10. Transcript: It Ain't Half Racist, Mum

In March 1979, as part of its Open Door series which gave marginalised groups access to the airwaves, BBC Two broadcast ‘It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum’. Produced for the BBC’s Open Door series, which gave marginalised groups access to the airwaves, it is notable for directly challenging the corporation itself, taking aim at the racism and stereotyping present in its comedy and current affairs programming.

The half-hour show – made in association with the Campaign Against Racism in the Media – was fronted by cultural theorist Professor Stuart Hall and actor Maggie Steed. Shot like an everyday BBC newscast, the two anchors are sat at a desk speaking directly to camera, their words intercut with footage from popular 1970s television – highlighting the racial slurs concerning Britain’s minority communities present in family sitcoms, and primetime current affairs programmes giving platforms to nativist voices like Enoch Powell as experts in discussions around migration.

The BBC would subsequently apologise for the broadcast, believing the show to have been “injurious” to the “professional integrity” of such corporation heavyweights as Robin Day and Ludovic Kennedy featured in the programme. We include an edited transcript of the television essay here not as a historical artefact but to ask whether contemporary discourse about race in the media has sufficiently moved forward in the intervening four decades.

Continuity announcer: You’re watching BBC2 and now, Open Door, a programme in which the BBC hands over airtime to members of the public to use under their own editorial control. Tonight, a programme made by Campaign Against Racism in the Media.

Maggie Steed: Hello. You may not have realised it, but you’ve just been warned about this programme. When the BBC says a programme like this is outside their control, what they are telling you is that they don’t think it’s balanced, neutral, or fair. We hope to show you that many of the programmes which are under the editorial control of the BBC, and ITV, are themselves biased and unbalanced – especially in the coverage they give to Britain’s black community. Not only is a lot of this coverage not neutral, it actually reinforces racism.

In the beginning, there was Lord Reith, the first director general of the BBC.

Clip from Lord Reith Looks Back with Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge: The interesting point, in terms of social history, is that this particular accent, which the BBC produced, somehow identified the BBC with a certain section of society and certain social trends, so that, to this day, the BBC is thought of as the organ of the – as it were – genteel and respectable elements in society.

Lord Reith: Is there anything wrong with that?

Clip from It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, with dialogue including ‘the most awful black in that village’ and ‘Get on with that punkah-ing you prize-eating berk’.

Stuart Hall: A typical scene from a well-known comedy series. It’s probably also fairly typical of what relationships were like between many white people and Asians during the days of the British Empire. Lazy, skiving natives locked in a deceitful battle of wits against Lord Reith’s genteel elements of society.

Clip from It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, in which officers agree not to give a pay rise to the lazy ‘punkah wallah’ for fear of affecting ‘the whole structure of Indian society’.

Stuart Hall: You may think it’s a good thing the British are able to laugh at their own past, but the British Empire was no joke for those on the receiving end. It’s because of the poverty the empire left behind that so many Asians and West Indians accepted invitations to come here after the war for work. So, it’s a bit of a turn-up for the books that one of the commonest jokes about Asians in television comedy today is that they work too hard.

Clips from Mind Your Language and The Rag Trade in which immigrant characters refer to working several jobs, being on the dole, and not knowing what unions are.

Stuart Hall: So, stereotypes do affect people’s lives. The trouble is that you can laugh at the joke and accept the stereotype at the same time. After all, the media don’t only give us information about the world we live in. They also shape our attitudes towards it. And jokes can strengthen our prejudices even while we are laughing at them.

Clip from Edinburgh Television Festival Q&A

Humphrey Barclay (Head of comedy, London Weekend Television): I don’t think that series [Mind Your Language] is socially damaging. I hope it isn’t. Otherwise, we really oughtn’t to be doing it. But I think that what people get out of that is a lot of enjoyment. I don’t think it’s at the expense of the characters. I think there is a multi-racial community working in that classroom, at some level, which is enjoyable. Which may make people who are not members of any of those racial minorities friendlier towards the races they see portrayed there, without saying – when they meet an Indian in the street – ‘Oh, he always talks like that and he’s funny because he wears a turban.’

