TV preview: Damilola, Our Loved Boy

This feature-length BBC1 drama movingly takes the Taylors' story from the public to the private sphere

Damilola Taylor (BBC)

For all of us, Damilola Taylor will forever by 10 years old. The picture that was beamed around the world when he died nearly exactly 16 years ago shows a smiling schoolboy; bright-eyed and smart in his burgundy and navy school uniform and so hopeful, or so we tell ourselves now, armed with the terrible benefit of hindsight.

Though so familiar, his story still twists the stomach. Damilola, or “Dami”, as his friends and family called him, lost his life in a dank Peckham stairwell, stabbed with the fragments of a glass bottle, a marble rammed in his throat. His short life was extinguished for nothing by kids only a few years his senior, a gang attack gone wrong.

The story of that murder has been told many times, as have the events that led to failings that meant it took six years and three trials to convict his teenage killers. Damilola, Our Loved Boy (Monday, BBC1, 8.30pm) takes a different, gripping angle. It focusses on Dami’s family. As writer Levi David Addai has put it: “The accused have had their time in the limelight, this isn’t about them…what people need to know more about are the real heroes of this, the people that went through it.” Made with the Taylors' cooperation, the 90-minute film charts the family's move from Lagos to London in the summer of 2000 in order to get better treatment for Damilola’s older sister who suffered from a severe form of epilepsy.

It shows how Gloria – who died of a heart attack in 2008 – played by Wunmi Mosaku (Dancing on the Edge, In the Flesh) took Dami, along with older brother Tunde (Juwon Adedokun) and sister Gbemi (Juma Sharkah) to the UK. They went from living in relative comfort in the Nigerian city to bunking down on the sitting room floor of a relative’s cramped flat on a deprived south east London estate. Babou Ceesay (most recently seen in National Treasure) plays Richard Taylor, the strict patriarch whose job in the civil service meant he was in Africa at the time of the killing. Since his son’s death he has been a prominent anti violent crime campaigner and much of this stylishly shot project is from his perspective.

It is not a spoiler to say that this doesn’t show Damilola’s death in that stairwell, nor do we see much of the boys eventually convicted of his manslaughter. Instead, Ceesay and Masaku movingly portray Richard and Gloria trying to deal with their own grief while holding their broken family together in the aftermath of the tragedy.

It is also no spoiler to reveal that Dami’s story has not stopped other young people meeting the same fate. As the credits roll, you will see that since his death, 204 other teenagers have lost their lives in London to knife crime. Programmes likes this remind us that crimes like that can and will happen in the most unfair circumstances – the public faces involved may change, but the private grief of a stricken family that could be any of us, makes for powerful, important drama.

Damilola, Our Loved Boy airs on BBC1 on 7 November 8.30pm