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Adjusting the contrast National and cultural identity, ethnicity and difference have always been major themes within the national psyche. People are witnessing the rise and visibility of far-right politics and counter-movements in the UK and USA. Simultaneously, there is an urgent need to defend the role of public service media. This book emerges at a time when these shifts and conjunctures that impact on and shape how 'race' and racial difference are perceived. They are coinciding with rapidly changing media contexts and environments and the kinds of racial representations that are constructed within public service broadcasting (PSB), specifically the BBC and Channel 4. The book explores a range of texts and practices that address the ongoing phenomenon of race and its relationship to television. Policies and the management of race; transnationalism and racial diversity; historical questions of representation; the myth of a multicultural England are also explored. It interrogates three television primarily created by women, written by women, feature women in most of the lead roles, and forcefully reassert the place of women in British history. The book contributes to the range of debates around television drama and black representation, examining BBC's Shoot the Messenger and Top Boy. Finally, it explores some of the history that led to the belated breakthrough of Black and Asian British comedy. The book also looks at the production of jokes about race and colour prior to the 1980s and 1990s, and questioning what these jokes tell us about British multiculturalism in this period.
’ will ‘light the fuse and this country’s gonna blow’ is now finally materialising. Little did Cracker audiences know at the time that they were in fact, as Kinsella states, ‘looking at the future’: a future where the socially marginalised would indeed turn to explosive, populist, far-right political movements to have their voices heard.
industrial subgenre an intimidating one to outsiders. This was a movement that was transgressive not only in its musical form but also in its philosophical outlook. As Christopher Partridge has noted, industrial artists took seriously ‘their role as the damned in society and enthusiastically excavated what the modern world had rejected – including occult thought, far-right political discourse and sadistic criminality’.3 This ensured that the industrial scene stood out as a particularly anarchic and nihilistic force in the post-punk musical underground. Unsurprisingly, then
modernity. Like most Englishmen prior to the end of the twentieth century, he elided English with British national identity in a seemingly unproblematic way. The Union Jack signifies England in both Jubilee and The Last of England since at the time he made those films, the flag of St George, the more precise signifier of Englishness, was then still the almost exclusive property of far-right political groups. 21 This elision of
of demonstrative skinheads,53 and by ‘waving the flag’ Morrissey found himself being associated with far-right politics. The media turned against him, and the 1990s debate about Englishness in pop music was in CAMPBELL PRINT.indd 235 21/09/2010 11:25 236 Englishness, pop and The Smiths part initiated by the backlash against Morrissey. His erstwhile champions54 at the NME jumped on the bandwagon by writing a five-page feature about the concert and condemning Morrissey as a racist,55 casting a long shadow over his whole career and pushing him into commercial and
witnessing the rise and visibility of far-right politics and counter-movements in the UK and USA. Simultaneously, there is an urgent need to defend the role of public service media, given its position in the multicultural public sphere.1 This collection emerges at a time when these shifts and conjunctures that impact on and shape how ‘race’ and racial difference are perceived, are coinciding with rapidly changing media contexts and environments and the kinds of racial representations that are constructed within public service broadcasting (PSB). Even in the midst of these
subsequent condemnation certainly renewed interest in and sparked debate around the events of the Second World War some fifty years after its conclusion. In the twenty years following Chirac's landmark speech in 1995, two more presidents have come and gone; Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–12) and François Hollande (2012–17). This period saw a significant rise in popularity for far-right political parties, including the National Front. This is important to our story as they reintroduced conservative rhetoric into public discourse, echoing the sentiments of
1980s London. Margaret Thatcher had swept to power as prime minister in 1979 promising to boost police resources and powers; policing had become increasingly politicised and racialised (Reiner 2000). As Stuart Hall pointed out in an influential essay, though Enoch Powell had been personally defeated, ‘Powellism’ and the far-right politics it inspired lived on in Thatcherism, through the ‘magical connections and short circuits between the themes of race and immigration control and the images of the nation’ which Powell had conjured (Hall 1979: 20). The Tory govern