Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis is full of horrific stories. But can it actually help?

In the years since 2002, when Idris Elba – all beautiful 6ft 2in of him – was first beamed into living rooms, playing the chief lieutenant of a drug empire in The Wire, the actor has come to represent something quite specific about modern Britain. He is a global export – Oscar-nominated and a hero of both Marvel and DC – as well as someone quite domestic, the sort of actor who will be linked to the role of James Bond until his dying day. It is a broad reputation that allows him to be something of a dilettante, flexing his directorial muscles with Yardie, his rapping/DJing skills as DJ Big Driis, and now his documentarian impulse with BBC One’s Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis.

The Luther star has spent several years as a campaigner against knife crime and pushing for greater regulation on the sale of machetes and zombie knives, and Our Knife Crime Crisis finds the actor attempting to humanise the journey, undertaken by so many young people, from knife carrier to potential murderer. It is a burning issue – knife crime has almost doubled over the last decade – and one that the actor feels strongly about. “Knife crime is a heartbreaking problem,” he warns viewers, approaching the issue from both sides. He visits young men in prison who have been convicted of knife crime offences (including one who was in five different jails before his 18th birthday), as well as the families and loved ones of victims. “It can literally be anyone,” the sister of Harry Pitman, a 16-year-old who was stabbed to death on New Year’s Eve 2023, tells Elba, of the offenders, “and happen to anyone.” The common factor, above all others, is poverty: there is twice the amount of knife crime in the UK’s poorest areas. Both victims and perpetrators, it seems, are caught in a vicious cycle.

The role of the onscreen documentary filmmaker is to marry a personal story with a public one. Elba has become a campaigner on these issues, in part because of his upbringing in Hackney and Newham, two boroughs that have been blighted by crimes of this nature. Perhaps that origin story, too, has become fused with his roles in The Wire and Luther, where he plays no-nonsense hardmen at the coalface of urban criminality. And so, Elba has become a very visible proponent of a more positive pathway for young black men (though, as the documentary points out, knife crime is far less racially divided than media narratives might suggest). “I felt like a bit of a prop,” Elba observes, having joined Keir Starmer for a pre-election summit on knife crime.

It is a knowing remark, but one that the documentary itself cannot quite shrug. When he visits a prison, the inmates rattle the windows and chant his name. “Thanks for meeting me,” he says to an unassuming Brummie detective. “Yeah, no problem,” the man replies, like it’s just every day that a Hollywood star comes around for a chinwag. And yet he’s also absent from some of the more intimate recollections, such as a visit to the Wolverhampton home of Ronan Kanda, a 16-year-old who was murdered by fellow teenagers in a case of mistaken identity. Whether that’s a creative choice – to allow Ronan’s mother the spotlight – or a scheduling issue, is unclear. But it makes the show feel lopsided, as though it cannot decide whether this is the tale of Elba’s activism or the human story of those more directly involved.

A bigger issue for Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis comes when the show attempts to pivot from problems to solutions. The stories are, without exception, horrific; the impact on families deeply moving. Elba’s honest chats with young offenders – where he is able to lure them into a candour that few other interviewers would achieve – are interesting, if rather brief. He deals, at times, in rather generalised commentary (“If there was no law, we’d be at each other’s throats,” he claims, “it’s just human nature”). But there is also a desire to find a solution, to say something more optimistic about this crisis. “No issue is permanent,” Elba opines. “There’s got to be a way out of it.” Apart from a rather vague mentorship programme, though, there are few answers. It is all rather reminiscent of Starmer himself, who tells Elba that his knife crime initiative will be funded by a crackdown on “non-doms” (the same plan that is being used to fund the NHS, social care, potholes, etc). Is any of this more than mere words?

“I’m an amplification device,” Elba confesses, at one point. Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis is, really, no more insightful than packages on the knife crime epidemic that are routinely produced for Panorama or even Newsnight. But what Elba brings – and the clue is in the way his name has been jammed into the title – is a bit of star power, a hope that his lustre will allow the documentary to reach the most impacted communities. If he is an amplification device, he’s also a targeted one – and that’s no bad thing.