Director- Hettie Macdonald
Writer- Abi Morgan
Release Date- 10th March 2008
Genre- Drama
Award- won best single drama award
Company- Tiger Aspect Productions

White girl is a single length drama based around an eleven year old girl from an unstable British working class family. This is a review from the daily telegraph, with quotes from Maxwell Martin who plays Leah’s father.
Tells the story of a hard-up family who relocate to Bradford. They find themselves in a racial minority, vulnerable and alone in a community they don’t understand, whose customs and religious faith they do not share. The most startling thing about this minority family’s predicament, however, is that they are white.
Maxwell Martin plays Debbie, an illiterate, borderline alcoholic mother of three, who moves her family to a new city to escape her lazy, pot-smoking and abusive husband, Stevie (Daniel Mays). You’d think from this description that Debbie would be a largely sympathetic character. In fact, says Maxwell Martin, she’s, “very frustrating, and not always particularly likeable. You just want Debbie to get a grip and be a mum, which, even after the move, she doesn’t really manage.”
Debbie soon slips back into bad habits and Stevie reappears, joint in hand, which leaves the family’s only responsible member looking after everyone: Debbie’s 11-year-old daughter Leah (Holly Kenny).
Leah, though, is struggling to cope, firstly with her alien surroundings (she and her younger siblings are the only white children at the local school) and then with Debbie’s repeated relapses. Inspired by the example of her classmates and a family of good-natured neighbours, Leah takes refuge in an unlikely place: Islam.
“For me, Leah could have adopted any religion,” says Maxwell Martin. “I don’t think it specifically has to be Islam. Hers is not so much a spiritual awakening as the case of a young girl finding something that gives her solace and a sense of community.”
The sight of Leah wearing a hijab [a Muslim headscarf] at a family wedding enrages Debbie. But, over time, Leah’s religious resolve starts to rub off on her mother. “Debbie has always laid down and taken the punches. She’s very self-pitying. But thanks to Leah’s example, she has a gradual awakening. Debbie realises, almost by osmosis, that she doesn’t have to be guided by Stevie, or her mum, or alcohol. In a way, this is a love story between a mother and a daughter: they’re both trying to reach each other and find an equilibrium.”
There are further fraught battles to be won, not least against Stevie, but White Girl finds cause for optimism in an otherwise bleak situation. “The really wonderful thing about Leah,” says Maxwell Martin, “is that although she berates Debbie, she always has faith in her. And, in the end, I think Debbie wakes up to that.”
Main themes-
Broken nuclear family- The first image is that of the family running away from the father and the last sees the mother and her three children crouched together in their new home.
Broken community- Leah tires to find a new culture to fit in with her new community as she can’t find it in the one that she is in. However there is a British community evident in the drama although it is flawed, when the mother is out for the hen do and at the wedding we are presented with a stereotypical ‘British’ culture. In both situations alcohol is present though making the community flawed. In comparison the Muslim community the attitudes and values seem to be aimed more towards family, happiness and a real community which is bound by their devotion to their religion. This is important as it reverses the stereotypical views we hold on other cultures and suggests that of the British culture is coarse in comparison.
Anti social behaviour- The father is laced in with criminal behaviour, but so is the grandmother which suggests the main role models are flawed. The mother herself is reliant on alcohol. This projects a negative outcome on the children themselves in fact Leah’s brother is being used as a drugs mule by his father. This behaviour is the catalyst for the two above categories.