Are There Colour Bars in a Digital Universe?

by Trevor Phillips

This penetrating analysis of British television and its relevance to issues of race and the media was delivered as the Royal Television Society's Fleming Lecture by Trevor Phillips, broadcaster, journalist and independent media producer. Phillips sets the scene for his lecture by acknowledging two historical streams. One a wellspring of innovation fostered by a scientific pioneer; the other a tributary of Black and Asian immigrants in post-war British society.

The founders of radio and television
I'd like to honour two groups of pioneers. The first set of pioneers, of whom Sir Ambrose Fleming is amongst the most distinguished, gave us radio and television, technologies that now reach across the globe and which have changed our lives in every way.

I must say that I feel some kinship with Sir Ambrose. Like him, I spent my early adult years in a laboratory. Fleming's first paper to the Royal Society was entitled "On The Conversion of Electric Oscillations into Continuous Currents By Means of a Vacuum Valve" - a catchy idea which today would probably win an instant commission from Sky One. I wonder what Sir Ambrose might have made of the fact that his work and encouragement to the infant medium would eventually give us Prime Suspect, Panorama, and Film On Four? He'd be proud, I guess. But original research does not always guarantee excellent outcomes.

My first and only research paper was entitled "Observations on the fluoroluminescence of certain chloranils". When I started out I saw a glorious future which culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. When I realised that the only vaguely interesting application for this work might have been the creation of a better bicycle reflector, I moved on. But I sometimes wonder, if I hadn't, would the world have been better off without some of my later experiments - such as Richard Littlejohn Live and Uncut, or The Devil's Advocate? I know several gentlemen who would have been much happier without The London Programme's interest in their affairs. And I wonder if Sir Ambrose looking down now would really count The Jerry Springer Show as a great contribution to civilisation, worthy of his genius?

The Windrush People
The other set of pioneers is that group of men and women, who after the Second World War embarked on an adventure symbolised by the voyage of the Empire Windrush. They first fought for King and country, and then helped to rebuild a nation shattered by war. Their presence has helped to shape our nation. I owe them a particular debt. First because, without them, it is very unlikely that I would be here at all; my parents were amongst the first of the half-million or so West Indians who followed their example. And more recently, because those who have survived were generous enough to entrust me and my colleagues at Pepper Productions with the enormous responsibility of telling their story, in our BBC2 series, and the book which I have written with my brother Mike.

I have seldom had the privilege of working with such an open, generous and articulate group of people. Their own account of their story is entertaining, sophisticated, insightful and compelling. If we convey just a fraction of their energy and optimism, we will have done well. I want to focus on the point where these two historical streams have met and combined, sometimes to delight us, sometimes to astonish us, sometimes to enrage or disappoint us. There's a sort of irony here.

Colour perception
Just five weeks after I was born, the Fleming Lecturer of 1954, G. G. Gouriet, addressed the Society on the subject of "Colour Television", and the lecture the following year, by Professor W D Wright was entitled "The Perception of Colour". However I don't suppose that either lecturer had the Windrush voyagers in mind; at that time you would have had to search pretty hard to find a person of colour on tv - though the phenomenon was not unknown.

There was a time in British life when the appearance of a dark face on a tv screen would provoke peculiarly unBritish reactions: that is to say, strong and passionate responses. White viewers would reach for the phone to object. They would bombard the tv stations' switchboards with complaints that "niggers" could not speak the Queen's English, or that they did not understand the British way. As late as 1987 I recall the word monkey appearing on the LWT duty officer's log after my first appearance on The London Programme.

Black viewers would reach for their telephones too. But in their case it was to call relatives and friends to tell them to turn on their tv sets straight away or else they might miss the sight of a black face on the nation's most popular medium. It was rather like birdwatchers being called to see a particularly rare species before it disappeared. Of course black and Asian people have always played a part in British television.

