David Olusoga on A Thousand Blows: "This series is an example of why inclusivity is wonderful"

Olusoga himself grew up on a council estate, and says that because of his upbringing, the most important thing he can do in his own career is to "tell the stories of working class people, marginalised people".

It's something that Knight does, in Olusoga's opinion, "better than anybody else". "So, there was a chance to work with one of the greatest dramatists working anywhere in the world today, but also somebody who cares about what I care about, which is – we talk a lot about kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers. Let's talk about ordinary people," he tells me.

Coming onboard to A Thousand Blows as an executive producer is "the next step up in my work in drama", Olusoga admits. "It is to be involved with the writers, with the development of characters, but also setting those characters within historical context which is what I'm really, really interested in."

Known for countless books and documentaries – which include the BAFTA Award-winning Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, as well as Black and British: A Forgotten History and Union with David Olusoga (to name a few) – Olusoga explains that tacking the world of TV drama is something different.

"One of the other things drama can do brilliantly is it can imaginatively create lives and backstories for characters. Where I think the history is critical is the world in which we place people.

"So I was as much excited by the chance to work on the drama that really wanted Victorian London, the London of the 1880s, to be a key character. That was as exciting to me as the characters – the real characters – these lives that we were going to imaginatively recreate."

The new Disney Plus series doesn't paint the East End to be a pretty place, something Olusoga thinks is fantastic to see depicted on screen. There were a third of a million horses on the streets of London, he tells me, conjuring up images of streets covered in mud and manure. But it's that very grit that makes the series so special.

Olusoga recalls summers spent in Stratford – where I was born and raised – a part of London that also has a place close to Olusoga's own heart but has seen constant change and gentrification in recent times.

It's an area of London that is rightfully celebrated for its rich diversity but many people may not realise that the East End wasn't all that different in the Victorian era, as we see depicted in A Thousand Blows.

When we think of Victorian England, we often think of petticoats, corsets, top hats, and a typically white landed gentry. But in A Thousand Blows, the under-represented history of the East End is brought to life as the industrial city and port town it once was, Olusoga says.

"I mean, this is an incredibly divided city – London’s a divided city today. The West doesn't look like the East... it was another world," he describes.

"People from the West [of London] used to go on ventures to the East. It was almost like a tourism for gentlemen to go and see how people live, to meet the different races, the communities, the Jewish communities in the London of the 1880s.

"It was a fascination, but also something that people were very nervous about. So that world, the East End of London, the world of Wapping, Whitechapel and Limehouse – creating that in all its industrial and global kind of complexity – that's an incredibly exciting thing to do."

We see in the series how Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) comes to London with best friend Alec (Francis Lovehall) with hopes of achieving fame and fortune, inspired by the true story of the well-known boxer.

Talking to Steven Knight in a previous interview, the Peaky Blinders creator told me that he wanted to depict Hezekiah’s past in Jamaica and the Morant Bay rebellion in particular as the “explosive that blows him to London”.

In flashback scenes, we see how the Morant Bay rebellion comes to shape Hezekiah's own story, but just the inclusion of the tragic historical event in this series came as a welcome surprise, I tell Olusoga.

It's a devastating event in Caribbean history that many people outside of the culture either don't know anything about or don't reference in the media, especially TV.

In fact, Olusoga says that after speaking with a Caribbean historian, he believes that the rebellion's inclusion in A Thousand Blows is the second time it's ever been dramatised, despite being one of the critical events in the history of the British Empire.

However, he shares his sadness at reading that one reviewer has already described the scene in question as “crude anti-colonialism”.

"I think that displays quite an incredible ignorance," Olusoga says. "It's a depiction of colonial violence that impacted on people's lives. The idea that the depiction of things that affect Black people in the Caribbean is somehow a political statement rather than storytelling, I think, is incredibly dismissive."

He continues: "The Morant Bay Rebellion was one of the seismic events of the 1860s. It divided the British elite, it was a landmark in discussions about race, about empire, about colonial violence. It was a moment in which some of the violence of imperial rule was brought home to Britain.

"I think it's a moment in some ways that we should celebrate because the response of those who opposed what had happened shows that humanitarianism was alive and well in Britain 30 years after abolition."

Olusoga thinks the Morant Bay rebellion – which saw a death toll of more than 400 – is most like the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, also commonly known as the Amritsar Massacre, which took place in 1919.

"It is one of those moments when the British people have to debate and confront some of the realities of empire, and some come out in support of the violence and others powerfully oppose it and eloquently oppose it," he says.

"But we've largely forgotten Morant Bay. I think after abolition, there's very little that's ever talked about of the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery up until the independence in the 1960s. It's like this kind of missing 130 years where we don't really talk about the Caribbean."

Olusoga himself platforms the history of Morant Bay in his own documentary, Black and British: A Forgotten History, but how did it feel to bring it to life in A Thousand Blows?

