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CN = Clive Nwonka, Interviewer
INT = Lanre Bakare, Interviewee
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CN: Hi, I’m Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society at UCL and an Associate at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre of Racism and Racialisation here at UCL. Today, it’s an absolute pleasure to be joined by Lanre Bakare. Lanre was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. He’s a correspondent covering arts and culture for The Guardian, where his writing, focusing on the intersection of art, race and culture across multiple disciplines. He was senior correspondent on the award winning Cotton Capital Project and has worked in New York and Los Angeles as part of the Pulitzer prize winning US Guardian team.
Lanre is the author of the book, We Were There: How Black Culture, Resistance and Community Shaped Modern Britain. This book explores a black Britain that for too long has been unknown and unexplored and, crucially, the one that exists beyond London. Throughout the podcast, we’ll be discussing Lanre’s new book, its themes and some of the ideas and experiences that have informed Lanre’s writing and perspectives on contemporary black British identity and cultural production. So, Lanre, welcome to the podcast.
INT: Thanks for having me, Clive. I’ve been looking forward to this one.
CN: Amazing. So, the book’s been, I guess, a revelation since it’s come out a couple of months ago. I mean it’s been described by Steve McQueen, the film maker, as ‘a vital corrective that enhances our understanding of black British history,’ and also by the journalist Gary Young as ‘a rare journey, an incisive book at an important time.’ What are your own thoughts on the response to the book? And has this almost kind of validated your intentions for the book as a kind of intervention into black public history?
INT: Yeah, I mean I’ve been really, really pleasantly surprised at the impact. You obviously hope for the best but you brace. You also in your darker moments think is anyone going to care about this? Is it going to land with the right people? Are people going to get out what I set out to achieve? And like from touring the book and stuff, I think a lot of people have got it. Obviously great to have quotes from people like Steve McQueen and Gary Young. I had some really great reviews as well that seem to have really got what the book’s trying to achieve. So, yeah, overall really, really, really pleased and couldn’t really have asked for me, which is a nice place to be. It’s very satisfying.
CN: I mean for many, many years you’ve been, of course, arts and culture correspondent at The Guardian and your work has generally been concerned with contemporary black culture production, creative expression but also institutions, which always has a kind of historical element to it in regard to that culture and identity. And we’ve obviously collaborated over the years on some of this work as well. Given all of that, what motivated you to pursue writing this kind of book?
INT: I mean we’ve had many conversations over the years, haven’t we, about this idea of black British culture outside of London, outside of the capital, away from the kind of metropole and what that looks like and why it’s important, and why really big kind of cultural or historical figures, who might have influenced us or been part of our lives growing up, are suddenly just not kind of included into this, the kind of story that we tell ourselves about black British history.
Like I remember talking to you at a café about Martin Offiah and Ellery Hanley and these Rugby League players who, if you were black in the eighties and nineties, these were some of the biggest sporting figures in the country playing Rugby League, which is a game that is only played across the M62 corridor. I’m from Bradford and it is a massive sport where I’m from but for most people, who’d only kind of come up when the Challenge Cup was on TV, and it just so happened that Ellery Hanley and Martin Offiah produced some of their best moments during the Challenge Cup Final. So, for me, those moments are vitally important. Just as important as someone like Ian Wright or Linford Christie, or any one of the amazing sports people we could talk about from our childhoods.
So, yeah, I’ve had many conversations like that over the years and I just understood that there were these stories that were there to be told and I think watching something like Small Acts was big. That was a big moment for a lot of people, to see five films about black British culture during the kind of period that I’m interested in, which is the kind of seventies going into the eighties, was a huge watershed but there was the frustration that they were all London stories. It felt like a great opportunity to tell stories, to bring in stories from Liverpool or Leeds or Glasgow or wherever.
And I get why that didn’t happen. Steve McQueen’s a big name and it was based around him and his understanding of London and that’s fine. But I knew these stories were out there to be told and we had a great response from the world of publishing. A lot of people agreed and wanted to buy the book and, thankfully, I found a good home for it at the Bodley Head and I think they’ve done justice to it.
CN: Yeah, absolutely, and it’s interesting you mention Small Acts but also that period in time, which we can now look back and call the post-George Floyd wake or the post-George Floyd context and other kind of parlances. And I think what always frustrated me was, yes, there was this kind of moment of reckoning and self-examination within British society and cultural institutions about those lost histories and those forgotten important moments in black cultural history and identity, that were now being readdressed through cultural production, through publishing or film or beyond.
