User:Gary Kirk/media

How has the representation of ethnic minorities in British television and radio comedy evolved in the last forty years?

Asian culture has been integrally linked with British culture since Victorian times, when British imperialist colonisation of the globe led to them conquering India for the British Empire. This connection is perhaps most obviously reflected in the popularity of Indian food in Britain today. Studies have claimed that chicken tikka masala is the most popular dish among British people. This is parodied in Goodness Gracious Me’s “going out for an English” sketch, which was voted the sixth greatest comedy sketch in a Channel 4 poll.[1] In the middle part of the 20th century there was a small but growing Asian population in Britain. This demographic change increased enormously in the 1960s and 1970s when Asians came from the Indian subcontinent as economic migrants. They arrived with the promise of employment and opportunity but these promises were not delivered and instead they faced racial discrimination and bigotry. While first-generation immigrants were aware as Marx would say of the “true nature of their exploitation”, they did little to challenge the dominant hegemony of their position as figures of fun and belittlement within the media. However, their children, stuck in a contradictory position between two cultures, wanted a voice to express their discontent with the prejudicial way they and their parents were treated. This essay will investigate how the representation of Asian culture has changed in the light of the growing cultural space for Asians to express their culture and identity.

In the 1960s, the idea of Asians playing themselves (or even featuring in entertainment media as any race) was unheard of. When these types of characters were called for, white actors “blacked up” with make-up to play them. The most well-known examples include Alec Guinness in A Passage to India and Peter Sellers in the film The Milionairess in which he starred with Sophia Loren. The pair also sang a comedy record insired by the film but not actually on the soundtrack called Goodness Gracious Me, both of which inspired the idea behind pioneering award-winning British-Asian sketch comedy Goodness Gracious Me.

Looking at the social context of 1960s Britain it can be more easily seen how white people in the entertainment industry played Asian parts. For one, the concept of “British Asian” was not a recognised ethnic category, as first-generation Asian immigrants had not yet fully integrated within the mainstream of British culture, feeling their identity was very different from their peers. Second- and third-generation Asians however had a complex set of values and ideologies to contend with, leading them to be further ingrained in the British way of life while maintaining their own cultural identity, leading to a mixing of hegemonic values in their lives.

It could be argued that television programmes like Goodness Gracious Me helped second and third generation British Asians establish themselves, as Woodward suggests: “Individual and collective identities” and “...provide possible answers to the questions ‘Who am I? What could I be? ‘Who do I want to be?’” (Woodward, 1997 “Identity and Difference”).

Goodness Gracious Me was created by a team of British Asians wanting to show that in the late 1990s, the 1960s attitude had been reversed. British Asians were playing British Asian characters in roles written by Asians and although the show was British-based, the only white British actors involved were Dave Lamb and Amanda Holden and Emma Kennedy. Executive producer Anil Gupta heard that the BBC wanted to create an all-Asian sitcom and suggested he and a writing team he knew, Richard Pinto and Sharat Sardana, get involved, even though they had previously stayed away from such projects, saying they didn’t want to get typecast as “the guys who do the Asian thing”[2].

Since Goodness Gracious Me came to television in 1998 more and more programmes have been made in a similar vein, and often with the same actors. Programmes lke All About Me where the role of Rupinder was played in the first series by Meera Syal and in subsequent series by her Goodness Gracious Me co-star Nina Wadia to X as well as more roles in radio series including Canned Heat and Masala FM, both Radio 4 comedies set in a newsagents’ and a British Asian community radio station in London respectively, followed.

-        Expand Social context

The programme was intended to reach as wide an audience as possible, not simply those of Asian descent. In order to appeal to as many people as possible outside of the Asian communities in Britain, Goodness Gracious Me produced a number of parodies of British texts or texts enjoyed in Britain. It could be argued as the uses and gratifications theory suggests that the texts offered different readings and purposes to different people in Britain. White British viewers would watch the show for the base humour while British Asians would see further into the comedy with the cultural references white British viewers might not immediately “get”.

