Ridley Road’s Sarah Solemani on why we need to understand the Nazis (2025)

Ridley Road, Sarah Solemani’s drama, opens in a sunlit bedroom in an English country house. It’s 1962. A young blonde woman plays with a cute school-age boy. Hearing his father, she tidies the boy’s hair and they face the door. Dad walks in, smiles at them then raises his arm in a Hitler salute. They do the same. “Wir kommen wieder,” the father says. “We come again,” the boy repeats. The meaning is clear: one day the Nazis will return, and this delightful postwar British family is working to make it happen here.

Ridley Road is based on Jo Bloom’s 2014 novel, itself inspired by real-life events — the rise of the explicitly Nazi National Socialist Movement, led by the British fascist Colin Jordan, and the ’62 Group of Jewish veterans and activists who fought them. The NSM was a violent splinter group that split from the original British National Party in 1962 and terrorised immigrants and Jews.

The newcomer Agnes O’Casey plays Vivien Epstein, a 20-year-old Jewish hairdresser from Manchester who arrives in Hackney, east London looking for Tom Varey’s Jack, a man she had an intense affair with, only to discover he’s a mole in the movement. When he’s injured in a street brawl, she dyes her hair and infiltrates the party, becoming a favourite of Jordan’s, played with chilling conviction by Rory Kinnear.

For Solemani, who broke through playing Becky in the BBC3 comedy Him & Her and stole Bridget Jones’s Baby as the news anchor Miranda, this script was personal. “I was carrying my first child when I read the book and she’ll soon turn eight — that’s how long it has taken for me to get it over the line,” she explains over Zoom from her house in Los Angeles, where she has lived for five years.

When the BBC turned her down, she prepared folders of newspaper clippings from all over the world. “I told them we were stepping into a really dark hour in India, in eastern Europe, in America and in the UK,” she explains, with earnest self-deprecation. “This far-right rhetoric is now popular. I’m Iranian, so I know what happens when religious theocracy undermines democracy.”

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Solemani’s Persian Jewish father fled Iran, met her Northern Irish Plymouth Brethren mother and they settled in north London, both socialists, both atheists, both teachers. Her mother died of cancer when she was 16 and about to audition for the National Youth Theatre. Understandably she went a little off the rails, with some underage drinking and party-crashing, but pulled it together to study social and political sciences at Cambridge. She has since married Daniel Ingram, a sustainable finance investor, and both converted to Judaism.

Despite this background, she wanted to make a show looking at how appealing the far right can be. “A lot of Jewish film-makers are reluctant to humanise Nazis,” she explains. “But I wanted you to feel real empathy for the young boys that get involved in the National Socialist Movement and even Colin Jordan, because we have to understand where it comes from. No one sets out to be a murderous dictator, but it starts with blaming the other. The monstrous Nazi trope isn’t helpful right now.”

She is depressed by the rise of antisemitism in the UK, especially as it includes elements of the left as well as the right. “It’s confusing how it can happen that these representatives of far-right views can become popular,” she says sadly. “Every year that passes Ridley Road’s subject matter becomes more and more relevant and urgent. It feels like you could just read the newspapers today and be, like, ‘OK, we should make a show about this.’ For a while antisemitism disappeared from the far right in the UK, but it seems to be their hot PR strategy now. And seeing people from the left sympathise with Iran’s views on Jews frightens me.”

She wrote a speech for Eddie Marsan’s Jewish cab driver that underpins this fear. “It’s hard to imagine when you trust your country how bad it can get. Everything seems absolutely fine until the moment that it ain’t. And then it’s just too late,” he tells O’Casey’s Epstein. “Eddie’s performance just nailed it,” she says. “That’s exactly what it was like. And if we don’t fight every single day it will happen again.”

Shifting from a sketch performer who cut her teeth in Cambridge Footlights to a hard-hitting political drama writer, she explains, was her reaction to male commissioning editors turning down her ideas or inviting her out for seduction suppers.

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“I could see the boys who graduated with me walk into the BBC (her Footlights contemporaries include Nick Mohammed and Simon Bird and Joe Thomas of The Inbetweeners). I had an audience, so I knew it wasn’t ability. With the UK commissioning system they don’t say, ‘You’ll never get a show on because you’re a woman.’ They’ll put you on a scheme or take you to dinner and I suddenly realised that these dinners were not because they were interested in me as a writer. It’s all just gaslighting.”

Ridley Road’s Sarah Solemani on why we need to understand the Nazis (2)

Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani in Him & Her

PERRY CURTIES/BBC

To be fair, the years weren’t entirely bleak — after Him & Her she secured roles in Bad Education, The Wrong Mans, No Offence and in two Steve Coogan movies. Out of these she formed an unlikely writing team with Coogan. Now she’s writing and filming a comedy about #MeToo, Chivalry, with him for Channel 4.

“We were filming Greed as #MeToo happened,” she says with a wry smile. “He had a lot to say about it and I had a lot to say about it and we weren’t really in alignment. I was interested that he was willing to thrash it out, whereas a lot of men were keeping their head down. That’s how the show was birthed. He has created this film producer, Cameron O’Neill, who’s slightly overwhelmed by this new sexual landscape. I play a woke, feminist film-maker who has been drafted in to fix his project. We hate each other but become attracted to each other. I shouldn’t be falling in love with an old white dinosaur . . .” she says, laughing.

She’s then adapting Mary Trump’s book about her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough, for TV. “America is this place of extremes — while I’m here I’m sweaty and frightened, whereas in the UK I’m cold and ignored, so you have to embrace those extremes.” She shrugs. “What is so powerful about America, in the light of Ridley Road, is that in 2020 they voted Trump out. History tells us that you don’t get men like that out.”

Ridley Road is on BBC1 from Oct 3, with all four episodes on iPlayer

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Men, not just monsters

Ridley Road’s Sarah Solemani on why we need to understand the Nazis (3)

Taika Waititi and Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit

ALAMY

Das Boot (1981)

Wolfgang Petersen’s ultimate submarine drama about a U-boat crew of Germans trying to sink Allied ships without totally losing their minds shows them as men rather than just Nazi ideologues.

Downfall (2004)

Through spit, panic and fury, Bruno Ganz plays Hitler watching from his bunker as the world he created collapses.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Taika Waititi’s film is a surprise: a nimble coming- of-age comedy about a Nazi boy whose imaginary friend is Hitler (Waititi). At its heart is a sparkling performance from young Roman Griffin Davis as Jojo.

Ridley Road’s Sarah Solemani on why we need to understand the Nazis (2025)
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