And Small Acts, in many ways, kind of bridged those two moments as a kind of looking back at the past, but this particular kind of cultural conjunctural moment of the post-George Floyd era where we needed a visibility of blackness in a historical context but, of course, as you mentioned, rightly so, this is a very London centric idea of a broader emancipatory kind of black identity across the UK.
So, in many ways, do you think your book was quite timely in that it actually kind of circumvented that two or three year kind of post-George Floyd kind of wake, where all this kind of work was coming out, the films, the music, the books that were claiming to examine the contours of black British history from a very, very London centric way?
INT: Yeah, I mean I address this in the introduction. I kind of say that if you look at the films and TV that were produced in the immediate the wake of George Floyd, where you had a lot of people in those industries scrambling to put together programmes that showed black British life. If you think of stuff like, I mean Small Acts we’ve already mentioned but, say, Dreaming Whilst Black, I Might Destroy You, Queenie, Boarders, Riches. There are a bunch of other shows as well. I can list them all and then I say all of these shows were based in London, or written by Londoners. And I think in the rush to kind of correct the record after when BLM hit, that kind of tidal wave hit Britain, there was this tendency to screw things back to the centre, maybe to what producers thought was a legitimate or genuine or authentic black British story, which not even nine times out of ten, more than that, was based in London. And I think that was a missed opportunity.
There are obviously anomalies. If you think of stuff like This Town which was a Steven Knight show about Two-Tone. You’ve got a protagonist there who’s black British who’s based in Coventry. That was something different. But the portrayals of black British life, especially in black communities outside of London, I mean they’re vanishingly small now, I think you could argue that the period I write about, 1977 to 1990, it was a better time for representation of black British voices outside of the capital than it is now. That might be slightly controversial but if you think of the four channels, if you did have a show like Empire Road, which was commissioned in 1978 and set in Birmingham, the first black British soap opera, that was a revelationary moment. Is there any chance something like that would be commissioned now? Like absolutely no way.
So, yeah, I’m kind of glad the book came out when it came out. I remember when it was bought, the publisher was like, oh I wish we could publish this now but I’m actually glad it came out in 2025, like after that initial rush because that wave has broken now, and I think a few people are looking round and saying, you promised all this, so where’s this new promised land that we’d get to? I did a piece about publishing not that long after the book came out. People are saying things are worse than they were before Black Lives Matter. A lot of black publishers have lost their jobs or have left the industry through frustration. So, there’s still loads of work to do and I think a book like We Were There reminds you we have been there before and this isn’t something that suddenly gets better. You have to constantly work at it and remind people about their principles.
CN: Yeah, it’s the continuum and I think you articulate it so well that. But I remember even in the film world, things such as Boxing Day and Rye Lane and Pirates were all kind of hailed as being an immensely kind of vital piece of black British culture, and I’m like, yes of course they are but this is also a continuation of things we should be kind of challenging at this moment in time, which is the London centricity of how we think about black culture, black identity and beyond as well. So, there’s certainly something there about how we are trying to kind of shift stance slightly, gradually in thinking about these things. But going back to your book, so do you see continuities between your work as a journalist, given your curiosity and your enquiry but also your positions on particular stories, and you now as a kind of author / cultural historian?
INT: Yeah, some of it maps directly onto each other. So, before I started writing the book, I worked on a Cotton Capital Project which was a kind of internal project to The Guardian, which is the newspaper I work for, where we, a group of journalists in-house and some academics, looked at The Guardian’s connections to the slavery economy. It was a newspaper founded in the nineteenth century in Manchester, which was then known as Cottonopolis and there were connections. Some of the original funders on plantations were involved in the enslavement of people.
So, that piece of work took me to Manchester and I was writing a lot about black Manchester, which is covered in the book as well, in the sixth chapter and, yeah, I mean a lot of that work maps directly into what I did with We Were There. It’s about the historic context of a black community. Where does it come from? How does it evolve? How does it begin to influence the wider world around it? How does the wider world around it interact with the black community that’s starting to grow and become more visible and become more confident and become more vocal? And those are themes that I got throughout the book. That’s every chapter really we explore that, those themes in depth, whether it’s in Cardiff or it’s in Manchester or it’s in Bradford, my home town.