Performers and writers
There is an honourable history of which I was barely aware when I came into tv in 1980, in which many have played a part - George Lamming, Cy Grant, Lloyd Reckord, Pearl Connor, Carmen Munroe, Rudolph Walker, Norman Beaton, Horace Ove, Horace James, Zia Moyheddin, Saeed Jaffrey, Nina Baden Semper, Earl Cameron, Michael Abbensetts, Ram John Holder all belonged to the generation of performers and writers who brought something new to British television in the 1950s and 60s.

Programmes like Till Death Us Do Part. Love Thy Neighbour, The Fosters, Empire Road were creatures of their time, and whatever we think of them now, gave black performers a chance to appear. But of course such appearances were few and far between until the 1980s and at the first whiff of controversy the authorities would run for cover. In one or two cases that was a good thing. We are better off without the Black and White Minstrels. But was it right that after more than 50 appearances in the 60s soap Emergency Ward 10, the actress Joan Hooley should find herself out of the series, purely because some people were uncomfortable about the fact that her character had kissed a white doctor? That was 35 years ago. It seems like another, ridiculously archaic world.

Elizabeth I, a Powellite
One reason for these attitudes was, of course that the British people, when it comes to race, suffer from what Professor Stuart Hall calls a kind of "historical forgetfulness", in which anyone with a dark skin is always a foreigner. It's rubbish of course. There were some 25,000 black soldiers, servants and slaves in Britain in Georgian times.

Even before that, at the end of the sixteenth century, they were complaining about the blacks. Elizabeth I, who was perhaps the first Powellite, wrote to the Lord Mayors of her cities in these terms: "There are of late divers blackamores brought into the realm of which kind there are already too manie... considering howe God hath blessed this land with a great increase of people..... those kind of people should be sent forth of the land." Perhaps it's just as well that the current Elizabeth is unlikely to have any such views - if she did, she might find that, things being what they are today, any one of those mayors might himself or herself be a blackamoor.

Irresistible presence
But this historical forgetfulness is perhaps a way of ensuring that this country should never have to confront some uncomfortable elements of our past - slavery for example. For several decades, television was complicit in that forgetfulness, essentially ignoring non-white Britain, except for moments when our presence became irresistible. (For example) the Notting Hill Gate riot of 1958, the riots of 1981 - ...or when the stories were just too juicy... remember that Shirley Bassey first came to the attention of the British people when two men fought a gun battle over her in a Cardiff cafe. Inevitably this kind of thing helped to create an image of us which was partial, distorted and negative.

For my parents and their generation, the bright hope with which they came to the mother country was quickly soured. Today, we worry about gross acts of discrimination, about racial attacks and about the growth of fascist parties.

But actually what shaped the relations between black and white were a thousand acts of thoughtlessness, an everyday pattern of tiny slights. People on a bus, sitting in front of a black serviceman who had helped them win the war, saying "I wonder when they are going home"; the hospital patient who says "Oh, these black nurses - they'll steal the milk out of your coffee". And the landlady who gave immigrants house room when her neighbours would not - then told her tenants that they should leave home early and come back late, in case anyone saw them.

Diana surprise
Of course we know that things have changed in many ways. Yet on the eve of Princess Diana's funeral last year, the BBC's John Simpson - for my money, the best, most perceptive reporter in the corporation - still seemed surprised to see so many black people joining in what was, after all a national act of mourning.

But why should that have been a surprise in 1997? We are as committed to this country as anyone else; we share in its dreams, its hopes and its disappointments. We are here. We are here to stay and we are, in all our many varieties, part of what could make Britain great again. Not cool, by the way. Just great.

Personal campaign
If television is to fulfil its role as the mirror to our nation's cultural identity, it has a major job to do in helping to cure us of that historical amnesia. And it matters, in a way that few other debates about what we do in our industry matters. It would occasionally pay us to take a reality check and ask ourselves about the effects of the programmes we make.

Two years ago I campaigned for a programme called Baadass TV to be taken off Channel Four. I did not do so out of spite, or because I wanted the commission, or because I thought it was a uniquely poor piece of television. I did it because such programmes have a very real, very negative effect on the lives of my family, my friends and my community.