They picked on the post-modern concept that identity has become confused and blurred, and parodied it with the sketches involving the Rabindranath and Kapoor families who refuse to acknowledge their obvious Indian heritage and claimed to be the Robinson and the Cooper families respectively. These people clearly struggled with their own British-Asian identities and in order to cope reverted to their own interpretation of what they thought a typical British family behaved like. In one scene in an episode of one of the three Radio 4 series, for example, the Robinsons have moved in to an English country manor house, and the Coopers come to visit. Charlotte Cooper warns her husband Dennis not to show them up (“we’re not in Chigwell now!”) but of course they do, as they are not fully familiar with pretending to be English. When Mrs Robinson offers Dennis a Pimm’s, for example, he replies “just a drink for me”, and she orders “a drink for milord”, addressing their servant as a lord as he does to them. Dennis Cooper especially seems to be the most forgetful and “stupid” character. When the couples attend a tennis club, Mr Robinson asks Dennis if he is "looking forward to tucking away a few loose balls", he replies “So sorry, it’s these damn shorts!”, and is told by his wife “He meant tennis balls” whereupon he says his catchphrase – “I knew that…”. While Goodness Gracious Me as a programme did not rely on catchphrases - the humour was more intelligent, so to speak, than this - there certainly were catchphrases. They typically identified one aspect of Asian culture that immigrants to Britain refused to accept had to change. One character insisted that everything from the British royal family to Superman was Indian or came from India. Another claimed that she could make anything the family wanted at home, examples being pizza and a taxi, and all she would need was a few basic items and "a small aubergine".

Anil Gupta said the team didn’t often deal with issues current at the time of writing, as they “wouldn’t make sense five or ten years later” but the programme did make fun of Jemima Goldsmith’s marriage to Imran Khan, mixing it with a sketch parodying children’s puppets Sooty and Sweep. This reflects the new-found confidence of second generation Asians. In this context they mocked the dominant British culture’s aristocracy, which has become increasingly common within the output of popular culture and the tabloid press in particular over the last ten years. According to postmodernists this reflects the breaking-down of traditional value systems, we now live in a society where grand meta-narratives no longer exist. Of course, parody is also part of the post-modern landscape, as all institutions and figures are ripe for deconstruction.

- More parodies: Punjabi girl, skipinder, Hindi people,

The 1960s attitudes had changed dramatically by the late 1990s. The working title for Goodness Gracious Me, which as also used for the pilot episode, was Peter Sellers Is Dead. When BBC Radio 4 commissioned a series in 1996 they insisted the title was changed, feeling it was too provocative and would give listeners the wrong idea on the team’s feelings towards Sellers – executive producer Anil Gupta stated they thought he was “the greatest comedy performer of all time”[3]. The comedy song Sellers recorded with Sophia Loren for the film The Millionairess was used as a “linking device; a nod to the past” during the pilot episode[4], and a bhangra arrangement of it was later used as the title music for all the radio and television series.

In the summer of 2001, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first radio series of the now extremely popular cult sketch show Little Britain. One of the sketches was known as FatFighters and revolved around a weigh-loss group. In the first ever sketch, the group leader, Marjorie Dawes, introduced a “noo member”. Meera was of Asian descent and Marjorie pretended she could not understand anything Meera said, constantly repeating “Do it, do it again? We’ll never know” and insulting Meera. In the later television series which started in 2003 on digital channel BBC Three Marjorie would refer to Meera’s home as being in India – for example, when the group was asked to suggest food they had cravings for and Meera said biscuits Marjorie said “Well it must be something we don’t get over here” even though Meera always tells Marjorie she comes from New Malden, a London borough. Johann Hari criticised the show writing in British newspaper The Independent: "Little Britain has been a vehicle for two rich kids to make themselves into multi-millionaires by mocking the weakest people in Britain. Their targets are almost invariably the easiest, cheapest groups to mock: the disabled, poor, elderly, gay or fat. In one fell swoop, they have demolished protections against mocking the weak that took decades to build up."[5]

Many would argue that between them, Lucas and Walliams were almost entitled to create comedy using these groups in society as the sketches were so ludicrous they were clearly not meant to be taken as literal attacks against these groups. Matt Lucas himself is gay and fat. However, much like during the early 1990s when many Radio 4 listeners and BBC 2 viewers wrote in to complain about the behaviour of Steve Coogan’s spoof chat show host Alan Partridge on Knowing Me, Knowing You…with Alan Partridge. For example, in the second episode of the radio series Alan “slapped” a child prodigy, and as the show was such an accurate portrayal of genuine chat shows of the time like Wogan, viewers believed it to be real. In fact the satirical nature of the show highlights the ideological assumptions that many people still have in this country. Thus in effect it could be argued that they are highlighting racial inequalities and parodying certain attitudes towards Asians. Perhaps then people who criticise the show could be said to have misunderstood what Stuart Hall called the preferred reading of the text.

