Imagine... Andrea Levy: Her Island Story, review - That rare thing, a novelist as interesting as their work

With the BBC’s adaptation of The Long Song getting under way this week, last night’s Imagine… Andrea Levy: Her Island Story (BBC One) took a look at the life and work of the novel’s author, Andrea Levy.

It didn’t exactly tear up the arts documentary rule book – this was a largely formulaic collage of readings from Levy’s novels, interviews between her and presenter Alan Yentob and extracts from the two TV adaptations of Small Island and  The Long Song. But that didn’t matter: Levy turned out to be that rare thing, an author who is every bit as interesting as their work.

The interest came in part from her family history. Levy’s father Winston was a 28-year-old from Jamaica who came to Britain on the MV Empire Windrush. After this year’s revelations around the destruction of landing cards, the Windrush generation has finally got the recognition it deserves, and Levy has the gifts to tell their story. Britain to them, she writes,  was less like a welcoming mother country and more “a stinking cantankerous hag who offers you no comfort after your long journey and says, ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’”

Then there was her own upbringing growing up on a housing estate in Sixties London as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, learning how to pick apart the complex roots underpinning her family history and transmute them in to literature.

What was best about this Imagine…, however, was that it didn’t settle for merely establishing Levy’s position as an author of worth: it also tried to show you what she is like. Yentob is generally derided for his pretensions but here he drew the best out of his subject: Levy came across as a great ironist, with a sly sense of humour and a winning candour.

Time and again her life intersected with her art, as when the lead character in The Long Song – the child of a slave owner – was revealed to be remarkably similar to Levy’s real great, great grandmother, even though Levy had made up the former before she knew about that latter. The final irony of the film was the cruellest. In an agonising coda, Levy revealed that she has been  living with breast cancer for 10 years and it is incurable.

“I accept that I’m going to die  but while I’m living I intend to live. That’s all I want to say about it.”  As the programme pointed out with customary acuity, she wasn’t going  to wallow in tragedy because her books are about surviving it.