This was a programme which claimed to explore the wilder shores of black culture, which seemed to consist entirely of escapees from a freak show - Long Dong Silver, rapping dwarves, paintings made of elephant droppings, hardly the mainstream of Black Britain. The makers of the programme said that we should simply accept this for what it is - a bit of post-modern irony. But fundamentally it was just another "nigger" minstrel show, and the days when we would stand by and allow ourselves to be insulted had to come to an end.

It wouldn't be a major issue if this were just one of a range of shows depicting the black experience in Britain. But Baadass TV, whatever its intentions, was what most viewers experienced of black culture at that time.

Many white people's idea of black people is formed by what they see of us on television. The more tv reinforces the image of black people as gangsters, pimps, whores and freaks, the more we suffer.

Few white people will understand what it means to be taunted in the playground, turned away from a job, to be shut out of accommodation, to be stopped by the police, and to know that the reason that you are being degraded is because the white person doing these things has a view of you derived from a newspaper or a tv programme. I think the makers of this programme would have found it hard to explain the sophistication and irony of Baadass TV to the three out of five young black men who are unemployed in areas of London.

Revealing job survey
The Fourth National Survey of Ethnic minorities published by the Policy Studies Institute last year showed that amongst men with A-levels or higher qualifications, 40% of whites are in professional or managerial jobs; 30% of Indians are in the same group, though they are actually more likely than whites to have degrees; and just 15% of Afro-Caribbean men are professionals or managers.

The images created by tv and sustained by programmes like Baadass are part of the reason that there are few black faces in the senior ranks of the civil service, the judiciary, the armed forces or public limited companies. Even where minorities are ostensibly successful, for example in sports, or entertainment, few make the transition to management. Black footballers have been present in the professional game for years, yet football league chairmen seem unable to see their merits as coaches - there is currently no black manager of a Premiership club.

No to non-whites
These statistics have a real meaning for people's standards of living. Today, in Britain, just under three in ten white households earn below half the national average income. For black, Indian and African Asian households that figure is four out of ten. In Pakistani and Bangladeshi households it is eight out of ten. Even the Chinese, by the way, who tend to own their own businesses and are more than twice as likely to have degrees, are still poorer than whites. This is not just a black thing. It is the signature of country that still likes to say no to you if you are not white.

Finally, perhaps the most substantial fear of many black and Asian people in the UK is that of racially motivated attack. There is some anecdotal evidence that many of these attacks occur because the attackers believe that no-one cares what happens to black or Asian people. It is certainly the message that we hear from the authorities when we look at, say, the Stephen Lawrence case.

Racial attacks
There's a certain irony that an officer in South London could say that he did not know that you could arrest someone you suspect of a crime without hard evidence. That would come as news to the thousands of young black people arrested under the sus law and its successor, stop-and-search.

Last year's PSI survey suggested that the number of people who suffered racial incidents in 1994, principally white on black or Asian, was around a quarter of a million. Taking into account repeat attacks, about one in eight of the black or Asian population experienced such an incident in the one year. And anyone who believes that these trends will change with age should reflect on the fact that if you were younger you were more likely to face a racial assault of some kind - 1 in 7 if you were under 45, 1 in 10 if you were older.

Stakes are high
So this is not a game we are playing. The stakes are high; it is not all television's fault or responsibility, but as a medium which more than any other can promote or stand in the way of change, we broadcasters and producers have an awesome responsibility.

So what can we do? Well, our aim should not be to try to bring about some politically correct utopia; nor should it be to harangue people about their supposedly improper feelings. I do not want anybody to feel that they cannot say about a black person what they might say about anyone else. We too have our share of bad guys; and in time, we'll achieve total equality and our morons, villains and undesirables will also be picked to play football for England. But that is not all we are and television has as one of its responsibilities - still - to paint a complete picture of the Britain that exists now, including all kinds of Britons.

How to do better
There are three areas in which I believe we can do better.

