SKET - Characters

Kayla - A younger Jordie girl trying to fit in. Moved to London from newcastle with her sister, she has no mother and is disconnected from her dad. From her actions in the film it looks as though she just wants to fit in, which is how she becomes involved with the other girls. At the start of the film, close ups on Kayla's face show her being scared of men who are harassing her on the street, showing she is not the strongest of characters and not the most violent. As the film progresses we see her picking up some of the lingo the other girls use such as "sket" and "shank". She also becomes more agressive in order to fit in, it almost seems like a struggle for survival. This point was also brought up when another character explained that you have to be like them (meaning men) in order to survive. The film shows Kayla's transformation from a sy jordie girl to being part of a small gang and voilent acts.


Danielle - A slightly older girl who is already regularly involved with gangs, drugs and violence. Danielle is probably the main reason why Kaya got involved with the other girls, because she sticks up for her and almost protects her from certain people, such as the guys ont he bus at the start. Danielle is the most masculine of the female characters, having pinned back hair and a more masculine dress sense and posture. This fits with the title of the film, "SKET" which usually refers to a masculine female with no regard for looks or dignity, although the origins of the word have more to do with prostitution. In the film Danielle seems to be very aggressive and feel very negatively towards men in general. She surrounds herself with girls and doesn't seem like the sort of person to settle down with a boyfriend, she often hints towards one of the other girls' boyfriends saying "next time it will be him" meaning the other girl is likely to get hurt by her boyfriend. This negative outlook on men could be due to her being forced into sex and violence by Trey which we find out later in the film. Danielle's general attitude is to act like a man to survive.


Shaks - Seems to be the oldest (but is never stated). Shaks is involved with Trey who is the leader of a bigger gang of "drug lords". Shaks acted defensive throughout the film for herself, Kayla and Kalya's sister. This could be due to the fact she is pregnant which might change peoples attitudes towards others, especially when violence is involved. While she is an active part of the gang, she often hints or states that she wants out. She asks Trey multiple times to "take the gear and move up north". Shaks isn't as masculine as Danielle but is a stronger character who can look after herself, she seems to be a very powerful person in the gang.

"SKET" Poster

The poster shows the 4 girls from the film on a black background with a pink/red filter. They seem to be hitting & kicking someone on the floor, strongly suggesting the violence in the film. As well as this we can see the front girl of the poster is hitting the person with a pole. The image is overlaid by the word "SKET" in large white letters in the lower middle of the poster. In the top left, behind the girls, there are some reviewers comments in red & white text. They read: "Raw, Gritty, and insanely powerful" and "Gripping, Hard Hitting, Intense, Electrifying... A must see.".


 The poster instantly suggests violence throughout the film, as well as showing the sort of people the girls are. Their clothes and expressions suggest the more "chavy" type, which fits with the name of the film which we would associate with that particular social group. Individually the characters look quite different, the girl at the front has long, untied hair and a hoodie suggesting she is more feminine, the girl to her right is a little more masculine wearing a coat and hair back in a pony tail. Behind her is another girl who we cannot see much of. To the right of the page there is one more girl who looks a lot different from the others. She has tightly pinned hair and a masculine anger expression with a hoodie and coat. She looks a lot more masculine than the others. This girl could be the one more represented by the title of the film as the word "SKET" is often used to describe someone more masculine, with no regard of dignity or grace. The poster suggests that the story will envolved around these main girls and violence, and will likely be set in a n estate judging by the representation of the characters involved.


This poster contrasts greatly with how girls and women are usually shown on posters, magazines and films. For example if we look at the poster below for recently released "This means war", we can see that women are usually represented in a much more positive way. Often wearing makeup, dresses, with long hair and a much less violent look, "SKET" completely disregards these stereotypes and creates a whole different image of the girls in the film.

Plan B - The voice of a Generation

Below is a profile of "Plan B" by the independent. 

