A new BBC podcast, Shadow World: Breakin' the Cycle, tells the extraordinary story behind the making of the 2005 British film Breakin' the Cycle, whose rough cut was seized by the Metropolitan Police and long presumed lost. The film was written and directed by Colin Browne, leader of the Hackney gang Love of Money, while he was serving a prison sentence for cocaine smuggling, and it starred rapper Lethal Bizzle and Bradley McIntosh, then trying to shed his S Club 7 image. Its production, which unfolded alongside real gang activity, drug dealing and violence, blurs the line between the film's fictional plot and the lives of the people making it.

The podcast is presented by Lewis Albrow, the film's editor, who reconnected over the years with Browne's associate known as "D", who later served a prison sentence for drug dealing before emerging, in Albrow's words, "a changed man". Browne himself was killed shortly after filming wrapped, having hoped the project might reach the Cannes film festival. McIntosh, cast as a drug dealer, said the role was meant to help him move beyond his "clean tween pop image" into more serious work, while Albrow, then a novice editor, recalls a chaotic low-budget shoot with unreliable sound. The series explores how the film-makers navigated genuine gang rivalries and a film industry perceived as elitist and exclusionary.