Black and white
TELEVISION STUART HOOD
So far as I know, no investigation has been made into the influence of the cinema or tele- vision on race relations. To what extent, I should like to know, has the mass audience been conditioned in its attitude towards the question of colour? It has always struck me as curious that people who beeome agitated about sex and violence on the screen should not have given a thought to the problem.
It is, of course, notoriously difficult to estab- lish a causal nexus between exposure to images and impressions—particularly when they are offered within the context of pro- grammes intended to amuse and distract (often by their remoteness from social reality)—and the formation of social reflexes. I should be sur- prised, however, if the image of the negro as portrayed in Hollywood films between the wars did not play a large part in fixing in the mind of a world audience the idea that a coloured man is shiftless but happy, poor but contented, a skilful minister to the wants of the white man—shining his shoes, mixing his drinks, singing for him and dancing for him.
Television is fortunate in that we have pro- gressed since those days. Publicly at least we have become more liberal. There is a different world market to be thought of with inde- pendent African states, independent Asian states, where the television stations are not likely to accept the old prototypes: rich, cun- ning, devious, cruel Orientals; wild, ju-ju- besotted Africans. It was Hollywood that produced I Spy, in which, for the first time in history, a coloured man was not only the hero of a telefilm, but an undercover agent for the cu.. Integration can go no further.
But however liberal our public attitudes, we live and broadcast to a community which has large areas of illiberality. Southall and Smeth- wick are the names of two of them—but there are others. One of them is on the doorstep of the BBC's Midland Region, where David Porter, who is head of programmes in Bir- mingham, had the courageous thought to make a serial, The Rainbow City, in which the existence of a colour problem in this country is admitted, exposed and used as the main- spring of the dramatic action. Thus the subject was at last brought down from the rarefied atmosphere of current affairs programmes and presented to the viewers at 7.30 p.m. when they are likely to be switching on in large numbers. It is not the first time that David Porter has seen in television a social instrument which might help to break down the barriers between races. Each Sunday morning Make Yourself at Home, a programme in the ver- nacular for Indian and Pakistani immigrants, attempts to ease their social difficulties. But that is educational television. He must have known that The Rainbow City—it came on the air, ironically, in the first week of colour tele- vision—would be judged by other standards.
It was with considerable expectation that I switched on to see the first episode. The open- ing sequences, well directed by John Elliot, augured well. The amount of film used seemed to indicate that he had not had to skimp on resources. The trigger of the action—the loutish jostling of a peaceful West Indian by two layabouts—was an adequate trigger for the action, leading to a fight, a stabbing and the death of a negro boy. What Sort of a Boy? the title asked. The episode began to give an answer in a tentative semi-documentary way. We met a variety of West Indians, from a solicitor, played by Errol John, to a nurse and a youth leader. We met the solicitor's English wife. He kissed her in shot. The BBC thus achieved what ATV is said to have shrunk from in Emergency—Ward Ten—the overt display of sexual affection between black and white.
The programme's intentions, in short, were of the best, but it did not lift off the ground. What it lacked was tension—not the stress of a general social situation—but tension between human beings. Everyone was too good to be :rue, too reasonable to be altogether credible.
remembered a West Indian woman in, I believe, a Granada documentary bitterly dis- missing the British way of life. I switched off with the feeling that I had been read a tract, not shown what it is like to feel in one's bones ihe full weight of discrimination. Perhaps the programme will improve, become tauter, more genuinely dramatic. Perhaps Errol John will make the lawyer come to life. I hope so.
Meanwhile, the BBC should ask itself whether it ought not at last to remove from its future schedules The Black and White Minstrel Show. The days are long past when a coon show is tolerable on the air.
Previous page