Stuart Hall: Well, in the cosy atmosphere of Edinburgh, the television professionals may think ethnic humour about blacks who work too hard, scrounge off the dole and live two families in a room, is just entertainment. The fact remains that, in Britain today, this is what most white people believe about blacks. The fact that television is always making jokes about it makes them feel justified in despising black people. The comedy makes it okay, natural, acceptable. If you think this is an exaggeration, look at the way exactly the same attitudes dominate the outlook of serious television documentary makers when they deal with what they like to call ‘racial problems’. For instance, when Philip Tibenham and the Tonight team went down to darkest Blackburn, they made a joke about blacks and overcrowding the starting point of their investigation.

Clip from Tonight

Philip Tibenham: Predictably, the Asian population has drifted into its own ghetto, sprawling on either side of a long road called Whalley Range. The standing local joke is for bus drivers to announce it as the Khyber Pass. But part of the problem in Blackburn is that some immigrants are on the move. This used to be a solid immigrant area, but it’s been demolished under a slum clearance programme. That’s meant that some Asians have spilt over into adjacent white, working-class areas, and there are those who don’t like it one bit.

Stuart Hall: This Tonight report and Mind Your Language both start from the same assumption: the problem isn’t the hostility which Asians face when they move out of the ghetto, but the fact that they are ‘spilling out’ into adjacent white working-class neighbourhoods. Blackburn’s problem is that immigrants are on the move.

Clip from Tonight

Philip Tibenham: In political terms, it led to something quite startling for Blackburn. At the recent local elections in St Thomas’s ward – normally regarded as totally safe for Labour – John Kingsley Read, chairman of the ultra-right-wing National Party, came top of the poll.

Stuart Hall voiceover: Here comes the John Wayne of racism, striding out of the west.

Philip Tibenham: For a man who didn’t form his party until earlier this year, Kingsley Read’s achievement has been remarkable, and no one questions that the success has been based on his open distaste for the coloured immigrants and his demands for their immediate repatriation.

Maggie Steed: When did building up a successful racist party become, in the BBC’s language of neutrality, ‘a remarkable achievement’? Can you imagine a report describing the rise of the Black Panthers as a remarkable achievement? Still, the cameras don’t leave us in much doubt where Blackburn and Mr Read are concerned. Here he is again, shown as a respectable politician hard at work in his front room, and he has a story to tell our reporter.

Clip from Tonight

John Kingsley Read: I’ve got many, many complaints about immigrants taking the toilets out and actually parcelling up their excreta, et cetera, and sticking it in the back alleys.

Maggie Steed: Here, the freedom of the air is the freedom to allow unsubstantiated racist slander to pour out from the screen, over the audience. Now Mr Read has the reporter’s ear. It’s an intimate little scene. The attention he’s getting from the reporter lends what he is saying credibility. When last did you see a black person on television getting this undivided attention? Still, as every good BBC reporter knows, when racist allegations become too strong, even they have to counter them.

Clip from Tonight

Philip Tibenham: Now, there are lots of disturbing things about this whole Blackburn situation. For example, we asked the local council if they’d investigate the allegations of smashed toilets, and pipes blocked by offal. And, after a thorough search, the health department came back with the answer that there is not a shred of evidence to support either of the stories.

Stuart Hall: I suppose, strictly speaking, this is the famous BBC balance and impartiality in action. Current affairs programmes aren’t supposed to express a viewpoint. They have to be impartial. And when the allegations in that Blackburn programme got too outrageous, the reporter did tell us there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support them. But formal balance is one thing, and the impression that strong images make is another. This isn’t an accusation against a particular reporter. It’s a question of how the media, as a whole, work; and of how television works on the audience. In those last extracts we had vicious allegations against blacks made it a confidential and authoritative way, and denials tentatively made later by a reporter stumbling up a backstreet in Blackburn. Which do you think made the stronger, more memorable, impact? Even Philip Tibenham had to admit:

Clip from Tonight

Philip Tibenham: The fact is that the Kingsley Read version has already gone into the mythology of Blackburn. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people actually believe that it’s true.

