My Crazy New Jamaican Life

At least they’ve resisted the urge to give this film a ‘Big Fat…’ C4 prefix. All the same, it contains many of flaws that we’ve become accustomed to in the channel’s documentary output.

Under the auspices of exploring a supposed infatuation felt by white British women towards Jamaican culture, it introduces Debbie and Holly. Debbie from Lewisham is in a relationship with Variel, a bashment promoter. And Holly is stuck in Kent but has found respite from bullying, alienation and general teenage angst in Jamaican music.

It’s hard to see these two likeable individuals as emblematic of anything much, but the messy confusions of real life are given a hook and shoehorned into a TV format regardless. This leads to a whole bunch of assumptions and generalisations about Jamaican men: charisma, sexual potency, a relentlessly roving eye. And the end product is deeply unsatisfactory – the concept of the ‘babymother’ is described as ‘not unusual in Jamaican culture’ and then never satisfactorily explored; the notion of family is simultaneously celebrated and undermined; and a trajectory for Holly in which she performs at a bashment night is contrived.

And at the end, we’re none the wiser. What was this film actually for?