White Teeth

Based on the best-selling and multi-award-winning novel by Zadie Smith, White Teeth is superbly adapted to the screen in this outstanding drama which features a compulsively watchable cast including Robert Bathurst, Phil Davis, Geraldine James, James McAvoy, Om Puri and more. Set in far from glamorous Willesden Green, London from the 1970s to the 1990s, White Teeth finds Archie Jones, interracially married to the post-Jehovah s Witness Clara, meeting up with an old colleague, Samad Iqbal who, with his family, has just arrived in England. The secrets they share from the past, and the secrets they will share in the future, are tossed and tumbled in a rich stew that bubbles with racial and sexual tension, new-found freedoms, old school politics, genetic science, animal liberation and the end of the world as we know it. It all adds up to a feast to be relished from start to finish. First broadcast on Channel 4 in 2002 and skillfully adapted by Simon Burke from the acclaimed novel by Zadie Smith, White Teeth is a colourful, decades-spanning chunk of recent history filtered through the lives of a small group of individuals. It begins with unhappy war veteran Archie Jones (Phil Davis, Bleak House, Sherlock) preparing to end his life in Willesden, London, 1974. A man whose most important decisions rest on the toss of a coin, Archie’s doleful fatalism illustrates both White Teeth’s rich seam of bleak humour and its reliance on fate and coincidence to propel the plot. The black comedy carries into the dialogue and the performances, as well as moments of absurd slapstick – watch out for Archie’s description of his first marriage, made all the funnier by Davis’ hangdog, deadpan performance. This exchange takes place during the first episode, in which he reconnects with an old army friend, Samad Iqbal (Om Puri, East is East, Charlie Wilson’s War). Samad, a blustering bon-vivant and pseudo intellectual, arrives in Willesden to fulfill an arranged marriage