Boom time for anti-racist TV: How an £84 bottle of wine exploded in British broadcast TV | television

HeyOn the afternoon of 1984, Farouk Dundee went to lunch, not realizing that he was about to become part of British television history. The Indian-born writer was working for Channel 4 at the time on multiracial programs such as No Problem! It is a comedy series about a family of Jamaican heritage in London, and Tandoori Nights, a comedy about an Indian restaurant. When Dundee arrived at the Ivy, Jeremy Isaacs, the founding chief executive of the booming radio station, ordered an £84 bottle of wine.

“I thought, ‘What the hell is this all about?’” Dundee says. It turned out that Isaacs wanted him to be the next editor of Channel 4. “For God’s sake, I’m not a desk job guy,” he said. “I’m a writer.” But after a brief conversation with Trinidadian scholar and activist CLR James, with whom he was living during his divorce, Dundee changed his mind.

For the next thirteen years, he was part of a radical wave of British television that funded and supported the telling of ethnic minority stories in a way never seen before – or since. A new season at the British Film Institute in London, titled Constructed, Told, Spoken, will explore this ‘counter-history’, showcasing archival episodes that tell the forgotten story of British multiracial programmes.

Until the early 1980s, such shows spoke to audiences of color without closely collaborating with them. BBC Hindi programs included Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan (New Life, New Existence) and Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (Make Yourself at Home), which focused on integration into British life after post-war immigration.

“They were very condescending,” Dundee says, citing programs that, for example, instructed Asian women not to barter in supermarkets. BBC and ITV sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbor and Mind Your Language poke fun at Caribbean and South Asian dialects and cultures, and Dundee says broadcasters’ coverage of the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s was routine and repetitive.

Sarita Malik, professor of media and culture at Brunel University in London, calls this the era of “absorptive television.” “English has always been dominant,” she explains. [These shows] It was geared towards producing a “good minority” model. Cultural difference – dialect, humour, food, music – was acceptable, but political difference was not. [They wanted] A kind of “disagreement without opposition.”

But they got opposition. In a reflection of other anti-racism struggles in the 1970s, activist groups began to bring public and industry attention to racism on television, with high-profile groups such as the Campaign Against Racism in the Media organizing protests against racist programming including The Black and White Minstrel Show, and the Black Media Workers’ Association threatening strikes over racism at the BBC. It’s time for Britain’s new communities to join the national conversation – broadcasters can no longer afford to ignore them.

Proposed under Labour, Channel 4 was launched in 1982, during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister, with a radical mission. It had a department dedicated to multiculturalism, and as Britain’s first ‘publisher-broadcaster’, it could commission independent producers who had been excluded from the industry. Audience broadcasting was already covered by the BBC and ITV, so the channel chose to serve previously undervalued audiences.

As trade union membership continued to rise and anti-racist organizing increased, the Broadcasting Corporation collaborated with grassroots groups, labor movements, activist writers and independent filmmakers under the direction of the Multicultural Programs Commissioner, Sue Woodford. Dundee, who was heavily involved in the anti-racist magazine Race Today, the British Black Panthers and the Indian Workers’ Association, was well placed to do this work.

Channel 4 has adopted a philosophy called “direct speech”, meaning that discussion should come directly from communities rather than being mediated through industry professionals. Television was a natural medium for this, and was still a nascent form compared to newspapers. To be a real part of the national discourse, people of color needed a life beyond what Dundee calls “complaint programs”: those programs about housing, education, and employment that simply point out the existence of racism, as if to explain it to white audiences. “Oh, it’s racist, racist, racist,” he says. “It’s boring. No one wants to watch it.” Instead, Dundee believed we needed comedies, dramas, documentaries, and lots more.

Probably the most famous program to adopt a policy of direct speech in the 1980s was Bandung File, commissioned by Dundee and edited by British-Pakistani writer-director Tariq Ali and British-Trinidian Black Panther Darcus Howe. The documentary and current affairs program was unique in its attempts to present the interests of the “Third World” and ethnic minorities to black, South Asian and white British audiences. Drawing on Race Today’s print political reporting, the Bandung File served communities of color in practical ways. Programs addressed black and Asian consumer issues and warned about changes to immigration and naturalization law.

