • Sarita Malik in Ecyclopedia of Television, Volume 1 (Abingdon, Oxon & New York City: Routledge, 2013), p. 1, also reproduced in "Abbensetts, Michael (1938-(2016))", BFI Screenonline