So, yeah, that was a great kind of apprenticeship before doing We Were There and it made the Manchester chapter a lot easier because I wasn’t starting from scratch. And just more generally, I’ve been a cultural journalist for like 15 years now, 14, 15 years and I think that’s stood me in good stead because it’s something that I love, something that I’m passionate about, and I think culture is such a fascinating way to view a community or to view a people. And the period that we’re talking about, I think black British culture was changing. It was evolving. It was becoming a lot more kind of forthright, whether it’s visual art or it’s music through Reggae and it was multifaceted.
That’s why I wanted to write about Northern soul as well, which is seen as a white scene, even though it was powered exclusively, almost exclusively, by black music, and the racial dynamics there and the elements that have kind of been missed in the retelling of that story, because often it is just presented as a white working class movement but I found it was more complicated. There were more layers there. So, yeah, doing what I do on a daily basis really stood me in good stead and kind of gave me a good basis from which to write something like We Were There.
CN: So, thinking about those methods, I mean related to the book, how did you actually go about piecing this lost history together?
INT: So, it started with finding a story. I wanted to make sure that each of the chapters would stand on its own two feet and would have a captivating story at its core. So, you usually follow like two or three characters through an event, a seismic event that happened in the black community, roughly over a 12 month period. Sometimes that’s a bit longer, sometimes it’s a bit shorter. So, that’s the kind of set up, the kind of premise.
So, it’s about going into archives. It was about finding correspondence from people. That’s where I started with a lot of it. Interviewing people who were still about, who were still alive, who were there at the events. Looking at primary, secondary sources. All the kind of things you would expect and also consuming a lot of culture, so documentaries, news reports, newspaper clippings, and music was crucial as well. Tried to put myself as much as possible in that space and in that time.
And then from there, it was a case of piecing that story together and then zooming out and talking about the wider context. So, for example, if you’re going to write a book about Birmingham and black Birmingham, you need to know about the industries that powered that city. You need to talk about economics and how that changed and shifted, and changed the way black people were treated. You need to talk about immigration and the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1968. You need to understand Jimmy Callaghan’s position on it. You need to understand Thatcher’s position on it and Nigel Lawson. You need to understand the Far Right and the NF.
All these things, these factors that were at play which, there’s a lot of echoes of today’s political landscape actually. It’s obviously a different situation but there’s a lot of the similar elements are still floating around in the British body politic. So, yeah, it’s all these kind of things that are in the ether and for me, it was about piecing them together and making a coherent narrative that tells a story of, for example, in Birmingham, the rise of Rastafarianism and the influence of someone like Stuart Hall in the city. But also Birmingham and Great Britain itself and how it was changing over that decade or decade and a bit that I write about.
CN: Amazing. So, thinking about that as well, I mean we’ve obviously spent years discussing why the BLACK British frame needs to be expanded beyond London. What is it about BLACK British popular culture and identity that means that our registers for BLACK Britishness are always embedded in London?
INT: Yeah, I mean it’s obviously an issue I’ve thought about a lot over the last kind of four or five years since I’ve been working on the book. I think it’s multifaceted. I think, as a journalist, I often watch… if you watch a documentary from that time or documentaries that are made about that time, the shorthand that we use to kind of understand black British culture, it comes from an incredibly limited palette. And I think even if you think about… if you were to ask most people to draw up a timeline of black British history, looking at the period just before the period that I write about, the seventies and the eighties and then just after, most of the events, the key events, the absolutely vital events that people would think about, would be based in London. So, I don’t know. I could do that exercise now.
If you think about the Notting Hill riots in 1958, the murder of Kelso Cochrane, ‘rivers of blood,’ (although that happened in the West Midlands so that’s a bit of an outlier), 1981 you have the New Cross massacre, Black People’s Day of Action. If people talked about the riots or the uprisings that happened in that year, it would probably be Brixton that they would focus on. You have the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976, 1977. Those are the things that people draw from to illustrate black Britain, because they’re interesting, because they’ve got these amazing images, like someone throwing a brick through a Black Maria’s window at the Carnival. It illustrates this racial tension vividly, and that’s what people like to search for.
