Authentic Antigua

Authentic Antigua


By Michael Pickard
July 18, 2024

Job Description

Baden Prince Jr tells DQ about his role as a consultant on forthcoming BBC drama Mr Loverman, an adaptation of Bernadine Evaristo’s novel of the same name that stars Lennie James as an Antiguan man hiding a decades-old secret.

From working for a north London council authority to becoming a storyteller and poet, Baden Prince Jr admits his life has been “a strange old journey” – one that has seen him set up his own creative writing workshops in schools and community centres, host poetry nights and even attend Glastonbury.

“Nothing’s planned, things have just developed, and sometimes that’s the best way,” he tells DQ.

The stories he tells often lean on his own experiences, and can also reflect his African Caribbean heritage, with Prince having grown up in Antigua before moving to England. That background has now led to his latest unexpected adventure: working with television producer Fable Pictures as a consultant on the forthcoming BBC drama Mr Loverman.

Baden Prince Jr

An eight-part adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s 2013 novel of the same name, the series stars Lennie James (Save Me, The Walking Dead) as Barrington Jedidiah Walker – or Barry to his mates. He’s a 74-year-old, Antiguan-born, exuberant Hackney personality who is renowned for his dapper taste and fondness for retro suits.

Carmel (Sharon D Clarke), his wife of 50 years, senses that Barry has been cheating on her with other women. But little does she know that he’s actually involved in a secret, passionate affair with his best friend and soulmate, Morris (Ariyon Bakare). Now facing the final chapter of his life, Barry has big choices to make that will force his whole family to question their futures.

Evaristo’s novel, adapted for the screen by Nathaniel Price (The Outlaws), is billed as a “ground-breaking exploration of Britain’s older Caribbean community,” and Prince was approached about supporting the scriptwriting process to ensure it was as authentic to Barry’s Antiguan roots as possible. In particular, script editor Nkechi Nwobani-Akanwo would contact him to run through certain lines of dialogue or to seek feedback on whether or not something sounded specifically Antiguan.

“It was 30 minutes here, an hour there. It wasn’t a massive commitment,” he says. “What I was being asked to do was very specific, and I really admire the company for their commitment to authenticity, because it is a huge source of annoyance in the Caribbean community that they put on some of these dramas and some actor comes on who’s supposed to be Jamaican and you think, ‘That’s a Trini, he ain’t no Jamaican.’

“Then Antiguans, you don’t get many Antiguans to a pound because we’re a small island and a small community. A lot of the elders aren’t around anymore, so the second- and third-generation Antiguans, people in my age group, are really scarce.”

Lennie James takes the lead in Mr Loverman, playing Antiguan-born Hackney resident Barry

When filming on the series began, Prince worked with the show’s dialect coach, Joel Trill, again about specific sections of dialogue. He also spoke to James and found a musical way of demonstrating the Antiguan accent.

“His accent is quite flat, and I was saying that the Antiguan and Jamaican accents run on a wider range of notes,” Prince recalls. “He said he gained quite a bit from it and enjoyed it, and he called me back a couple of times to talk through things. I ran lines with him on a few occasions, which was really interesting because I’m not an actor. But I do perform, so I do have a sense of the dynamic. I also really enjoyed it.”

Prince also had a hand in advising on some of the Antiguan scenes featured in the series – which is distributed by Sony Pictures Television – as flashbacks take viewers back to the infancy of Barry and Morris’s relationship while they still lived on the island.

“For example, they were very interested in the layout of the small house the boys would have been living in at the time and what the interior of a typical small- to medium-sized wooden house would look like, particularly from that era,” he says. “That really took me back and made me think.

Barry’s wife suspects he has been cheating with other women, but really he has long been involved in an affair with his best friend Morris (Ariyon Bakare)

“There were a couple of other things, like a big set Sunday lunch scene, and there was some conversation about what would have been on the table, the layout of the kitchen and what would have been on the counters or not – what sorts of products from that era. I could see my aunt’s kitchen, with the bread bin and the containers for the coffee, tea bags and sugar. It was a real nostalgia-fest for me. I was talking to one of my uncles, and that same aunt, just to check my memory hadn’t skewed things. Overall it was a really interesting experience.”

Across the series, Prince wanted to ensure they language in the series related specifically to Antigua, rather than adopting “Jamaicanisms” or broad Caribbean phrases that would have blurred Barry’s explicit identity.

“Language was the key thing. There were some really obvious Jamaicanisms, like the use of the pronoun ‘him’ instead of ‘he’ and dropping the ‘h,’ because there was a lot of that in the script, ‘him this,’ ‘him that.’ Nkechi used to find it hilarious because I’d been through the script myself and every time we found one, I said, ‘There’s another of those hims.’

“Antiguans generally tend to be more laid back. We’re quite easy-going. Most of my input was really around language, around accent. It was really around some obvious – and not so obvious – phrasing, or the use of particular words or phrases that just didn’t fall right on the ear.

The series also features flashbacks to the pair’s time in Antigua

“What also made it interesting is I’m in a WhatsApp group, an old boys’ network who all went to the same school, and a lot of those guys still live in Antigua. Every so often, a bit of a conversation or discussion would break out and people would be dropping voice notes in the chat, so again that allowed me to register that my ear was still working and still pretty accurate. One particular bit of dialogue, I forwarded to the voice coach. It was pure Antiguan.”

After his first foray into the world of “the magic lantern,” Prince praises Fable Pictures for their dedication to making the characters and the dialogue as authentic as possible. “I say well done to them. My sense is that’s not the standard approach.”

He’s now looking forward to hearing on screen some of the lines he had a hand in developing, with Mr Loverman coming soon to BBC One and BBC iPlayer. “They’ve all said thanks for what you’ve contributed, it’s been invaluable and really helpful, and that’s really good to hear. It’s not just about being called up and being a consultant on a TV show. It’s good to hear people give you feedback and say you’ve done a really good job and it’s been really useful to us. That’s worth more than anything.”

As for seeing Antiguans leading a BBC drama based on Evaristo’s “ground-breaking” novel, Prince believes the series will “challenge a lot of people’s perceptions.”

“Some people are going to be uncomfortable with it, and that’s going to be balanced against the fact it’s specifically about members of the Antiguan community. We’re not a particularly large community. People are going to be very excited that Antigua and Antiguans are being represented on television.”

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