• First we have to ensure that our mainstream programming is not exclusive and is what the South Africans now call "non-racial".
• Second we have to redefine what we mean by multiculturalism and create a new prospectus for programmes which are about British identity in all its variety.
• And finally we have to embrace the opportunity of the digital age.

Ending exclusion from the mainstream
I'd like to turn first to the so-called mainstream, that is to say, programming which is made for a mass audience, more or less undifferentiated on the basis of age, sex, or race. I am talking peak time here. I spoke earlier about the early days of minority presence on tv. Things have changed.

So things are better on screen. Even off it, we are beginning to see more black faces on production teams and in the administrative and other departments of major British companies. There are black and Asian and Chinese researchers and producers and even directors in British tv. But on the executive floors - where real decisions about scheduling, programme style and tone, are taken there are virtually no black faces. I do not know how many tv programme executives in the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 or BSkyB who are not white - as usual there are no reliable numbers, but I would buy a magnum of champagne for the first person who can name more than six at head of department level or above.

Whiter than white must change
Up until a few years ago, there were just four of us in the terrestrial channels, Samir Shah, Narendhra Morar, Farrukh Dhondy and myself. I wish I could say it was tokenism. But tokenism suggests a conscious policy; four executives out of several hundred feels more like an accident. By the way, all four of us started in the same place - making Black On Black and Eastern Eye for London Weekend in the early eighties, under John Birt. For a while we never dared meet, or travel in a car together. Like the American President and Vice President, were we to be involved in an accident, that would have been it - the upper reaches of British tv would have been whiter than that of South Africa. Come to think of it, all four of us have moved on and that's exactly what it is now.

Somehow, the boards of Channel 4, the ITV companies and the Governors of the BBC seem to have allowed a situation to arise where senior minority talent drifts outside the major broadcasters. Yes, Yasmin Anwar and Andi Peters at Channel 4 are a great asset, Dele Oniya has made his mark at the BBC. And of course, there is the celebrated North African brother in charge of the largest production house in Britain, but even if we do claim Alan Yentob as one of us it doesn't make up for the shortfall.

Bias in the system
Talents like Samir Shah, Ben Robinson, Waheed Alli and Narinder Minhas all now work outside in the independent sector. Their absence leaves a large hole in the business. For there to be fewer minority figures at the top of our major broadcast institutions than there were ten years ago is a disgrace, and a refutation of the assurances of change that we have been given year after year.

Things have changed; but in the wrong direction. There is clearly a bias in the system which can only be corrected by setting targets for senior managements in each of these companies, reinforced by ITC regulation if necessary.

Remedy is inclusion
This is about exclusion. The remedy to that is inclusion, and if you want a specific target, consider this the industry's millennium challenge: By start of the year 2002 - three years from now - none of the senior creative management teams of Channel Four, ITV, BSkyB and the major BBC directorates, should be all-white; and overall, the senior creative and editorial managements in British tv should by then have appointed at least one in ten of its members from ethnic minorities.

I think Channel Four may be on its way to this target; the BBC is way behind, and ITV, BSkyB and Channel Five, as far as I know, haven't even found the starting line. It'll cost them.

Some years ago a friend who had been negotiating with a large American company told me that when the negotiations collapsed and the deal fell through, one of the Americans took him to one side to commiserate. The American then said: "Of course some of it is down to the way you guys handled it". My friend said, "What do you mean?". "Well," said the American," For a start you looked a bit old fashioned." My friend, who wore Armani and had all the tv gadgets, couldn't believe it. The American shifted uneasily and said, "Look, here's one thing: in North America no-one would go into a negotiation like this with an all-white, all-male team". Companies which want to be global must look global.

Reflect Britain, not America
I have one further concern about the so-called mainstream. Statistically, the majority of the black characters we see on tv are American. There is nothing wrong with that in principle. Unlike some, I do not regard American tv as rubbish and I think that some of it - Murder One or the X-Files, for example, - is far in advance of anything we make or have ever made here. From the point of view of cultural inclusion, shows like NYPD Blue and ER are models of how it could be. However we should remember that these programmes reflect American society, not ours, and in one respect at least we are becoming less and less like them.