But I’m interested in that kind of layer that goes under that, because that presents a very limited flattened story, which is evocative but it’s incredibly simplified. And most groups, most minoritised groups suffer from this but I think for black Britain, that’s the playbook. That’s the palette that people reach for.
I think there’s also kind of like still a general misunderstanding about black British life outside the capital in general. So, in Manchester now 13% of the population of that city is black. It’s a huge amount and it’s growing, and that’s a pattern that we’re seeing in many big cities around the country. People are moving there or have moved there in the last kind of ten to fifteen years. We need to have an interest in these places. They’re absolutely vital. We need to understand what’s going on with these communities and they need to understand that they’re not the first people who’ve been here. They’re part of this big lineage and history.
I just don’t know how much interest there is in telling those community-based stories now. In the seventies and the eighties, I think there generally was an interest. You had shows like Ebony or Ebony on the Road, where they do like a magazine show that was based in Butetown in Cardiff or Chapeltown in Leeds. There’s no way that’d get commissioned now. You might get a reality TV show in a chicken shop, or somewhere like that, but you wouldn’t get something that tried to tell the story of these communities.
And I often think as well the other thing that’s different now is some of the people who made that ground-breaking TV in the eighties, so, if you take someone like a Colin Prescod or a Darcus Howe, they were brought up at a time when the black cultural leaders in Britain were people like Amy Ashwood Garvey, C.L.R. James. They were people who fundamentally understood that black Britain was this nationwide place. Like C.L.R. James wrote some of his most important work when he was in Nelson near Blackburn in Lancashire. Amy Ashwood Garvey opened up the Pan-African Congress in 1945 in Manchester.
So, I think some of the most influential figures from that period instilled this understanding that black Britain was this thing that you needed to explore and it wasn’t just London, and I think over the last few years, that’s been rowed back on massively. I’d say from like maybe the 2000s onwards, just that lack of an interest in black Britain beyond the capital, and a genuine belief you can tell the story of black Britain from in this city which, I mean I would say this is as a Bradfordian but that’s just demonstrably untrue. Like you’re giving people a kind of flattened simplified version.
And the weird thing as well is I’ve lived all over the country. I’ve lived in Bristol, I’ve lived in Bradford obviously, Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle. London’s the outlier. London’s the place that is unlike anywhere else. Those other places have things in common. So, you’ve got it completely the wrong way round, in my opinion. Like this city is amazing. I love living here but if you want to understand about black British life in a city like Birmingham, you’re not going to be able to do that through the lens of London because it’s just completely unlike that city.
CN: I mean you mentioned you being, of course, from Bradford in Yorkshire and one of the most compelling chapters in your book is the story about George Lindo, and I related to the actual comment made by Nesrine Malik, The Guardian journalist in reviewing your book, where she mentioned your book is told with such love and tender. And there is something about the tenderness about how you tell that story that I think is very, very much about you exploring your own history as being someone from Bradford, is actually kind of hidden or made obscure. So, tell us briefly about the story about George Lindo?
INT: Yeah, so that chapter’s about George Lindo who was a textile worker born in Jamaica. Part of a big family that moved over in the late sixties and lived in Bradford and he worked as part of the textile industry and then now and again he liked to gamble. He used to frequent a bookies which was then robbed and his name was given by someone. The police went round, accused him of committing the crime and then, essentially, framed him and he ended up going to prison for almost two years. But that triggered this huge campaign locally and nationally where people like Darcus Howe got involved. Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote a poem about him, which was on his first album, Dread Beat an’ Blood. And it was a huge deal locally in Bradford and it basically illustrated the corruption of West Yorkshire Police.
It was a successful campaign. They managed to get him out early because it was proven that the police had falsified evidence in another case involving the Yorkshire Ripper and that same officer was accused of falsifying evidence in the Lindo case, so that was seen as a big enough problem for them to release him early. And it’s a fascinating story about a small community in Bradford. You’re talking about a couple of thousand black people, who lived in Bradford in the late seventies, coming together, with the assistance of some national figures, and successfully managing to get George Lindo out.
And at the same time, incredibly at the same time this was happening, there was a Tanzanian American film crew who were going round the UK creating a documentary called Blacks Britannica, which is all about the black British experience in the late seventies, going into the eighties. And some of that film captures the Lindo story, so you see people campaigning, you see some of the groups who were involved talking about the case.