Maggie Steed: Yes, thanks to such stories, not thousands but millions now believe it – and television helped to make those myths believable.

Stuart Hall: And somehow the myths keep creeping back into the programmes. TV reinforces those myths simply by using them as a colourful lead into the next race story – just ‘good, strong television’. In the next extract, our guide is not a racist politician but an expert, who wrote what is a supposedly impartial report for the police about young blacks and crime in Birmingham. The expert, inevitably white, is an important figure in television documentary because he isn’t seen to take sides. He has the authority of ‘a man who knows’. The next documentary is from the award-winning Shades of Grey – listen to the way the expert’s piece to camera moves from one stereotype to another.

Clip from Shades of Grey

John Brown: Imagine young West Indians, perhaps born in the early 60s, come on to the labour market just at the worst time – a time of high unemployment, particularly for young people. Then they get perhaps involved with the police, in some act of minor delinquency. The police come round. The parents themselves get het up, reject their children, and this act of rejection is very common, in many ways. So, leaving their parents, they go and shack up with others of their kind, in squats or in communes. On the one hand, searching for purpose, searching for identity. On the other hand, perhaps involved more and more in criminality, acts of violence against the old and defenceless. It’s a terrifying scenario.

Stuart Hall: It is indeed, but what’s really terrifying is the way the scene is being set. This is the archetypal picture. Black communities seen exclusively in terms of crime, unemployment, family breakdown, and problems. The problems are always explained by white experts.

Maggie Steed: In fact, racism is a white problem. But, from Blackburn to Birmingham to Brent, wherever the television eye turns, it sees the same story.

Clip from Race – The Way We Live Now

Richard Lindley: Brent isn’t notorious for racial trouble like Notting Hill, for instance, though it is probably the blackest borough in Britain. Of every ten babies born here, four are non-white. Bob Butterick lives on the huge Stonebridge estate. Here, white families are outnumbered three-to-one by blacks. What is it that really upsets you about this estate?

Bob Butterick: Well, it’s the vandalism, the noise. You come out of your street door, you ask them to be quiet in a nice way, and they just look at you: ‘Go in, you white trash.’

Maggie Steed: Blacks may outnumber whites by three-to-one, but the BBC seem to have trouble finding them, since none on the estate are interviewed. The microphone is given to a white resident, and again the reporter lends a sympathetic, professional ear.

Clip from Race – The Way We Live Now

Bob Butterick: Out it comes, and afterwards people just use it as a dust hole.

Richard Lindley: How do you know it’s black children doing this?

Bob Butterick: Because I look out the door.

Maggie Steed: Would you call that convincing evidence? Was it substantiated by any of the black residents on the estate? It would have been nice to know their view. Instead, we’re given a guided tour of the lift-shaft and more stories of excreta. White citizens though, are given the freedom to air their prejudices.

Clip from Race – The Way We Live Now

RICHARD LINDLEY: What’s it like to live here?

UNNAMED RESIDENT 1: Absolute hell.

UNNAMED RESIDENT 2: Bloody awful.

RICHARD LINDLEY: Are whites going?

Maggie Steed: This is a programme where the black majority, who are said to be the problem, are invisible; and the whites, who are having the problem, hold the camera. No one questioned whether you only find run-down condition and social problems on housing estates where blacks are in the majority. It isn’t only what the media say, it’s what they don’t say but take for granted.

Stuart Hall: Whenever programmes are made about blacks, the starting point is always numbers. And there is nothing that factual television loves so much as a good solid number, unless it’s a comparison between two numbers and a bit of zappy graphic work.