Few songs arrive accompanied by a statement of intent, but Ben Drew believes his latest single requires clarification. Its subject is the riots that erupted across England last summer. The news, says Drew, moved on so fast – from street fights in Tottenham to the battle for Tripoli – that they were never properly examined. And as the 28-year-old songwriter, singer, rapper, film-maker and actor better known as Plan B explains on his website: "The point being made in my song 'Ill Manors' is that society needs to take some responsibility for the cause of these riots. Why are there so many kids in this country that don't feel they have a future, or care about having a criminal record?"

Drew posits at least one theory himself: that underprivileged young people, living on urban estates, suspect society doesn't much care about them – and thus care little for society. They're casually branded "chavs: council housed and violent", a term no better in Drew's eyes than those used to discriminate along racial and gender lines. "If you're born into a family that has enough money to educate you properly," he goes on, "you are privileged. You're not better than anyone else. You're just lucky. Certain sectors of middle England, not all of them, but the ignorant ones, need to wake up and realise that... and stop ridiculing the poor and less fortunate. That is what this song is about."

Already, the right people are beginning to take notice. After it was posted on YouTube a week ago, Labour's shadow health minister, Jamie Reed, tweeted that "Ill Manors", in substance if not in style, reminded him of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On". "The risk of any lefty politician being pilloried for praising the new Plan B track is really pretty high," Reed admitted. "That said, it's excellent." In a blog, music writer Dorian Lynskey called it "the first great mainstream protest song in years", comparing it to Public Enemy and The Clash.

Effective protest songs are rare nowadays, the form weighed down with cynicism. But on "Ill Manors", Drew swerves the clichés. His shouted chorus is confrontational: "Oi! I said Oi! What you looking at, you little rich boy?" Yet the rapped verses – strapped to a thrilling, Prodigy-like track – are witty and complex: "We got an eco-friendly government/ They preserve our natural habitat/ Built an entire Olympic village/ around where we live, without pulling down any flats." Integral to its impact is the video by Yann Demange, director of the recent Channel 4 drama Top Boy. Demange's promo is laced with real footage from the riots, and expressly designed to be discomfiting to Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

"I'm not trying to condone what happened during the riots," Drew told BBC 1Xtra DJ MistaJam in an interview. "It disgusted me... it saddened me more than anything, because those kids who were rioting and looting have just made life 10 times harder for themselves. They've just played into the hands of what certain sectors of middle England think about them." The single is just the first part of a bigger plan for tackling that mindset; in May, Drew is releasing a feature film, which he wrote, directed and soundtracked. Ill Manors is a "hip-hop musical" made up of six intersecting east London stories, starring Riz Ahmed and Natalie Press.

All this may come as a shock to those who first encountered Drew on his previous LP. The Defamation of Strickland Banks (2010) was an accomplished Motown pastiche, a coffee-tablish concept album about a sharp-suited soul singer locked up for a crime he didn't commit. To those who were fans of his 2006 debut, however, it's a welcome return to hip-hop. Who Needs Actions When You Got Words was released mere days after David Cameron, then the leader of the opposition, became the latest politician to condemn hip-hop for encouraging violence. Drew's first album gave the lie to such claims, with its nuanced first-person portrayals of street crime, poverty, addiction and underage sex.

When Drew turned his back on such things, Sam Wolfson, reviewing Strickland Banks in the NME, expressed disappointment. Now, however, he sees brilliance in the decision. "Lots of people who'd want to do something like 'Ill Manors' just don't have the profile in middle England that Plan B does," says Wolfson. "Strickland Banks was hugely successful with a super-mainstream, Radio 2 crowd. To most people, he was a bad-boy-done-good soul singer, not all that dissimilar to an X Factor contestant. That makes the force of this single so much greater, because it comes from such a mainstream place."

Drew was born in 1983 and brought up in Forest Gate, east London, where Ill Manors is set. His father, Paul Ballance, a former punk musician, left home when Drew was five months old, and dropped out of the boy's life altogether when he was six. He sent his son a congratulatory text when Strickland Banks went to No 1, but Drew deleted it and the two haven't spoken since. His mother, "a saint", was a local-authority architect. "We weren't working class but we weren't middle class," Drew has said. "We were in the void in between."

