As You Speak
Feature film funded by BBC Films and BFI, based on my documentary about race riots in NW Birmingham in Summer 2005, after a rumour that proprietors at a black beauty products shop, owned by Pakistani men, and in a Caribbean neighbourhood, had sexually abused a Jamaican girl illegally in the UK.
Status – pre-production.
The Best We Could Do
This is a show about love. Love in all its many and messy forms.
Love through the buoyant lens of a working-class Punjabi family in sticky heat of the Summer of ’94, of mavericks making ends meets, of mothers longing for Bollywood romance, of kids travelling lights years to navigate their immediate worlds.
When Sukhi is rushed to hospital on the evening of Lucky’s eighteenth birthday party, the cracks in the picture-perfect family façade burst open and the family’s secrets start flowing. In the face of such oozing wounds, is their love for each other truly unconditional?
TV series based on stories all 500 meters from my front door over one summer. The project has at various stages evolved with Objective Fiction, with two co-writers.
Status – 1st series outline ready.
Spiral
Tale based on the story of a Punjabi woman who marries into a British family in my hometown of Smethwick. Her grip on reality slides as the pressure she faces from her in-law family drive her to destruction.
The script was written by James Walker, a Bafta winning screenwriter. It’s a strong, complete work – and a work I have pledged to make.
Status – draft script complete, pitch stage.
The House
When a fire destroys her clinical psychology unit, Julia Rylance, a charismatic but repressed NHS psychologist is reassigned to work in a rebellious, eccentric Psychotherapy Department operating out of an old asylum building—where she confronts her grief, reconnects with her soul, and finally dares to feel again. Trapped between bureaucratic performance and human mess, she rediscovers the creativity, rage, and joy she thought she’d lost forever.
Penned by a criminal psychiatrist, Jack Hawksley, who after years of working in a hospital for the criminally insane, has been marked to share his story.
Status – Pilot Episode Ready for market
Rouse, Ye Women
In the soot-choked forges of Cradley Heath, 1910, hundreds of resilient women chainmakers walk out on strike after employers refuse to honour the new national minimum wage. The film follows their 10-week struggle, a battle of wills that pits the unity of working women against the greed of industry, culminating in a landmark victory that would echo for generations.
Status – preproduction
The Forge
Told through the eyes of a small boy, James Salter, and set in the mid-19th century nail trade in the Black Country, the work will be both a document and an indictment of evil times as he watches the struggles of his parents. His self-educated father Jack stands up to unscrupulous bosses at the nail-makers, and goes on with local preacher Allardyce to become a paid agitator and unionist. This puts him at odds with rich local businessmen and his own boss, who pursues Jack with hired mercenaries while bringing a libel case against him. What’s startling about this novel is that the people Jack looks to defend – the powerless – turn on him too, for they can’t manage knowing the truth of their meagre lives.
Status – late 19th century novel, out of copy-write
Lucky Jim
When a university classmate commits suicide internationalist middle aged lives are bought together, 20 years after a meeting at university,. The story will start at the funeral and spend most of it’s time in a country house where old scores are settled, reflections on life shared, and pathos met. Inspired by the suicide of my friend James Walker (last one, promise) and the seminal film Big Chill.
Ghosts from the past will come to life, of longing, of unrequited love.- did I marry the right person – was it you all along?, of hubris – I’ve made money, my life it great – of doubt – is this all there is? Was it worth it?
What message does his death send to us, and how can we change our lives. I think in the DNA of this story can be a truly life affirming message.
Status – outline
London Story
Inspired by one of my favourite ever films, Tokyo Story. I’ll take the format of it and apply it to a mid 90s South Asian family in the Black Country, where the farming mindsets of the Punjab meant the elders never left their towns, whereas the children of these towns, soon as they grew legs, would often escape to bigger cities. The widowed youngest lives with her elderly parents, and works as a prison officer and caretaker. The other three children live in London, and have not been seen or heard from for some time. One day the elders head into the big city, where the children argue over who’s to look after him, attached to their own daily lives. One evening, over a tense dinner, the father announces their mother has cancer and urges the children home. Once home, the children have to reconcile who they’ve become with the place they came from and all have to reckon with the transitory nature of life.
Status – story outline