And I just thought I’d tell these two stories that kind of intertwined and tell the story about community resilience, this man who’s at the centre of it. It’s a triumphant story in many ways but it’s also very tragic because of the way that George Lindo’s life panned out. He only lived until he was 37. He died of leukaemia. So, those two years… well, it was more like a five year period of him being arrested and then he won an appeal and managed to get some compensation. That was a big chunk of his adult life that he spent kind of engulfed in this awful thing. So, yeah, I wanted to show the kind of human cost of this widespread issue in the late seventies, which was police corruption and police racism, which was a massive issue, mostly through things like SUS but also framing people. People being framed all over the place in Britain.
And, yeah, the fact it happened in Bradford. Taking it out… if that was a London story, I think most people would expect that. They’ve probably heard of the Stockwell Six or the Oval Four, these big cases, Mangrove Nine for example, but I wanted to show that also happened in West Yorkshire. This was a nationwide issue and also the response to it, which was kind of incredible, incredibly kind of militant, well run, successful and it pointed to a kind of resilience within the community that most people aren’t aware of. So, yeah, it’s funny, after writing the book, I’ve had so many messages from people who are like, ‘I was a little kid out on those campaigns, I remember that. It radicalised me, it changed the course of my life.’ I’ve had so many people who’ve come forward and said that. So, yeah, it was a massive deal, I think, for people in West Yorkshire.
CN: What impressed me so much about the book is the range. You move from art to music to radical politics to injustice, but also, as you mentioned briefly beforehand, sport, and I certainly feel that sport is so neglected in our capturing of black British history but also iconography and the influence that they create. My first real encounter of black Britishness outside of the London frame was, as you’ve already mentioned, Martin Offiah. Now, as a British Nigerian, you recognise the name and recognise the importance there. So, watching as a young, young boy the old Silk Cut Challenge Cup on Wembley on a Saturday, I’m not quite sure he had a Northern accent but certainly the whole event was so rooted in being Northern. Why was Rugby League and the story of Ellery Hanley so important to you in the book?
INT: Yeah, I mean that was one story really early on that I knew I wanted to tell because for me growing up, Ellery Hanley but definitely Martin Offiah, and maybe Jason Robinson, some of the Rugby League players who were black, they were absolute heroes. They were like these black supermen who could kind of do anything because Rugby League’s such a macho physical sport. I still love watching it now and Martin Offiah was just the best player. He scored ten tries in a game. He scored a try at the Challenge Cup Final in 1995 which is maybe the best try that anyone’s ever scored, where he picks up in front of his own post and takes on the entire team. He was an icon. He was in Night Campaigns, alongside Michael Jordan.
People forget how big an impact he had and he was a black guy who was actually not from the North, he was from Hackney, who had just been kind of supplanted and taken from the world of Rugby Sevens, Rugby Union, which was incredibly hostile to black people and then placed into the professionalised world of Rugby League, which wasn’t. Well, it was hostile in one way in that people would get racial abuse but in another way was incredibly open. Like some of the biggest stars in Rugby League history are black. You think of Billy Boston, he’s still alive up in Wigan. There’s a statue of him outside Wigan Stadium. There’s some footage you can watch of him being applauded by the entire stadium of Wigan because he’s this legendary player who used to score like 50-odd tries a season and was maybe the greatest Rugby League player who’s ever played.
And that to me is just… I wanted to shift perceptions as well because I think people think of the North as this incredibly hostile place to black people, especially Londoners. You say oh, I grew up in Bradford and it’s like, oh my god, and actually Bradford’s a great place to grow up if you’re black actually. Like Bradford as a city, you can definitely… there’s some places where you wouldn’t necessarily want to go but as a city, it’s great because it’s incredibly diverse.
And I wanted to show how these players thrived in an unexpected location, but then when you look into the history, it makes complete sense. Like the lineage of black players goes back. I mean you’re talking Billy Boston, who’s big in the fifties. You’ve got Clive Sullivan, who was the first ever captain of a Great Britain sports team. He won the World Cup for them in 1972. He used to play for Hull. Colin Dixon, Johnny Freeman. There are all these players who came through and, yeah, had this huge influence on the sport and this huge influence on Northernness and like what it was to be a Northern man because these were the heroes of people.