The misunderstanding of racial attitudes was also seen in the 1960’s. The writers of Till Death Us Do Part created the stereotypical racist Alf Garnett. His character was of a previous generation, especially in the 1960’s culture of change. Alf’s values and opinions differed from that of the rest of his family and were often deliberately extreme and over-the-top. A large number of misguided viewers made an oppositional reading of the show, actually sympathising with Alf’s views and ideologies.

The 1970s black comedy Love Thy Neighbour revolved around two neighbouring families. A white, working-class family moved next to a family of black people, and the series dealt with their experiences. The social context of the time was that many black families had emigrated from other countries and took up poorly-paid, often manual jobs. Because of this the dominant hegemony became that such behaviour was acceptable and even the norm.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory says that people need to have a range of needs met by their use of media products. It could be claimed that Asians watching Goodness Gracious Me are having their need for self actualisation met. First generation Asian immigrants were content to get on with their lives and keep their heads down. While second and third generation Asians are far more into integrating into British mainstream culture, while still maintaining a sense of cultural identity. Goodness gracious me has allowed them to recognise the nature of their experience and grow in confidence because of its acknowledgement within mainstream British television. A further knock on effect has been that it has allowed white British people to gain an insight into and greater understanding of Asian culture, hopefully therefore leading to greater tolerance and less prejudice.

In November 2001 BBC Two aired the first series of a show featuring an all-Asian cast. The Kumars at No. 42 featured Goodness Gracious Me co-stars (and, four years later, husband and wife) Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal in a spoof chat show in which the guests were interviewed in a light-hearted fashion in a full TV studio built in the fictional Kumars’ back garden. Many aspects of a traditional Indian way of life when clashed with the “new” British way of life to which the Kumars had not quite yet fully adapted to were explored, especially through Sanjeev, the son, who is frequently shown up in front of his guests by his family by his social goofs. A book, “Help Yourself with the Kumars” was published in 2006 after the seventh series of the show had aired. It was a spoof self-help guide and documented how each member of the family had solved life problems, including Ashwin trying to impress Mr (Aggerwal) and Sanjeev trying to get a girlfriend[6]. This further reflects the growing common acceptance of Asian identities and also British Asian identities and culture into mainstream British culture.

The Kumars repeated the concept of a “comedy record” when in 2003 they recorded the Comic Relief charity single, a cover of “Spirit in the Sky” with Gareth Gates.

White British television viewers enjoy watching comedy to amuse themselves. The uses and gratifications theory states that audiences consume texts for various reasons. For example, to escape the mundaneness of their own, dull, lives they divert their attention to more interesting texts in the mass media, including films, television and radio. In order to understand more about the British-Asian subculture, they turn to these texts in order to learn.

It is interesting to compare the differences between television and radio comedy and the subsequent representation of British Asian ethnicity.

The representations of ethnic minority groups has improved in general over the last forty years, as changes in the context of production for the various texts produced have changed dramatically. Goodness Gracious Me dealt with the changing attitudes through sketches mocking racism and racist attitudes by showing how ridiculous it is, so the audience laughed at and saw how wrong racism was rather than laughing with those displaying short-sighted, racist values. This was achieved through sketches such as “Rough Guide”, a spoof mini documentary parodying the Rough Guide television series, where British tourists went to countries including India and looked down on the culture, considering themselves to be superior to it. This can be directly contrasted with Love Thy Neighbour in which much of the show’s humour was about the white neighbour and his family mocking the black family who lived next door. Those changes show a positive change in representation. They are certainly much less stereotypical attempts at this than had previously occurred.

Attitudes are certainly still changing as the 21st century continues. No actors or actresses have used blackface make-up to portray a black or Asian character for many years on television as there is simply no need as it looks very outdated compared to real Asian or black actors in such roles. It is also notable that black or Asian people appear as much as white actors in mainstream television or radio programmes (including comedy), reflecting today’s multicultural Britain, rather than playing the “token” ethnic character as was the case a number of years ago. Peter Sellers’ portrayal of an Indian doctor in the 1961 film The Millionairess in particular is seen as a poor and stereotypical characterisation which is insulting to Indians.