As a young teenager, Drew taught himself guitar, aping Britpop acts and penning romantic soul numbers. Only later did he take up rapping, his "Plan B" shifting his songwriting focus to his mother's unsuitable boyfriends, his father's failings, his tough school life. He was expelled for fighting more than once. He threw chairs and verbally abused his teachers, and at 15 was sent to the pupil referral unit that he later claimed had turned his life around. He regressed once, in 2007, when he received a suspended sentence for threatening a stranger, kicking a bin and swearing at police. He subsequently spent time in therapy and swore off drugs.

Who Needs Actions was not a huge hit, reaching a modest No 30 in the charts despite its five-star reviews. But Strickland Banks went triple platinum, winning Drew three Ivor Novello awards and a Brit for Best British Male. His inadvertently prescient performance at the 2011 Brits ceremony featured a staged prison riot. Musical success also helped him to develop an acting career, with roles in Adulthood (2008), Harry Brown (2009) and 4.3.2.1 (2010). This year he'll star in the big-screen remake of The Sweeney alongside Ray Winstone.

Meanwhile, Drew's been trying to make a name behind the camera. A music video for electro duo Chase & Status in 2008 was followed by a grim short, Michelle, which now forms one of the narrative strands in Ill Manors. No production company was interested in funding the feature film, so he raised the budget independently, starting with £4,000 of his own savings. His favourite movie, he says, is Forrest Gump.

Assuming his latest project has the broad impact that he's aiming for, Drew has expressed a wish to establish a charity to fund and empower those individuals in troubled and underprivileged communities that he calls "vigilante social workers". There is a danger, though, says Wolfson, in holding him up as "Plan B, Voice of Britain's Feral Youth", adding: "What's been interesting about the youth resistance, with the student protest and the riots, is the total avoidance of leaders. But because there's a vacuum, there's a natural media tendency to search for some kind of spokesperson. It's that Newsnight thing of bringing Dizzee Rascal on to talk about the presidential election."

Nevertheless, Drew's ambitions are considerable. "I started to write an album that would try to reach out to these kids and, in some ways, to be a father to these kids, because they were parentless," he told a TED conference last week. And, in his 1Xtra interview, he suggested that mission was lifelong. "A lot of these kids come from family environments where they're told they're no good and will never amount to anything, and when they walk out of their front door, society tells them the same thing... But you can change that... That was the motive behind my first record, and will probably be the motive behind any hip-hop music I'm ever going to make, until we change the issue – and then I can start making pop music."

A Life In Brief

Born: Benjamin Paul Ballance-Drew, 22 October 1983, in east London.

Family: Mother worked for the local authority. Father left when Ben was five months old.

Education: Anglo-European School, Ingatestone, Essex; Tom Hood School, Leytonstone.

Career: First album in 2006: Who Needs Actions When You Got Words. First major film role in Adulthood (2008). Second album, The Defamation of Strickland Banks (2010). Directed the film Ill Manors.

He says: "If anybody wants to talk to me about how I think we can change these things I'm ready."

They say: "With less talent, or worse luck, Drew could have been among the rioters." Dorian Lynskey, writer

This profile paints a good picture of what Ben Drew hopes to achieve through his album/track.

He says: "If anybody wants to talk to me about how I think we can change these things I'm ready."

They say: "With less talent, or worse luck, Drew could have been among the rioters." Dorian Lynskey, writer

Plan B - Ill Mannors (Music Video)

London Riots Study - Response

• What was the context of the riots? (reasons for riots)
  
  The riots had a lot of different reasons and a complicated context when it happened. The "Main" or outstanding reason for the cause of the protests which sparked the riots was a man being shot and killed by the police without arrest. On top if this there were a lot of underlying problems that had not been addressed and that many people felt angry over, contributing to the stress that was around at the time of the riots. The guardian said for example that the country has been unhappy since the coalition, which was reflected by multiple student protests, and the riots in discussion as well as the crash of trade unions, loss of jobs and scandals within the government and press. One man, when being interviewed by the BBC, said "This has been coming for a long time.", showing that the incident with the police is quite clearly not the only problem that the rioters were thinking about. I think the main contexts of the riots where as follows; the shooting of the man without arrest, the student cuts, raising unemployment, and tax payers money being spent elsewhere. Even those who do not feel for these causes may have joined in due to their own reasons for example one man made a comment about immigration levels when being asked why he supported the riots.

