‘What Price Channel 4’ – Who cares for multicultural programming?

June 9 2016

Contributors who shaped the early identity of Channel 4 in the UK, argue in a new book that its unique remit should be preserved, as the government looks at options for the broadcaster’s future. The structure of Channel 4 is to be examined alongside BBC charter renewal and there are some who believe privatisation of the channel represents the best way forward  –  without any commitment to minority programming and/or viewing whatsoever…

By Farrukh Dhondy, writer and former Channel 4 multi-cultural commissioning editor

I DIDN’T read it myself, but when Liz Forgan, Controller of Programmes at Channel 4 in the 1990s left to be the BBC Radio Supremo (not the way the post was advertised), she told an interviewer that being at Channel 4 was “the best job in the world”.

She went on to qualify her enthusiasm: “where else would you get a commissioning editor for religion who is an atheist, a commissioning editor for arts, who doesn’t believe in art and a commissioning editor for multicultural Programming who is a racist?”

The quote may be apocryphal or distorted, but it points, in Liz’s inimitable summarising style, to a positive truth about Chanel 4’s raison d’etre.

It was born to defy, to swim against the current, to disbelieve. It was a purpose determined by Parliament; a mission to bring to the small screen what other Channels didn’t and to represent the voice of ‘minorities’.

The remit was formulated through the social and political experience of the 1970s and early 1980s. There were new, if nebulous conglomerations whose lives, opinions and even presence seemed unrepresented and locked out of mainstream BBC and ITV.

There was the feminist voice, the presence and lives of the gay community. There were the new communities of Britain who appeared on TV either as stereotyped outsiders or as rabble rousers with a mission to complain which TV occasionally patronised. There were potential converts to sports other than soccer and cricket. There was the need to integrate the disabled into the fabric of the premier socialising, entertaining and conversational medium of the country.

Of course the ‘remit’ was open to interpretation and Channel 4’s first Chief Executive Jeremy Isaacs and consequently the team he chose as ‘Commissioning Editors’, a job he conceived and introduced into British TV, did precisely that. There were checks on this freedom of interpretation.

Liz’s probably-apocryphal remark points to the freedom the commissioning editors had in the first decade-and-a-half of the Channel’s existence. It was to do something unexpected and yet representative.

As the second commissioning editor to be appointed to the multicultural remit, a year after the Channel was set up, I interpreted my job as venturing into the parts of the new communities that other programmes and channels had not reached.

This entailed the recruitment of people to the manner rather than the manor born.

It was not a complexion-counting exercise. I recruited Tariq Ali and Darcus Howe, both journalists with vast experience outside the mainstream, both with firm connections in the Asian and West Indian communities and with a commitment to international perspectives, to edit a socio-political programme.

They had formed a production company with others, non-ethnics, experienced in TV reportage. The aim wasn’t jobs for black boys. It was getting a probing programme with a radical agenda that fitted the remit.

So also commissioning the situation comedy “Desmond’s” from the team of Trix Worrell (black) and Humphrey Barclay (very white), wasn’t an attempt to boost the headcount of what has hideously come to be called ‘diversity’.

It was an attempt to present the comic dimensions of a Black British community. It worked.

That was 20 and more years ago. Since then, the whole landscape and scope of TV, with the multiplication of commercial channels and the superposition of computer media, have changed.

In Channel 4’s early days we would screen a season or two of Bollywood films and, very early on weekday mornings, we would show the dawn-risers of the Asian community episodes of Pakistani and Indian serials. With the availability of a dozen or more Indo-Pakistani channels specialising in films and serials, that programming necessity no longer exists.

What Channel 4 also did in the past was give debut opportunities to feature film directors of ethnic origin such as Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha, Deepa Mehta, Shekhar Kapur, Jamil Dehlavi, Horace Ove, Faris Kermani and Ahmed Jamal to mention those who come immediately to mind.

They brought to the screen alternative visions from Britain’s new communities. They also proposed alternative ways of interpreting Bollywood’s dancing, singing conventions into serious drama. No such commitment can be seen on Channel 4 today.

There are reasonable arguments on both sides for reviving such a multicultural remit or for redefining it and calling it something else (but please not DIVERSITY!).

A few weeks of watching Channel 4 as it is now in 2016, leads inexorably to the conclusion that the ‘remit’ doesn’t exist.

