Queens of Chapeltown
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the violence directed at black people in Nottingham and Notting Hill in the 1950s, and the naked racism expressed in Smethwick during the 1964 general election, a group of pioneering West Indians came up with a simple and defiant riposte: Carnival.
In Queens of Chapeltown, Colin Grant goes behind the scenes of Carnival to its Leeds West Indian HQ in Chapeltown - amidst the glue guns, sequins and feathers - to capture that moment of extraordinary transformation, 50 years on: the birth of a tradition which, for one weekend in August, would wash away the bad taste of anti immigrant sentiment with a burst of colour and flash of exuberance that would forever change Britain.
Grant travels to Leeds to talk with the pioneers and celebrate the endurance and growth of Carnival.
Produced and presented by Colin Grant.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.0 | This is the BBC. It was everybody clubbing together as a little unit and family. |
| 0:49.0 | It was everybody clubbing together |
| 0:51.0 | as a little unit, and family, because we all helped each other we didn't know |
| 0:55.9 | what we were doing because none of us made costumes in Trinidad. |
| 1:00.0 | Feathers and sequins, music and dance unite the people in today's seriously story, |
| 1:06.7 | but it's so much more. |
| 1:08.8 | English people or white people went to the Caribbean and they had their events taken to the Caribbean like |
| 1:15.4 | there at a certain time we came here with the only part of our culture left is |
| 1:20.3 | carnival it's all we have left. I'm Riana Dylan and this story takes place in Leeds. |
| 1:26.0 | Colin Grant is welcomed into the homes of some of the city's West Indian community |
| 1:31.0 | as they prepare for carnival. |
| 1:34.0 | This is Queens of Chapel Town. I was living at 15 Green Javan in a bed seat. |
| 1:45.0 | I was living at 15 green javin in a bed seat. |
... |
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