Struggling for the Ordinary: Race in British Television Drama

Abstract

The representation of black and Asian people in British television drama remains, to this day, predominantly in the hands of white programme makers.1 In the 1960s and 1970s, white control over the dramatic representation of blackness on television (and of issues relating to multiculturalism, race relations and immigration) was almost total. As Malik has recorded: ‘When a “Black Story” was to be produced, it was up to the White (usually male and middle-class) writer to “fight the black corner”.’2 This televisual tendency to speak on behalf of black and Asian people was not only a feature of British representation; instead, it has been the default position of European and American drama on film and television for as long as these media have existed, a matter which has triggered substantial and persistent criticism. It is in this context, for example, that bell hooks rounded on the ‘institutionalization via mass media of specific images, representations of race, of blackness that support and maintain the oppression, exploitation, and overall domination of all black people’.3 hooks’ linking of ‘images’ and ‘oppression’ implies a vicious circle of power and representation, grounded in a belief in the ability of dramatic images to cement and reinforce off-screen social relations. Stuart Hall similarly emphasised that representation was intrinsically tied to society’s power-brokers, ‘not only by the institutional position of broadcasting itself as an “ideological apparatus”, but more intimately by the structure of access’.4KeywordsBlack PeopleRace RelationTelevision DramaAsian PeopleDaily MailThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.