I must have missed the Act of Parliament that changed or relaxed it, though I haven’t missed the fact that women’s programmes have completely absorbed feminist ideology, that gays find representation of sorts on TV and that perhaps the imperatives that governed early Channel 4 are deemed by those who run it to have melted away.

The ‘remit’ seems to confine itself to a diluted ‘diversity’.

Channel 4’s responsibility is to get some ‘diverse’ faces on screen and to enjoin the companies that produce programmes for it to include some ‘diverse people’ in the production process.

The headcount is all – apart from the pursuit of audience figures with which it should be compatible.
There was a deputy editor with a distinctly diverse name on the Channel 4 evening news. The weather reporter was also a diversity-wallah. In the Jamie and Jimmy cookery show, Usain Bolt turned up and introduced the café and the viewing world to jerk pork. The same programme featured Tandoori chicken in a real garden-constructed tandoor. Diversity with Celebrity on a cookery programme. I can bet the present Commissioning Editor for Cookery is not a vegan or anorexic.

One can’t consider today’s Channel 4 programming without commenting on their series entitled “Keeping up with the Khans”.

It’s dedicated to examining a part of Sheffield called Page Hall which was, till recently, almost entirely inhabited by Pakistani immigrants of the third or even fourth generation.

The series concentrates for a few episodes on the newcomers to the area, the Syrian and African refugees and the East European Roma who are happy to settle there.

It examines, if only cursorily, the tensions that thee newcomers face in attempting to integrate into British life. The series, in true dedicated fashion to cultural multiplicity, has an episode featuring a relatively fat Muslim wedding.

One of the episodes of “Keeping up with the Khans” (pictured below) featured the whites (part of diversity?) who remain behind in Page Hall. All of those featured in this episode were in one sense or other on the fringes of society. The main character Joanne, was a pregnant homeless woman partnered with an alcoholic and drug-addict called ‘Monkey’.

Among others who were featured, was a gentleman in a mobility chair whose knee had got irreparably infected by his pet dog licking a wound in it.

There were others featured in the episode and all of them, like the lame and blind man of my allegorical story above, were marooned in Page Hall which the whites of Sheffield had long since abandoned. They said they were isolated in an alienating sea. The pregnant. homeless girl Joanne gave birth to a boy which her boyfriend, who soon succumbed to his alcohol addiction, disowned the child. Joanne said she wasn’t abusing the Pakistanis through racism, she was ‘just jealous.’

Laudable and very watchable though I think the series was, its purpose was unclear. I don’t mean to imply that observational narratives ever have, or ought to have a single purpose. One could take from the series, without anything in it pointing to this conclusion, that the immigration policies of the 1960s and 1970s had allowed Page Hall to grow into an exclusive, enclosed Pakistani community which can now be seen as a failure of social or assimilative policy.

The only glimpse we were given into the already settled Pakistani community was the wedding episode. Introduced by a pretty little Pakistani infant girl it was a twee insight for the rest of Britain into what Muslim weddings are like.

Not so the results of Channel 4’s Muslim survey (broadcast in April). This essay and publication* go to print before the nation’s reactions or the response of the government to the survey are evident. That there will be comment and debate and even possibly some form of ‘backlash’ ** is certain.

The Channel 4 initiative in providing these statistics is to be applauded as it is the penetration of a wall of silence. What statistics cannot do however is inform the national conversation about the genesis of these attitudes, the tensions within the Muslim communities that may or may not be generated by them, the possible gestation and developments from them or the prospects for challenging or changing them.

That, one would have thought (and as someone who has worked as a commissioning editor at Channel 4, I think) is the job of observation, investigation, drama, comedy, soap and all the other forms and genres known and to be invented for the small screen. Surely that’s what the Channel’s remit is about?

This is an edited version of a longer essay, ‘Remit, Schmemit…Channel 4 today…’ from the book, *What Price Channel 4? Published on June 7 2016 and edited by John Mair, Fiona Chesterton, David Lloyd, Ian Reeves and Richard Tait and published by Abramis.

Further detail/purchase http://www.abramis.co.uk/books/bookdetails.php?id=184549680

Editor’s note: There was, with the Sun newspaper running a front page splash suggesting that many British Muslims did not hold ‘British values’. The newspaper chose to highlight statistics that presented a generally negative portrayal of Britain’s Muslims communities.

Views in this column do not necessarily represent those of www.asianculturevulture.com

What do you think?

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Richard Tait in The Guardian