The show explored the many facets of racism, beyond caricatures. One episode, titled “Too Many Questions,” examined the nuances of racism on Britain’s borders, noting that black people from countries like Canada enjoyed privilege over those from poor, black-majority countries. The show’s legacy remains precious: last week Ali expressed concern that he would not be invited to speak at next month’s BFI show, fearing the show’s vision would not be communicated (Ali has since been invited).

This era also saw Channel 4’s Asian magazine Eastern Eye and the African and Caribbean show Black on Black. The latter was the first British program to be presented by black journalists – and the team included figures who would go on to achieve other feats, such as Julian Henriques, the director of the first black British musical, and Victor Romero-Evans, star of the first black musical to reach the West End.

Dundee says this type of career progression has been built into Channel 4’s strategy to train black and Asian people as directors, producers and camera crew, as well as actors and presenters. The broadcaster has funded small businesses led by people of color, offering them advice on how to get started in the industry, in an effort to decentralize production and get underrepresented communities working behind the camera.

As Channel 4 became known for its radical programmes, the BBC and ITV also diversified their output. The BBC established a production unit for Afro-Caribbean shows and launched Ebony, its first dedicated cultural review targeting the black community. Part of this interest was economic, says Xavier Alexandre Pillay, curator of the BFI season. “In local markets in the early 1980s, programs were produced to meet the needs of diverse audiences.” When broadcasters were under scrutiny, Pillay says, this competence was conveyed, the feeling “that the particular broadcaster could be trusted to reach even those audiences considered marginal”.

But by the turn of the millennium, around the time Dundee decided to leave Channel 4, the economic, political and industrial context had changed. The introduction of digital television and Freeview has intensified competition between channels, leading to increasing populist and sensationalist programming. Under New Labour, “multiculturalism” once again came to mean assimilation, and more political understandings of race fell out of fashion. Channel 4 disbanded its multicultural programming department shortly after Dundee’s departure, and turned towards commercial competition. The BBC and ITV followed similar paths.

Despite their potential to evoke pessimism or nostalgia, the BFI season’s broadcasts are an important part of British media history, and help set the context for where we are today. When it comes to diversity on television, broadcasters and pundits often reinforce the idea that we’re on the verge of progress. But this counter-history suggests just the opposite: that the 1980s can be considered a golden age for anti-racist television, and that, in some ways, we have gone backwards.

Today, ethnic minorities may feel better represented on the small screen, but as of 2020, they represented only 8% of those working in creative and content production roles, and 9% of those in leadership roles. “People see representation as the ultimate goal,” Dundee says. “So what you get is black or mixed-race families advertising to sell soap. That doesn’t solve anything.”

The Baladna Food Industries Archive also shows the importance of financial and structural investment. The multicultural television movement was successful because of dedicated units, huge levels of investment, and worker organizing that directly threatened power structures. The political landscape is different now. “Since the 1980s and 1990s, we have seen a creeping depoliticization of the issue of more diverse representation — representation without structural challenge,” Malik says.

Pillay tells me this is especially true for non-fiction: “If we look to the present, it’s amazing to see episodes of Ebony where cultural perspectives aren’t co-opted while interviewing people of West Indian descent talking about the complexities of returning to the Caribbean, or television providing historical context for present-day issues.” He points to the British media’s failure to put the circumstances that led to the 2011 riots into context as the latest example of the reporting gap.

Pillay adds that very few people realize that all this existed, and that, without this context, we are at risk of revising history. “[Contemporary] Dramas like Small Ax are great, but these historical events are there, captured in real time: interviews with people who were in Grunwick, coverage of the Deptford fire.

When we don’t acknowledge these narratives as part of our history, we also tend to paint an unfairly bleak picture of the past. “When people talked about acting in that era, the first thing they mentioned was ‘Love Your Neighbor’ or ‘Mind Your Language’ – two ITV sitcoms that have since become notorious for their racism.”[That’s] It is as if historians talked about television in the first decade of the twenty-first century and only mentioned Jeremy Kyle.

Reality is always more complex. As Dundee says, television is not just one thing, it reflects the national conversation. This conversation is multi-layered, contested, and far from over. As the archive shows, it can change at any moment.