America is a segregated society. According to the Oxford Professor of Urban Geography, Ceri Peach, most blacks in the USA live in areas where the majority of people are black. they do not mix with whites except at work. We are completely different. According to the Policy Studies Institute, most - some 85% - of black or Asian people live in wards where they make up less than a quarter of the population.

One in five Caribbean adults is married to or lives with a white partner; two out of five children of an Afro-Caribbean parent also have a white parent and the number is climbing. And yes, the difference is partly explained by the fact that many of those children live with their single mothers.

But the point is that, entertaining as they might be, the domestic sitcoms such as Friends or Frasier paint a picture which is right for America and increasingly wrong for Britain. Despite the fact that they are set in cities with substantial non-white populations, these shows are more likely to introduce an English or a Chinese character than a black character.

As an avid viewer of Friends, in four series I believe I have yet to hear a black character utter more than a single sentence in any episode. No-one in my family can recall a single black character ever entering the Friends' apartments - the few that do appear are in Chandler's office. Similarly, Seinfeld.

Different strokes
Perhaps that is why in each case, these programmes, wildly successful in white households, are not liked by black families. Last year:

• Seinfeld was number two overall in the ratings but was 50th in black American homes.
• Friends was fourth overall, but down at number 107 in black homes.
• Frasier was 11th overall, but in black homes was 55th.

By the way, in case you think this is an age thing, you should know that the most likely age group to watch white programmes is not the young, but those over 50. I'll return to that later.

The point here is that whilst I would not for one second want to do anything to reduce the flow of excellent dramas we get from the USA, we must grasp that they are different from us, live differently, and the more their story is told on tv the further we move from a true representation of our own nation. And no matter what we do elsewhere in the tv scene, if our major channels look like embracing someone else's apartheid, any effort to include people of colour will become that much more difficult. The answer must surely lie in more original production designed to tell stories of the new Britain.

No more multiculturalism
Let me turn now to the issue of multiculturalism. There is no doubt that the new Britain is a multicultural, multiracial society and will be that way for good. The nearly two million non-white Britons are rooted and now consider themselves British. What's more, pretty much everybody else agrees. The fossils in the House of Lords are increasingly voices in the wilderness. But how do we in television respond to the important changes that are taking place? First, perhaps we need to understand exactly what they are.

In television, multiculturalism has become a sort of convenient cocktail party word, used, not to mean the interplay of the many different kinds of traditions which now exist side by side in British society, but to avoid people in polite society having to say nasty, difficult words like white, black, Asian. It's another version of the British tendency to avoid thinking about race. But this time the euphemism may have led us all up a blind alley.

What multiculturalism?
Originally multiculturalism was very simple; it started with television as a social service for ethnics. The BBC in the 1960s simply borrowed a pattern that began in Germany. The aim was simple : to teach newcomers how to fit in. The Germans started in 1963 with Nachbarn, unsere Nachbarn (Neighbours, our Neighbours), and Heimat, unsere Heimat (Your homeland, our homeland), directed at the mainly Turkish gastarbeiter (immigrant worker). Austria copied them with an upbeat little number called Dobar dan Hrvati or "Hello Croats". The French, ran Mosaic for more than a decade until 1987, the programme being funded not by the tv station but by welfare sources.

The BBC's earliest efforts were aimed at Asian arrivals. Who can forget such hits from the dawn of broadcasting - literally dawn in most cases - as Apna Hibar Samjhye (Make Yourself At Home), or Nayl Zindagi, Naya Jeevan (New Life), and - before Reg Grundy got there - Padosi (Neighbours). This was the tradition of social service programming that we've never quite shaken off. Along with the patronising tone went minuscule budgets and ludicrous scheduling.

But people did watch. A survey of viewers in Leicester in 1978 showed that two thirds of the Asian people of Leicester watched Naya Zindagi - those who didn't, missed it because they were still in bed when it was shown. It was more attractive to those with less English of course, but the point was that there was a demand for it.

