After learning about ‘Plantain conversations’ I felt inspired to rewatch the film 2006 film Kidulthood, which is akin to a hood classic in London’s MLE community. It centres on a group of diverse teenagers around the ages of sixteen and seventeen living in West London who operate at the boundary between badly behaved and participating in formal organised crime, the sort of teenager who will engage in the occasional opportunistic mugging but is still uncomfortable with murder. The characters take drugs like cocaine casually but balk at smoking heroin.
This balance makes the characters more relatable for most people who grew up in London than the other grand attempt to taxonomise London’s diverse criminal environs, Top Boy, where the children are already in at the deep end of brutal violence and drug trafficking. It is more like Kids than The Wire. For those resident in London’s hood watching the film is similar to someone from a residential suburb of Manchester watching Coronation Street, a slightly condensed and dramatic version of their own experience – for me the pleasure is both voyeuristic but also nostalgic, as this was a world which you incidentally brush up against as a teenager. On the top deck of a London bus or, if you were particularly badly behaved, meeting a pale girl your age with sick all over her clothes in a drug dealer’s flat.
Kidulthood is the only film I can think of which properly captures the inexplicably indifferent attitude that many White middle class parents had to their children’s safety by dumping them into unreformed comprehensive schools. The film opens with a middle-class white girl being violently bullied by a group of rough teenage girls who beat her face into a bloody mess.
