Just Act Normal creator Janice Okoh on class, comedy and the one joke white people won’t get

Abandonment by a parent – for whatever reason – is the most painful experience. For Just Act Normal, I wanted to show the truth of that while still giving the audience vibrant characters.

The Forge, a production company known for shows such as Help, Ackley Bridge and Marriage liked my play Three Birds, about three Black working-class kids home alone and wanted to develop it further. Like my play, the show focuses on three siblings coping when their mum, who has struggled with substances, goes missing. The show is definitely ‘dark’, in terms of loss and pain and has a ‘thrillerish’ element to it because we want to know whether they will get away with it. But it’s also very funny.

Just Act Normal’s main character, Tiana (Chenée Taylor), is only 17 and has to take care of her younger siblings while still trying to be a teenager, living her teenage hopes and dreams – such as owning her own beauty business with her best friend and falling in love for the first time, with a DJ called Jamie.

It was important for me to place value on Tiana’s dreams – not everyone aspires to go to university. I’m keen not to place middle-class values on all our characters. Tionne, Tiana’s brother played by the equally brilliant Akins Subair, is naturally bright and it made sense that he would want to go to university. But it was important to not position Tionne’s dreams as being more worthy than Tiana’s.

Tiana is the heart of the show. We hope she achieves her dreams, but she’s met with plenty of hurdles – the main one being that she has to keep the family together otherwise her siblings will be taken into care, which is what her mother, Jackie, never wanted.

Where I live I see many addicts. But I feel they are invisible in our society – or people want them to be. So I was keen not to make Jackie invisible. I was keen to give her a voice – despite her being absent. Even though she has a substance problem, I wanted to paint her as a person who was still functioning and did an incredible job with her children and their self-esteem. I didn’t want her to be a two-dimensional figure.

So Jackie taught her kids that they are better together as a unit and in dark times they have this game called “In the Real House” where they imagine what their future will be.

The youngest sibling, Tanika, is played by Kaydrah Walker-Wilkie, who we discovered at an open casting call in Birmingham. She is nine and develops a relationship with her teacher, Ms Jenkins, played by Romola Garai. Tanika plans on making Ms Jenkins her substitute mother, which increases the threat of them being discovered home alone as the teacher becomes more invested in their lives.

All three siblings in Just Act Normal have very strong storylines, as does Gavin, AKA Dr Feelgood, the local drug dealer who moves in with them. He is played by the brilliant actor Sam Buchanan.

There’s more to Feelgood than dealing. He’s a clever guy with a heart who does the crossword and enjoys listening to Radio 4. He just fell through the gaps, as many working-class kids do. He ends up falling in love with the kids – it’s wonderful watching them all try to live together and get on with life.

One of the biggest differences between the stage play and the TV show was relocating it from South London to The Midlands. We got to work with the most amazing local actors including R&B singer and actress Jamelia, who plays one of my whackiest creations, ‘Fake Jackie’. Her character pretends to be Jackie, the kids’ missing mum, to fool the schoolteachers.

Some white people might not get the joke that white people mix Black people up all the time. It used to be a running joke at my sister’s workplace where they would get her mixed up with a mixed-race secretary all the time, for 10 years. Even the other day, when picking up my six-year-old kid at primary school, the TA gave me the wrong Black kid.

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To me I look nothing like that child’s mother – she’s 20 years younger, six foot tall, a shade darker and wears her hair in long beautiful braids (I always wear a woolly hat). Anyway, Black people find humour in recognition, and it was important for me to talk about the everyday realities we face.

Working and casting locally meant we found amazing new talent. Kaydrah is the little star of the show. It’s incredible that she has no acting experience and has blown us all away. But the thing I loved most about filming Just Act Normal in Coventry and Birmingham is throwing a light on working-class Black communities outside London.

I love the accent and the show feels so place-specific. It was important that the feel of the show wasn’t grim and bleak as so many ‘estate dramas’ can feel. I feel that we’ve produced a drama that is realistic but also uplifting, joyous and funny.

What’s great about turning my play into a TV show is being able to create a show with darker-skinned working-class Black girls in central roles, at a time when it’s important for every voice to be heard. Growing up, I never saw representations of me on TV in this way.

Now, as I see girls like Tiana and her best friend Shanice in my area, I feel a sense of achievement that I was able to make this happen for girls who look like me. To help boost the self-esteem of little Black girls in this way feels amazing. It would have done a lot for me, growing up, I’m sure.

Just Act Normal is on BBC3 and iPlayer from Wednesday (16 April) at 9pm.

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