• Why were youths involved in the riots?
  
  There were many reasons why youths may have been involved in the riots,   their motives ranged from the student cuts and political standings, to simply wanting free loot. A good reason that i thought about was the social exclusion of those involved. Youths who are not rich, or intellectual  may feel excluded from society due to the lack of material items that consume us today. Many of the youths involved could be seen as lower class, or minorities. The riots could have been both a way for them to take a stand against the consumerism, as well as to gain some of the items that the majorities can afford.
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• Where the youths given a fair representation in the press coverage of the riots?
  
  I dont think they were. Most of the pictures of the riots show the police, and not the youths. The whole press coverage of the riots forgot about its "protest" beginnings and instead turned to blame the young of britain for everything that was happening. Using sensationalist words such as "Mob" and "Voilent" the press controlled what the public where thinking at the time of the incidents, clearly pointing the blame at youths. It could also be worth noting that over a quarter of the arrests made during the london riots were of over 25's, at least half of those being over 30, yet it was very rare to see any of them in the news.
• How can the coverage of the london riots be understood in relation to the ideas of stanley cohen?
  
  Stan Cohen says that events like these cause "Moral Panic" and they are blamed on the "Folk Devils" who had disrupted society. In this case the folk devils were "the youths" as painted by the mass media, and the disruption would be the riots. The moral panic was caused by the amplification of the events by the media. It would be unfair to say the riots were "hyped up" as they were quite serious however the media did group together images from different locations giving te feel that there were riots everywhere. But more importantly they used a lot of sensationalist words such as "Thugs", "Riot", "Violence" and "Mob" setting a tone of panic and moral discomfort around the country. 
• To what extent was the collective identity of the youths constructed by the press?
  
  The press played a bigger part in constructing the identity of those involved than they did themselves. The mass media are generally "in charge" of how people are represented in all aspects of our lives, due to a lot of our leisure activities and work being media related. During the riots the youths were portrayed as being violent thieves and had a very negative constructed identity despite a lot of the country not taking part in the riots, with many youths being involved in the cleanup of the riots being ignored by the press.  Again, the press used a lot of sensationalist words such as "Thugs", "Riot", "Violence" and "Mob" to paint youths in a negative light.

The Guardian - Context Quote

When looking to find more background information on the context of the riots, i found a quote from the guardian website that i think summarizes it up nicely.

Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven't seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.

I kept this as i thought it would be useful.

London Riots Study

• What was the context of the riots? (reasons for riots)
• Why were youths involved in the riots?
• Where the youths given a fair representation in the press coverage of the riots?
• How can the coverage of the london riots be understood in relation to the ideas of stanley cohen?
• To what extent was the collective identity of the youths constructed by the press?

Press Coverage - London Riots

Youths In The News (Newspaper Analysis)

Mob of 200 youths pelt police with bricks and smash up shops 'in anger at on-going sex grooming trial (Link)








This article is about some events that happened a week or two ago involving youths. The text looks at youths in a very bad light, using "Mob" in the title which instantly paints a bad image of those involved in the events. Using sensationalist words such as "Mob" and "Rampage" will instantly make the readers feel a certain way towards the matters described, in this case it makes them feel negative towards the youths in the story. A good example of this would be when the  It was also interesting to see that in the title it said 'in anger at on-going sex grooming trial', with the line inside apostrophes possibly suggesting the youths' reasoning for the violence was not justified. The pictures with the article don't show youths, just pictures of policemen after the incidents. Overall the article describes youths in a very bad light and does not address the motives behind the abuse given by the teens.

My Identity