"Play for Today":A Hole in Babylon

The controversial Play for Today, A Hole in Babylon built powerfully on director Horace Ové's earlier Pressure (1975), in both subject matter and style. Ové continued his exploration of racism and the fight-back of the second generation of black youth, and further developed his highly experimental style of story-telling. Here, he employed a pioneering form of drama-documentary, involving multiple dramatic flashbacks interspersed with archive footage. A Hole in Babylon dramatises the botched 1975 Spaghetti House Siege in Knightsbridge. Middle-aged petty criminal Frank Davies, accompanied by two young men, Wesley Dick and Anthony Monroe, prepare to rob the restaurant. The younger men want out but Frank keeps them focused. As the three cross the point of no return, things immediately go wrong. The police are called and the siege is on. What began as a means to an end is now repackaged as a political and revolutionary act. Frank Davis assumes command of the quickly improvised Black Liberation Army. As police negotiations begin, Ové winds back in a series of flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks, to explain how we got here. He intersperses the back stories of the three characters with developments at the siege, without once losing the immediacy of the moment. First, Frank, recently released from Prison, is haunted by mental problems; Wesley, a poet, stuck in a dead-end job, is wishing for paid community work; Anthony, a middle-class medical student drop-out, is dreaming of going to Nigeria's Ibadan University to escape 'Babylon's education'.