Paving the Empire Road: BBC television and Black Britons

"This brings us on to thinking about the BBC and the shaping of British culture and society. Newton’s book explores a theme that is implicit in a lot of the writing about the history of the BBC. For most historians, the BBC is a progressive, liberal, socially transformative force in British society—it is on the side of the angels, creating a more open and progressive and educated democracy. However, there is another way of viewing the history of the BBC—that it has actually been on the side of the Establishment, a socially conservative force, catering to the existing opinions and tastes of the majority and failing to serve minorities. Darrell Newton’s book helps us think about this by focusing on the issue of race. There is another good book about this—that I’d talk about if I had space—Gavin Schaffer’s The Vision of a Nation . What you really see coming out of both Newton’s and Schaffer’s books is, on the one hand, the BBC self-consciously taking on an educative role. From the 1950s onwards, BBC executives and programme-makers wanted to explore issues of racial inequality in Britain, exposing prejudice and getting white listeners and viewers to think about Commonwealth migrants to Britain in more positive ways. The BBC sought to promote tolerance and help create a multicultural society. However, on the other hand, the BBC was arguably slow and inconsistent in implementing this strategy and failed to put programmes on air that addressed the concerns and reflected the needs of Black and Asian people. When it did put Black people on air, it was largely as singers and entertainers—Black performers could find few other roles. In doing research for my own book, I’ve been struck by the fact that going right back to the 1920s, Black singers and entertainers featured quite prominently in BBC programmes, but largely as musicians and entertainers. This continued to be the case for a very long time. The BBC’s most popular programme on television during the 1960s was, notoriously, The Black and White Minstrel Show , involving blackface performances by white singers and comedians. It remained on television until 1978. When Greg Dyke became Director-General of the BBC he famously described it, in 2001, as ‘hideously white’: very few executives were Black or Asian. These debates haven’t gone away: one of the accusations levelled against the BBC today is that it does not reflect the concerns of Black and Asian viewers. They have disproportionately abandoned the BBC and moved to alternative media services. Although the BBC royal charter now mandates it to reflect and champion diversity, its audience is increasingly middle aged, middle class and white. Darrell Newton’s book helps us explore the roots of those debates and controversies. It was ITV, but there were many BBC and ITV comedy programmes, particularly in the 70s, that picked up on the same themes that Rising Damp did, and often treated them much more crudely. Gavin Schaffer’s book looks at this in some detail. Till Death Us Do Part was the classic BBC engagement with the theme of race through comedy and it was very controversial at the time. For some viewers, Alf Garnett was a character who lampooned racial intolerance and racism by epitomising prejudice and holding bigots up for ridicule. However, other viewers laughed with him rather than at him, and critics accused the show of celebrating racism."