Viewing (p)leasure, viewer pain: black audiences and British television

Abstract

This essay explores the views which black audiences hold towards the representations of their various selves on British television and is informed by the findings from a qualitative research study carried out in 1995 and undertaken for BBC TV Equal Opportunities. It argues that black audiences are both irritated and worried by the largely stereotypical construction of different 'ethnic' identities which regularly pervade and persuade TV narratives and suggests that the limited repertoire of black characterizations are a direct consequence of (white) writers' ignorance of black communities in real life and their (perhaps unconscious) racist assumptions about what black people are like. The tacit assumption that the mainstream audience is 'white' results in a disregard for cultural authenticity - that is, at least getting the details right- which viewers interpret as a disregard for themselves. These derogatory images not only affect self-esteem amongst black viewers and, in particular, children, but also impact in seriously negative ways on white audiences who, without first-hand knowledge of black communities, assume that their vicarious experience of television's portraits of 'blackness' is the real thing.