G325 exam case study
Please watch the BBC TV drama Murdered By My Father and analyse the representation of ethnicity (for your re-take) and the representation of identity (for your A2 exam).Description from website:
"Every parent wants the best for their kids, and Shahzad is no exception. Ever since his wife died he’s been trying to keep his two kids Salma and Hassan on track. Salma is growing up quickly, and Shahzad wants to make sure she’s set up with the right guy to settle down with. It’s a promise he made his wife, and part of what he considers his duty as a dad. But what does Salma want? Unbeknown to Shahzad, she’s caught up in a whirlwind romance with charismatic charmer Imi. Salma knows Imi is not what her dad is expecting, but can she find a way to make everyone happy? A hard-hitting drama with a devastating finale, Murdered by My Father is a story about the power and the limits of love in communities where ‘honour’ means everything."
Review by Ceri Radford in The Telegraph:
"The father in question, Shahzad (Adeel Akhtar), did not start out as a monster. A widower, working hard in the building trade and raising two children alone, he had a touching bond with his teenage daughter Salma (Kiran Sonia Sawar). She teased him, he slid a gift of hair grips onto her bedside table as she slept. But he had expectations that she would honour the marriage he had planned with her late mother, linking their family to his business allies by settling down with the gormless Haroon (Salman Akhtar). Meanwhile, Salma had fallen in love with someone else: the charismatic charmer Imi (Mawaan Rizwan), who was very far from Haroon, and very far from the match her father felt he needed to be able to hold his head up in his community....Murdered by My Father, which followed in the same vein as 2014’s Bafta-winning Murdered by My Boyfriend – a drama based on a real case - could easily have strayed into stereotypes. But in the hands of the young screenwriter Vinay Patel, the story felt both nuanced and unbearably heart-breaking. His script drew on testimonies from those involved as well as input from charities expert in this area to paint a portrait of a tragic clash between tradition and individual freedom."
Kasia Delgado writes in The Radio Times: "Written by young screenwriter Vinay Patel, the drama is based on
the 12,000 cases of so-called "honour-based" violence reported in the UK
since 2010. These include abductions, beatings and an estimated 60
murders, with around 9,000 calls made to helplines. If you've always
taken for granted that you could love whoever you want, it's hard to get
your head around the idea that young women are killed for defying their
family's wishes – but this drama goes a long way to explaining the
psychology behind these murders, without in anyway justifying them. " RETAKES: By next Tuesday, please treat this extract (or another from this TV drama) as an exam piece. You must be ready to offer oral textual analysis using exam techniques (terminology, examples, explanation / analysis / argument).
Representation of Identity for G325:
The screenwriter Vinay Patel in interview with The Asian Writer:Q. As an up and coming screenwriter were you reluctant about tackling factual drama such as this, and if so, why?
I was very reluctant. In my head is a list of topics that I, as a British Asian writer, didn’t want to tackle. High on that list was a story involving an honour killing. Partly that was me feeling I didn’t want to do anything to denigrate a group of people that already come in for enough trouble and partly, more selfishly, it was not wanting to get pigeon-holed into writing “issue” drama.
However, when I started to read some of the preliminary research I started to see how there was scope to build a fully fleshed out story that wasn’t just a simple retelling of a story that would be better served as a documentary. I pitched Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge as my dramatic touchstone for the the project – the tale of a man who could stop terrible things happening if he could only move beyond his pride and insecurity. So right from the start I tried to see it in terms of the drama and not the issue as much as possible. There was a strong story to be told here.
Having said that, when you hear the real stories, frankly, it’s hard to not feel invested, like you want to be involved in anything that could stop some of those playing out again in future. It made my objections of not wanting to be seen a certain way as a writer feel very small indeed, especially since in a lot of these cases the girls involved feel scared about leaving or talking about what’s happening to them because they worry that people won’t understand what’s going on. Looking back from the end of the process, hearing that one of the charities we worked with likes the programme and wants to use it in schools was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had as a writer.
Q. What were the main challenges for you as a writer working on a story that is often sensationalized?
The main challenge was to try and get a feeling for what I thought the audience will bring into it from what they might have heard in the ether or on the front pages of the newspapers. That is both in terms of the crime as well as the people involved. To push against this, I knew we had to give the father a real humanity. He needed some unexpected angles to him. But also I wanted the daughter to not be this sweet, simple girl who is the victim of a horrific crime. I see that trope in dramas such as these a lot and whilst I can see how it feels morally right to have the victim be unequivocally nice, I was keen to avoid it. Not because I wanted to imply blame on the victim’s part but because I wanted her to feel real. Salma, for me, needed to be a little spiky with others, a little closed off – living with a lifetime of secrets just to please your parents can do that to you – even a little unlikeable at times. But I hoped this would make her more interesting, complex and ultimately relatable than the simple tabloid portrait.
After the fact, there is a whole other challenge in dealing with the idea of what you present doesn’t feel people’s perceived sensationalised narratives. As an example, the show doesn’t focus on religion, because that’s not generally a direct or meaningful factor in these crimes, but you just know there will still be people who are going to attack you for doing what, actually, the research bears out. I had to accept very early that there would be difficult responses, no matter how good a job we did.
Q. What were you keen to bring to the project so people don’t have that feeling that the issues are being misrepresented or not explored in a way they should be?
I think if you’re going to tackle this subject, you have both a factual and dramatic responsibility. By the latter I mean you have to give every character – even the ones you don’t like and who might even seem quite monstrous – a shot at being a complex, understandable human being. In that way, if there is to be judgement to be made, it is of that character. By fighting hard against stereotype, the hope is that you avoid homogenising a crime and ascribing it to an entire group of people, the vast majority of whom would be horrified by it.
With the former, it was about working with the right people to make sure you don’t misrepresent the issue or the people involved. There are of course different iterations of the same crime, so this wasn’t necessarily about replicating an exact chain of events as making sure the emotions and the pressures felt accurate. We worked with a couple of charities – mainly IKRWO but also Karma Nirvana – both in the research phase and afterwards once the script was written to make sure we were accurate as possible.
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