A gritty drama where The Wire meets Ab Fab

 
4 November 2013

Harriet Sergeant, the journalist and author, has become a champion of London’s troubled inner-city delinquents. Now she is penning a TV drama with a former street hustler whom she befriended while writing Among the Hoods: My Years with a Teenage Gang, the Orwellian portrait of urban poverty that she published last year.

Sergeant — who describes herself as a “middle-class, middle-aged white woman who writes for the Right-wing press and a Right-of-centre think tank” — first started to understand the brutal reality of life for London’s underclass four years ago, while doing research for a report on why so many black Caribbean and white working-class boys are failing. After striking up an unlikely friendship with a group of teenage boys, she eventually became passionately involved in exposing “the forces that turn potentially decent young men into misfits and criminals”.

Now Sergeant and Gamble, a 28-year- old ex-drug dealer, are hoping to bring parts of that story to life in their new drama series LDN. “It’s about where his world and my world overlap,” says Sergeant “which is crime, politics and sex. Or The Wire meets Absolutely Fabulous.”

The characters on the socially wide-ranging show will include a newly elected London Mayor, a charismatic drug dealer and a middle-aged Clapham housewife. “I said to Gamble, we’re going to have a middle-aged woman like me on the show, she has to be having a wild amount of sex. Of course, basically, Gamble sees me as a grandmother,” laughs Sergeant. “So he looked absolutely horrified.”

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