Bold step
In 1978 the regime at LWT made a bold step to move away from the welfare ethos. John Birt set up the London Minorities Unit to make programmes by and for minority viewers - black, Asian, gay, the elderly. In the two years after I joined one of the unit's programmes, Skin, we made no fewer than 60 editions of the half-hour documentary programme.

The standards of journalism were high. The team - mostly, though not exclusively, black and Asian - built up a reputation as tough and professional. But we were trying to straddle two very different groups of cultures - Afro-Caribbean and Asian - and we were also having to explain things to white viewers that seemed evident to black or Asian viewers. It was only a matter of time before a transition became inevitable.

In the years that followed Channel Four's Black On Black and Eastern Eye, aimed at, respectively, black and Asian viewers hit up to 90% of their target audiences regularly. But they also succeeded in drawing an audience which was neither black nor Asian. And they created new names for British tv - for example the rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, as well as showcasing the resurgent British gospel movement and, in the case of Eastern Eye, virtually inventing the bhangra sound. On the face of it, even when these series were controversially ended in 1985, it was thought that they would provide the platform for more and better interventions by minorities in British television.

To some extent that's what happened. Channel 4 commissioned the black entertainment series Club Mix and the Bandung File. There were also other specialist factual programmes, especially on the BBC. The Corporation screened the black magazine Ebony, as a response to Black On Black, later followed by Network East, aimed at South Asian viewers. Channel Four commissioned No Problem in the early 1980s and succeeded in crossing over to some extent with its comedy Desmond's and Devil's Advocate - not a comedy. The Real McCoy in its three seasons on BBC2 introduced some new performers to us, and perhaps the biggest success in this respect has been Goodness Gracious Me, which migrated from Radio Four to BBC2 with a brilliant, unselfconscious and very British brand of Asian humour.

Points of debate
But there are many who now argue that all such series are diversions that allow the broadcasting establishments off the hook. Aspiring drama writers are sent to The A-Force or Goodness Gracious Me, the potential Panorama producer diverted to Black Bag. Some say that these are ghetto programmes which should be mothballed and that minority artists should compete - and be judged - on the same basis as everyone else.

In an ideal world they may be right. But the world isn't ideal and is getting less so by the year. There are two reasons for not going down this road at this point. First, to quote my friend and colleague Samir Shah, interviewed for the BFI book Black and White In Colour in 1992: "As long as there is such a thing as an Afro-Caribbean or an Asian, as long as those terms have meaning, then there will be a need for programmes that address the content of that meaning... until the difference between Afro-Caribbeans and Asians [and others] becomes the same as the difference between the Angles and the Saxons".

Open access
In principle we need to hear voices different from that of the dominant culture. Without them we and our medium will be starved of inspiration. Second, there are practical reasons. If we want to reach new talent, all our experience says that this is a good way to do it. Whatever the shortcomings of the 'specialist' strategy it is true that many young programme makers who would not otherwise have made any productions had the opportunity to learn their craft on the so-called 'ghetto' shows.

The way to solve the diversion of talent is not to get rid of the only proven access route for minority talent - it is to make sure that the other routes open up. What perhaps might be more useful is a new definition of multiculturalism so that people are not caged making programmes that reflect a very narrow range of experience.

And, in any event, the days when we needed to explain people to each other are passing. Not everywhere is as enlightened as London, of course, but even vicars in The Archers now know what "well wicked" means. To come back to my starting point on multiculturalism, descriptions of specific racial groups and their historic traditions are less necessary than they used to be.

Windrush changed Britain
Even in Windrush, we ended up focussing not so much on the West Indians themselves but on the way they have changed Britain and the way that Britain has changed them. One interviewee told me that these days, if he's walking down the street behind a group of young black men, he has to get in front of them to be sure whether they are white or black, so much has black style penetrated youth culture.