So, yeah, I wanted to get stuck into that story and kind of focus on these two amazing athletes who emerged at the same time, and I think of them a little bit as like Messi and Ronaldo, where they were just setting new levels of excellence within the sport. Scoring 50-plus tries in a season, which no one had done since the 1960s when the rules were completely different. But Ellery Hanley was this incredibly driven man who completely created this paradigm shift within the sport and then was backed up immediately by Martin Offiah, who emerges a couple of years later as this complete maverick figure who’s scoring, again, 35 / 40 tries a season.
And I wanted to show like how, not only were they amazing at sport, at Rugby League, they also helped usher in this new age of black British celebrity. So, they had agents, they were involved in Night Campaigns, like I said. Martin Offiah was doing photoshoots in Cosmopolitan. He completely transcended Rugby League and it’s interesting, if you think of famous Rugby League players now, I don’t know if you could name a current playing Great Britain Rugby League player who’s playing in Super League? I think a lot of people would struggle. Whereas I think if you asked them to name a Rugby League player, still a lot of people would reach for Martin Offiah because he’s still that iconic.
And I think he transcended the sport, he took it to a different level. His race was a factor in that and he also, like I said, ushered in this new kind of confidence that I wanted to speak about towards the end of the book, because that chapter’s set in 1990 and I think going into the new decade, things were different from 1977. We had moved. Things had shifted. I’m in no way trying to say things were this wonderful utopia because clearly they weren’t, but I think a new confidence emerged from black Britain and I think people like Ellery Hanley and Martin Offiah probably typified that.
CN: It certainly feels to me that, as we enter the 21st century, that notions of black Britishness were glacially expanding, to the North and to the West as well, but generally in quite pejorative terms. So, I’m thinking about maybe the stigmas attached to Nottingham and gun crime, for instance, or Birmingham black ‘gangs.’ Do you see these as similar discourses to those maybe observed in the eighties in Toxteth and Chapeltown where we associate all the inability to imagine these communities beyond crime?
INT: Yeah, that’s definitely something that has kind of come over from that period and that kind of playbook that we see from the press and the way that black Britain’s written about, it hasn’t really shifted. I think you could make a pretty convincing argument that we’re still, in many ways, in the Thatcher era, in the way that politically things are discussed, the idiom that’s used, the playbook that’s used by politicians on all sides. So, if you think of, I don’t know, like Keir Starmer, his ‘island of strangers’ speech which is just still staggering he made that, but that is the kind of play that Thatcher would make, or Powell obviously, who he was he says unintentionally quoting from, or using incredibly similar language to.
And I think that kind of similarity in language and tone has shifted… hasn’t moved since then when it comes to talking about the black community. So, if you think about the narrative about County Lines, or you think of the way that ‘gangs’ are written about in Birmingham or in Manchester, for example, with joint enterprise where, if you’re part of a music crew and you do a music video, you are in a gang. That is not the case if you’re in a white group. It’s disproportionately those kind of joint enterprises used against black men coming together and making the music, which should be staggering but, unfortunately, is just part of, in maybe slightly different forms, British life for decades now.
Before that, I write about in the book about the moral panic around mugging and in Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall, it’s a very, very similar model where you get these massively biased newspaper reports, where you never see anything positive. Everything’s always in a negative light. It’s about mugshots, it’s about County Lines, it’s about drugs, it’s about violence, and black communities shouldn’t be written about just exclusively in those terms. People are doing fascinating things all the time in these communities but you rarely hear about them on a local or national level. So, yeah, I think that’s still one of the biggest issues that black Britain faces, is the way it’s written about.
CN: How do we disrupt this black London hegemony? Do cultural products such as, I don’t know, Top Boy, for instance or the cultural institutions being so concentrated in London actually hinder this? The idea, like these trickle down ideas that big culture and big cultural production in London that is black, by whatever definition we’re going to use, will somehow kind of influence and kind of trickle down to the rest of the nation, isn’t really kind of happening. So, how can we try and again shift the dial even further towards outside of London?
INT: I think you could take some pretty robust measures. I’d suggest that if you are a public service broadcaster and you are taking public money and you are commissioning shows that are ostensibly about black British life, it should be possible, or it should be enforced on them, to ensure that they’re creating black British shows that are representative of the entirety of black Britain. Now, the last census showed that, for the first time since race has been recorded, more than 50% of black Britain is outside of London. So, why are not half the shows that you create about black British life outside of the capital? That’s a pretty easy thing, I think, to achieve, and I think that’d be a massive shift for some of these broadcasters, to actually have to think about could we present this story in Birmingham? Could we present this story in Cardiff? I think it’s an exciting opportunity.
