Boom Box: Beats and Betrayal review – the most astonishing British TV
Try not to Google this true story of a London record shop used by undercover police to ensnare teens. As the astonishing details of what really happened unfold, you will pray for more fantastic telly like this to be made
The UK launch of HBO Max has brought with it some major US series (no more waiting for The Pitt!). More unexpectedly, perhaps, its launch slate also includes this distinctly British true-crime docudrama about a record shop/recording studio in Edmonton, north London. Teens involved in petty crime came to Boom Box to keep off the streets – only to find that the studio itself was a hotbed of gang-related activity. It’s an astonishing tale which is told totally fantastically here, in a series that hopefully heralds HBO Max as a platform that will champion British (as well as American) TV.
I strongly advise against Googling Boom Box (the show), or Boom Box (the recording studio), lest you spoil the eventual, frankly ridiculous revelations this series contains. There is one piece of information, however, that does feel impossible to merely hint at: the people these teenagers were getting involved with were not criminals – they were undercover police officers, who had targeted the area after a spate of murders in 2008. As its four episodes unfold, the ethics of what those officers did is questioned by those who feel they were ensnared at Boom Box, and manipulated to commit serious crimes they would never have thought about otherwise. Dramatic reconstructions are contrasted with interviews, which are then contrasted with more dramatic reconstructions which feature the same cast but tell a different story – one from the point of view of law enforcement. The whole thing is very meta, and that’s before the people playing the Boom Box teens get talking to the actors playing them.
The actors, in turn, shoot their scenes inside a studio reconstruction of the shop. It is all very British, but it also reminds me – weirdly – of an HBO show from the US, Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, in which the comedian helps people prepare for stressful life events, often featuring a painstaking 1:1 copy of a house or a shop along the way.
Unlike that show, though, there is little to laugh about here. Boom Box: Beats and Betrayal is offbeat and tense, but it’s not amusing in the slightest. The studio was, we hear, kitted out with top-of-the-range equipment which kids could use for just £15 an hour; says Junior, also known as Trini, “it gave me Dr Dre vibes”. These were kids from tough backgrounds or who even – as in the case of Junior’s brother Kyron – had immigration issues that meant they were cut off from employment and benefits.
Whether or not you believe the police acted fairly, it’s clear that the money spent on this operation – which ran to several hundreds of thousands of pounds – could have done much good elsewhere in the community it targeted. Certainly, it was doing some good, at least initially. Boom Box felt, says Junior, “like the only positive thing in Edmonton”. It wasn’t, says Oya Suleyman, lawyer for two of the men, “a fair and proper and unexceptional” kind of setup – she would go on to argue that there had been an abuse of process on the part of the police, making their evidence inadmissible in court.
A judge would later deem that the police had acted lawfully, and there are plenty of officers here who say they were toeing a difficult but pivotal line: making the operation look legit, while also pushing the kids for information on what they maintain was existing criminal activity. The idea wasn’t to be an agent provocateur, says one: they were “there to identify criminals, not to make innocent people criminals”. But was that initial premise – with its shiny equipment and older, influential men effectively mentoring young kids – really a sound one?
Boom Box: Beats and Betrayal is co-produced by Rogan Productions, who have built a strong reputation in recent years for diverse, ambitious documentaries, such as Netflix’s Grenfell: Uncovered. Even as the horrors here are exposed (and there are many horrors indeed), this is a programme that has clearly been made with care, and which centres around the kids – now adult men – whose lives were for ever altered by their time at Boom Box. “I messed up, I have to take accountability,” says Kyron, who now volunteers with an immigration charity. He doesn’t want other kids to make the same mistakes he did, and be led astray. The police, for their part, don’t voice any regrets. Says one officer, whose work was crucial to the credibility of the operation: “We are law enforcement – we are not social workers.”
Boom Box: Beats and Betrayal is on HBO Max now.