Britain is changing because of the new traditions that have arrived in the past 50 years. And many of those traditions are no longer the property of any one racial or religious grouping. Apache Indian speaks Jamaican more readily than most of the black people I know; Willard White is the master of European Grand Opera; the biggest selling reggae bands in the world were and are UB40 and The Police. The issue of intermarriage is as alive in the Jewish community as it is in the Muslim. Young people of Irish descent, faced with a changing situation over the water, may once again be rethinking their idea of what it means to be British in exactly the same way that young people of Afro Caribbean origin have been doing for some time.

Multiculturalism no longer does the job for the major terrestrial channels. To me it smacks of the old social services mentality, updated with a bit of GLC style special pleading. I would be happy to see the back of so-called multicultural programmes, if by that we mean programmes defined by the skin colour of those who make them and who appear in them and which are solely about separate, individual traditions.

Odyssey
On the other hand programmes which have the range of Peregrine Worsthorne and Darcus Howe's odyssey in search of the true spirit of Englishness, England My England or the cheekiness of Goodness Gracious Me which tackle the interaction of cultures and identities, seem to me to be the way forward. And those cultures should not be defined only by race. I also want to know how Irish Britons, Jewish Britons and Muslim Britons are tackling their search for identity; and of course that means also a place for the poor old English who having been given the heave ho by the Scots, need to find out who they are now.

I could well see one of those new senior management positions at Channel Four becoming the Commissioning Editor for Identity Programmes, or I suppose in the BBC it might be Editor or Head, Identity Programmes, Daily and Weekly, (Television) (TV Centre Annexe).

The Digital Universe
However, none of this means that we should simply forget our ancestral identities. Many of us, whilst embracing Britishness as we do, want our particular history and tradition to have a place somewhere in the mix. From time to time we want to take our Caribbeanness, or our Irishness, Jewishness or Indianness neat.

The PSI survey found that a strong sense of ethnic identity still persists, particularly amongst the young, taking the form of "remembrance or pride in one's origins... over three quarters of ethnic minority respondents agreed that Caribbean and Asian people should try to preserve their culture and way of life - the highest support coming from Caribbeans".

Asked to describe themselves to a new acquaintance on the phone what would tell them something important about you, two out of three minority respondents chose ethnicity above age, job or education. For example, 76% of Afro-Caribbeans said they'd mention their race, whilst only 56% would mention jobs. OK, maybe that's because many didn't have a job, but the disparity is too great for that alone to make the difference. Similarly seven out ten Indian Britons mentioned that they were Asian, fewer than six out of ten mentioned their age or their job. So we know that the issue of what we are and where we come from still counts.

Responding to new demands
It was once thought that Channel Four would respond to this demand. But a report published by the European Media Forum earlier this year drew on the Channel's own work to demonstrate that between 1988 and 1995 its multicultural output fell from 163 to 64 hours each year - a fall of 61%.

More alarming still, as a proportion of the Channel's total output, multicultural programming fell from 3% to 1% over the period. However, a BBC survey showed that despite its effective reduction of commitment it is still regarded by minority viewers as the best of the terrestrial channels when it comes to serving their communities. The new remit for Channel Four which places a duty on it to transmit three hours of programmes which can be defined as multicultural each week should reverse the trend.

But it is unlikely that Channel Four alone can carry the duty of giving a separate voice to everyone, and as I've argued here, I believe that it should steer away from that formula anyway, to a new approach to identity programming.

New channels
The answer may lie in the plethora of new channels coming on stream - sometime soon, they keep telling us - through digital satellite and DTT. Where minority viewers have a choice, they are already defecting to satellite and cable channels. In London, some four out of five South Asian homes take a specialist channel if they can, and amongst Afro-Caribbeans survey evidence suggests that they too would opt for satellite and cable in numbers if they had a similar offering.

Part of the reason is the range of programmes, including black-led shows like Sister, Sister and Moesha. But it is also the feel of some of those channels - urban, contemporary and inclusive. You only have to look at the generic trails for Nickelodeon or Trouble to see a world in which the black people look like they belong; the range of stars includes a much wider range of races and backgrounds than any of the terrestrial channels.