From doing the research on the book, I mean you don’t just have to do contemporary stuff in these communities. You could look back and do period pieces in Butetown when it was still a trading port and these amazing stories and people were drawn from all over the world that went there. It’s an amazing opportunity and I just think you need… it’d take a shift, a sea change in the way that producers and commissioners think about the limitations of black Britain. So, yeah, that’s my kind of ideal kind of crystal ball, dreamy, dreamy vision.
But, yeah, I completely push back on the idea that somehow just having a show like Top Boy is good for black Britain. I just don’t think that’s true. I think doing a few episodes in Liverpool isn’t enough. Maybe Top Boy’s not a great example because I think, in some ways, it’s a problematic show, although I defend it often. But I think the issue with it is, if we were in a kind of healthy TV ecosystem, Top Boy would just be one of many, many shows about black British life, which are about all kinds of different things. Unfortunately, it’s not.
Unfortunately, because of its success, I think we’ll again see shows that are about crime and that are about gangs and that are about drugs, and that’s a staple and because of that, we miss this kind of wider, much more interesting story, which could take in activism, art, creativity, black feminism. There’s all kinds of things you could touch on which are human interest stories that happen all over the country. So, yeah, I don’t know but I think a kind of 50/50 principle for a place like the BBC I think is completely reasonable to ask for. What’s wrong with that? I think that’d be a fantastic thing and the idea that there aren’t stories out there, I mean I’ve just written a book, mate. Like there’s at least ten there. Pay me, you can use them.
CN: Amazing. It’s a nice place to end, back to the book as well. It’s been a pleasure to watch the book develop from idea to fruition and a fiscal kind of outcome. And with this in mind, your book, what do you think we’re still missing in how we are documenting and archiving and accessing black British history, a cultural history, particularly those outside of London?
INT: Wow. I mean I think archiving is vital. I think it’s really, really vital and I don’t necessarily mean like in an institution. I mean like keeping your family history, keeping those stories, document them on a personal level because I think, from having written a book, those were the key ways of getting into these stories and really understanding what people went through just to get to this country, never mind the things that they faced when they were here at first. So, I think archiving is vital. I think it’s an expensive thing. A lot of archives are under pressure and they do a vital job because they’re these kind of time capsules or like time travel devices where you can get back into this area. So, I think that’s really important.
And, yeah, I think just countering this idea that it’s okay to just tell the story of black Britain with London stories. Like it isn’t. We’ve got to demand more. We need to demand more from our public service broadcasters and say that’s not enough. It’s not like these stories are terrible. I’m a big fan of all the TV shows I listed before. I think they’re amazing but I’m just greedy, Clive. I want more. I want more and black Britain deserves more, frankly. Yeah, it’s kind of sad looking back at something like Empire Road which came out in 1978 and 1979, had an almost entirely black crew, almost entirely black creative team and it didn’t signal this moment of change for British TV. It just became a weird anomaly, a curio from the past.
So, yeah, it’s about time that there was this shift. Whether or not that’s going to happen now I don’t know. It feels like we’ve moved into a different period, the kind of post-BLM period where anti-DEI is in the ascendency and a lot of places are rowing back on their commitments that were made after BLM. But I think that goes back to my earlier point of us, as black British people, getting hold of that history and keeping it because it’s delicate and fragile, and it’s important that we have it, because it tells the real story about what went on here, not the headlines you might get in some newspapers or on some TV channels but the actual truth. That real kind of granular detail of the everyday struggles of people and also what they overcame.
CN: Well, listen, I’m convinced that this book will go quite some way to try and instigate that kind of cultural shift and that kind of thinking. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been an amazingly rich and generative conversation. I think the book is amazing and it’s been certainly restorative for me as someone who is not from places outside of London, just reading that kind of lost history and recognise there’s much more to be understood and absorbed about the black community beyond London as well. So, congratulations, an amazing book and I look forward to our future conversations.
INT: Thank you, Clive. Thanks for having me, man, it’s been a pleasure. I love talking about this book.
Recording ends 37:35 minutes