‘Londongrad’ depicts London’s diverse Russians
Print Edition
Riding around London in a beat up Lada are an unlikely team: a maths genius, a beautiful heiress and an unflappable taxi driver who speaks no English.
They are some of the colourful cast of characters in “Londongrad,” a new drama airing on Russian television this week that depicts the English capital’s diverse Russian community.
In a first for Russian TV, 80 percent of the scenes were filmed on location in London, the makers say.
The fast-paced series premiering today on CTC tells the story of a “concierge” agency set up to get super-rich Russians out of scrapes — for a hefty fee, naturally.
In the first episode, the agency’s boss, Misha, discreetly fishes the drunken playboy son of a loaded Russian official out of a police cell.
Misha, played by up-and-coming actor Nikita Efremov, is a brilliant mathematician who dropped out of Oxford, disgusted at the class system.
Passing for a Londoner in his scruffy parka, Misha likes to joke about his fellow countrymen just off the plane.
At the Heathrow airport arrivals area, he scans the passengers with a cynical eye and lists the typical types from a Moscow hipster to an oil executive coming to buy a pad in Mayfair.
Unusually for Russian television, the show was scripted by two Americans, Michael Idov and Andrew Ryvkin, who both have Russian roots and speak the language fluently.
They say they tried to avoid the cliches of peroxide blondes in leopard print or oligarchs owning football clubs.
“Everyone was expecting that and that’s precisely why Andrew and I didn’t want to go there, because it’s just not interesting enough,” said Idov, a novelist and former editor of Russian GQ who now lives between Moscow and Berlin.
“It does paint a more diverse picture of Russians in London, as it steers away from the stereotype that we all have six to nine zeroes in our bank accounts,” said Ryvkin, who worked on television and film projects in Russia and wrote for British paper The Guardian before moving back to the US recently.
Much of the Londongrad’s dialogue was written and filmed in English as the Russian characters interact with British people.
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