Commerce and culture
These seem to me to be the opportunities for the undiluted voice to come through the babel. And for once commerce and a cultural need may march hand in hand. Broadcasters looking for new streams of income are turning to satellite and to cable for expansion. It is becoming clearer that such channels will have to be funded by subscription and pay-per-view. It is predicted that satellite will grow to the end of the century and, when its share flattens out, cable will go on growing to the point where satellite and cable between them may take up to a third of the viewing audience.

The shock troops of the new channels will undoubtedly be movies and sport. But there is only a limited number of times that any audience will switch on to see Terminator 1, 2, or X; and there must be only so many oddly named football tournaments that will attract fans to pay.

Channel economics
Sooner or later there must be a rebellion against what started out looking like jumble sale tv - old cast offs that you've seen appearing on other people's channels showing up again, looking pretty worn out, but good for one more sentimental outing.

We are perhaps moving on to what you might call car boot sale tv - you probably won't have seen the stuff on all these channels before, but it is seriously dodgy and you're probably paying over the odds for it. The economics of such channels mean that they have to be low-cost. That means little original programming, long runs of repeats from other channels and poor presentation.

Two futures
There are, then, two possible futures. One is that as the minority communities themselves become less poor they may have the funds to support better programming. Asian communities in particular find themselves able to support both a Hindi-movie channel plus a channel based on news and speech. And it may be that the overall environment is changing in the right direction.

The decision of BSkyB, according to Elisabeth Murdoch, to invest in more original programming is beginning to look like a smart one, with Ibiza Uncovered and Hollywood Sex showing what cheap but different tv can do. With two hundred channels to fill, there may well be space for some of the religious and cultural minorities in the UK to have a voice. However, so far we are talking of pretty low grade stuff. And both here and in the Netherlands attempts at culturally specific subscription have failed.

Ethnic hinterlands
But there is a new phenomenon which may well make a very different approach economically possible. As national boundaries become less important and communications easier, many kinds of people are re-establishing links to ancestral ethnic and religious communities across the planet. In the United States it is becoming fashionable once again to have an ethnic hinterland - and in some parts of Canada it is impossible to move for kilts and bagpipes on Burns Night.

Indians, for a long time a huge expatriate tribe, have established a network which, it is said numbers something of the order of 100 million people around the globe, outside India. All of these people are starting to create communities that cross oceans and continents at the touch of a button. The internet will reveal hundreds of sites that give you lists of colleges and schools, Indian companies around the world, temples, and inevitably, marriage services.

Meeting divergent tastes
At the same time, in the United States, the latest survey of ethnic viewing preferences shows a clear and continuing divergence between black and white households. Taking the top twenty shows: in each case, they shared just four programmes - NFL Monday Night Football, CBS' Sunday Night Movie, and Touched By An Angel and ER. Twelve of the black top twenty came from the smaller networks - Fox, Warner Brothers and UPN, which had specifically focussed on the urban audience.

Interestingly it was viewers over 50 who were less likely to watch targeted shows - the 50 plus black viewers had 13 crossover shows. Yet those between 18 and 49 had only three crossover shows. Similar preferences exist amongst black audiences in South Africa and the Caribbean. You can see the trend.

The logic of this should be increasingly that pay-tv could supply specific global audiences with cultural connections with what they want. But, to start that process, some of these channels are going to have to be protected.

The ITC is currently working out its regulatory framework for digital tv; part of that framework should be to protect, for a period at least, some portion of the spectrum to provide for programme suppliers who will offer channels targeted at particular cultural, ethnic or religious interests.

Price of diversity
It is almost certain that sooner or later this is where we will end up. And, yes, I do envisage that there may be some channels with contents we find offensive. But that is the price of diversity. And in such a digital universe one thing is sure: few black or Asian people will need to rush to phone Granny or to tell her that there's a black or brown face on the telly. If she's not watching the show already, it'll probably only be because she's appearing on it herself.

(From the Trevor Phillips Fleming Lecture to The Royal Television Society 1998, with permission).