"I’m incredibly proud that I’ve been a small part in a drama that has showed that, for the people of Jamaica, this was an event that lived with them and that shaped later generations.

"My friend Marvin Rees – who up until last year was the mayor of Bristol – his ancestor was hanged, as hundreds of Jamaicans were, in the violence after the Morant Bay rebellion, or the violence that was an integral part of the Morant Bay rebellion.

"I know that it affects people 160 years later, because I can see the impact it had on Marvin when he discovered that reality. So to hear it dismissed as 'crude anti-colonialism', I think it's just sad. It's depressing. I think it's one of the things I'm most proud of about the series.

"I don't think that we would be dismissing a depiction of somebody whose ancestors or somebody who is affected by the Peterloo Massacre or the famine in Ireland. I don't think we would dream of dismissing it as 'crude anti-colonialism'."

To try to separate Caribbean history from British history is pretty nonsensical given the very concept of colonisation and by not only including Hezekiah's story in A Thousand Blows, but also the Morant Bay rebellion, Olusoga says it "is a recognition that the Caribbean is part of British history".

"It was the 1620s when the English got to the Caribbean. Jamaica has been part of England and Britain's history since 1655. This is one of the key events in that relationship between these two islands.

"It's wonderful that it's part of this huge series. And it's wonderful that it shows something that we often forget which is, what happened there is part of our history.

"British history doesn't just take place in Britain. You can't have an empire and say that British history is only what happens on these islands. What happened in Jamaica in October 1865 is part of British history and it has a fundamentally important, but also meaningful, place in a British drama."

Hezekiah's story in A Thousand Blows is one that's typical of some of the Caribbean or African figures that emerge into the British historical records, Olusoga says, but it's a fractured biography for Hezekiah.

"We have flashes where we can hear so much about them and then big questions – we know nothing about him. He disappears. We know he got married, so we can hear reports of him, see reports in the newspapers of the fights and then nothing.

"So, the nature of Black British history is we have these flashes of detail. We meet these people, we get some sense of who they are and then there’s silence. And that's where drama is incredibly powerful because drama can imaginatively fill the gaps. We will never know, I suspect, much more about Hezekiah. But drama can do something different."

Writing history books and making documentaries means that Olusoga knows exactly what history is and where its borders are, but with TV dramas, "it can scratch the itch to know something that we can't learn very often from the historical records, particularly when it's to do with poor people".

He continues: "It's not to say what happened to them, but what must it have felt like? What were their ambitions? What might their hopes have been? What might their fears have been? How might they have been affected and damaged by the experiences that the historical records tells us that they went through? Drama can do that most amazing thing, the best thing about us, it can inspire empathy."

Olusoga is clear about the fact that A Thousand Blows is inspired by the lives of these real-life figures like Sugar (Stephen Graham), Mary (Erin Doherty) and the Elephants, Treacle (James Nelson-Joyce), Punch Lewis (Daniel Mays) and Alec (Francis Lovehall). And although they may have been concealed in history, they were real men and women.

"Somewhere under the tarmac are their bones; we have a duty to them to remember them. It's astonishing that these people who are largely forgotten, are going to be remembered again.

"That the name Hezekiah Moscow is in the newspapers this week, the same [way] as he was in the newspapers in the early 1880s with his boxing being reported. It's quite an incredible thing – 140 years later, he is again in the London newspapers.

"That sort of thing gives me a chill down my spine. That's the reason why I care about history and get up and go to archives, dig out documents and care about these people. That's an amazing thought, isn't it?"

Olusoga argues that drama is part of a wider historical ecosystem but its primary duty is to be good, entertaining and depict characters with care. But the historian does say that the worlds of drama and history can overlap, describing the "fight to make them as realistic and as authentic as possible".

The result? A depiction of 1880s London that is "the most dynamic, frenetic, astonishing, terrible, inventive, creative, chaotic, kind of wonderful, violent place on the face of the planet", Olusoga explains.

"We've created this astonishing world in which these amazing characters who did exist, where we can imaginatively give them lives that the history didn't record."

But what are his hopes for what viewers will be left with or want to research after inevitably tearing through the series?

"I'd love people to be fascinated by the London of the East as much as we're fascinated by the London of the West. I'd love us to care more about working class history, care more about women's history," Olusoga tells me.

"We're suddenly told that inclusivity is a bad thing. I mean, this to me is an example of why inclusivity is wonderful. These are better stories. We have a richer understanding of the past by meeting Mary, Sugar and Hezekiah.

"It’s an anaemic version of history if it only takes place in the West End where everybody is a Lord or a Lady. It's a less interesting version of our past."

A Thousand Blows is available to stream on Disney Plus now. You can sign up to Disney Plus from £4.99 a month now.

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