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3658 Paving the empire road:Layout 1 30/6/11 08:45 Page 16 1 Radio, race, and the Television Service Well one thing I think that will interest West Indians is what is the attitude – of the English people as a whole, – how do they take to strangers. After all West Indians are coming over here in increasing numbers, and they’d like to know what sort of person they’re going to meet, and how they’re going to be treated. (West Indian humorist and Government Public Relations officer for Jamaica, A.E.T. Henry, on the BBC radio programme We See Britain, 1 June 1949
more controversial as viewers witnessed West Indian immigrants arriving on the Empire Windrush; an event televised to only a modest portion of the population given that fewer than 130,000 licences were held in 1948. There was no way to ignore this phenomenon, however, particularly when considering newspaper coverage and cinematic newsreels.5 A major component of this televised imagery was footage shot by the British Pathé Film Company that made its way from motion picture theatres into the homes of licence holders. Unlike before the war, programmers at the BBC during
the colonial empire. He notes how, as the Colonial Development and Welfare Act passed in 1940, after decades of imperialism being ‘least challenged politically by colonial nationalism, the British establishment turned its mind towards colonial development at precisely the point when its rule began to be undermined’.1 The Crown’s need for support among its colonies is apparent in the numerous radio broadcasts, newsreels, and films featuring West Indian troops as part of the war effort. However, as the war ended, concerns continued over an increase of immigration from
discontinuity. Perhaps the most underrated of these ‘writerly’ collaborations are the four films that Losey made with the West Indian screenwriter Evan Jones in the early 1960s. The pair first worked together on The Damned (1961), when Jones (who until then had worked largely in television) was brought in at the last minute for a hurried rewrite of Barzman’s original script. Losey had discovered the writer through
England and Britain represented for generations to come. Audiences soon had a choice of musical variety programmes, and a host of dramatic teleplays and informational talks, each demonstrating the ability of television to hopefully do what BBC radio had done for nearly fifteen years: entertain and inform a variety of publics on current, global, and national events. One such event occurred on 22 June 1948, as the troop transport Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks with West Indian immigrants eagerly searching for a better life within the British Isles. The group of
increasingly important. 237 238 The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922–53 Members of Britain’s West Indian and Asian communities, or more recent immigrants from Europe and Africa, who could find it difficult to embrace ethnically based identities such Englishness or Scottishness, might be able to accommodate themselves to the more institutionally based national identity that Britishness offers. And these are, much like those of the Scottish and Welsh, dual identities—Black British or British-Asian—reaffirming the historic function of Britishness in integrating
. From the plays that survive, it is clear there was a considerable diversity in the work produced in the nine series of Second City Firsts. They include naturalistic studio plays as well as social realist dramas; intimate personal dramas as well as campaigning agit-prop dramas like Fight for Shelton Bar; plays about the West Indian community in Birmingham (Barry Reckord’s Club Havana) and about lesbians in the army; plays about football, journalism, dogs, clairvoyantes, strikes and politics. The fact that the plays were only thirty minutes long and mostly recorded in
which the legitimation of xenophobia by the Brexit campaign and the preceding government policy of a ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants have contributed to a kind of ecumenical causality, in which the blaming of the others – foreigners, yuppies, immigrants – can coexist with older nationalist and racist formations. Nelson unearths the long history of white politics in the area in the testimony of the Reverend Gloria about vigilante harassment of the worshippers at the (mainly West Indian) Bethel Tabernacle in the 1970s
reputational damage to his party, Ward's lifestyle uncovered a trove of salacious content and promiscuous relationships that could be used to divert attention away from Profumo's own naughty behavior. Given the radius of Ward's acquaintances, the case dredged up a shocking (for the time) convergence of social and racial spheres: a dancer from Murray's Cabaret, it was discovered, skinny-dipped in a lord's swimming pool; a West Indian jazz singer, a Soho slum landlord and a Member of Parliament shared the same lover; and a man in a mask, naked except for an apron, with a
Annigoni in 1954–55, when she was in her late 20s. The grey hair and West Indian accent of the film’s fictional painter, Mr Crawford, also recall the bygone heyday of immigration from the Caribbean. Moreover, the character is portrayed by Earl Cameron, best known for the 1950s and 60s film and television melodramas in which he so often played the virtuous victim of racist violence ( Sapphire , Basil