desmond's final essay

8/6/2019 Desmond's Final Essay

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Student: 22120045 Media, Ethnicity and Nation MC53031A

Examine the ways in which diaspora and hybridity are constructed in the representation

of Black British identities inDesmonds and its contribution to the notion of a

multicultural nation

Walking past a decrepit-looking shop just off Peckham High Street, I remembered with

nostalgia the comedy sitcom Desmonds- it was the shop, it had to be. Growing up in

Peckham, I had watched this programme voraciously being somewhat proud that it was

just around the corner. Unfortunately the shop did not live up to my fond memories

lacking the maroon and yellow sign instead displaying cracked paint and dark windows.

This seems to be an appropriate metaphor for the condition of Black British visibility on

television today.

In this essay, I intend to explore the emergence of Desmonds on British screens and


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having viewed Series One, examine how Desmonds came to be written and firmly

stamped upon the nation as an example of one of the most original British sit-coms in

centuries delivered courtesy of the Evening Standard.

Desmonds can be seen to have emerged at a specific socio-historic time in British

Broadcasting and in looking back at the political and cultural surroundings in which it

appeared, it permits an analysis of the shifts within television and its institutions against a

broader backdrop of the politics of race as it evolved and is evolving, in British society.

Sarita Malik considers television to be a useful barometer by which to examine race

relations in society, which is a concept I am keen to take up and explore in this essay.

Television, far from being a mirror of society or serving the public sphere as its official

idiom, is a social institution which actively constructs an imagined community, a

reality and neutrality of its own and, as such, always makes active choices and

judgements about who and what to represent. I intend to explore television as a mediated

public sphere constructed by the institutions of national broadcasting and consider how it

functions as a symbolic home for its nations members. I will examine who is excluded

and included from symbolic membership of the nation and how television can affect the

way Britain sees itself.

I will pay particular attention to themes of diaspora and hybridity and the construction of

Black British identities in Desmonds, exploring how it produces alternative collective

memories whilst also being very much part of an institutional domain.


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Whilst I have painted a rather dismal view of Black British programming in the current

cultural milieu, I intend to critically examine British broadcastings relationship with

ethnic minorities and how it has influenced what is on our screens and how it actively

constructs a multicultural nation. The relevance of dissecting a program such as

Desmonds and its political setting is its use in enabling us to consider how and where

television has gone from the remits of Channel 4 to Todays supposedly coherent and

conducive One Nation.

Looking through the eye of the needle

Television is thought to be a potent and broad apparatus in which to maintain and

construct the nation. It is able to project an imagination of a unified cultural life, a we-

feeling:

A sense of belonging, the we-feeling of the community, has to be continually

engendered by opportunities for identification as the nation is being

manufactured (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991: 277)

This notion of collective identity and imagined community, however, in the

construction of nation has finite, if elastic boundaries (Anderson, 1983). It is the notion

of boundaries that have traditionally favoured a nation imaged as a predominantly white

middle-class, preferably male, heterosexual body.

When the culture of that public sphere (and thus of the nation) is in effect

racialised by the naturalisation of one (largely unmarked and undeclared) form

of ethnicity, then only some citizens of the nation find it a homely and welcoming


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place (Morley, 2000: 44)

This has come about by signalling to specific groups that programmes are designed for

them, effectively a gold-embossed invitation to participate in the nation, whilst therefore

signalling to other members of the nation that they are not among the invitees.

In such a construction, those who are not imagined in the televised public sphere become

bodies out of place in the nation.

The recognition of others from being in the same nation, or sharing nationality,

hence involves an everyday and much rehearsed distinction between who does

and who does not belong within the nation space (Ahmed, 2000: 99)

The portrayal of the British nation in broadcasting has involved a specific articulation of

Englishness, and this idea of cultural homogeneity has not encompassed the many

different segments of British society.

Depending on whether youre black, white, old, young, privileged,

disadvantaged, healthy, sick etc. England means a million different things to a

million different people. Everyone is still staring out of the same window and

seeing entirely different views (The Observer, 2000)

The construction of national identity in Britain has tended to place people of African and

Asian descent, as well as others, as being outside the nation. This representation of

Britain is achieved through the active exclusion of the other through the narrow eye of

the negative.

It has to go through the eye of the needle before it can construct itself

(Hall, 1991: 21)


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However, this constructed identity has always been largely a myth, national culture has

never been unified in such a way and Englishness as a category is fluid, hybrid and

interchangeable , masquerading behind an idea of a pure and homogeneous culture.

Instead of thinking of national cultures as unified, we should think of them as a

discursive device which represents difference as unity or identity. They are cross-

cut by deep internal divisions and differences and unified only through the

exercise of different forms of cultural power (Hall, 1992)

British broadcasting has attempted to construct a national family with the monarch at its

head. The Christmas Day broadcasts unobtrusively underwrote this version of society

whereby the nation and its constitutive parts are addressed as being part of a greater

national family sharing familial attributes. The concept of race has also largely been

constructed through the idea of shared attributes, of belonging to one race or another.

Paul Gilroy argues that the distinctions between national belonging and conceptions of

race are inherently blurred, precisely because of these familial connections. Phrases

such as the Island Race and the Bulldog Breed represent participants of the nation as

having biological properties. The reaction to black settlement in the UK has been

described continually in metaphors, whereby the purity of the nation is in danger. The

infamous River of Blood speech delivered by Enoch Powell in 1968 epitomises the

period of such thought.

How then has the notion of multiculturalism been written into the nation with its

emphasis on diversity rather than homogeneity? Emerging as a historically specific

negotiation of the nation in the 1980s, it has been argued that rather than producing an


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inclusive heterogeneous conception of the nation, multiculturalism serves to neutralise

the difference that it apparently celebrates. Multiculturalism claims difference as a

nations achievement but is only tolerated under certain conditions, incorporating some

differences and expunging others.

The we of the nation can expand by incorporating some others, thus providing

the appearance of difference, while at the same time, defining others, who are not

natives underneath, as a betrayal of the multicultural nation itself (such others

may yet to be expelled from the national body (Ahmed, 2000: 106)

The we of the nation still remains inherently White British and the ambiguity of race

and nation, of who and who does not belong, paradoxically remains integral to the

discourse of multiculturalism.

Change is in the blood and bones of the British- we are by our nature and

traditions innovators, adventurers, pioneersBritain today is an exciting,

inspiring place to be. And it can be much more. If we face every challenge of a

world with its finger on the fast forward button; where by every part of the picture

of our life is changing (Tony Blair, speech to the Labour Party, Brighton,

September 30 1997)

The (white) racial emphasis still remains with remnants of our glorious past, suggesting

that if we face the challenge when every picture is changing, then Britain can still be

a good place to be. This rhetoric still places the we in a golden imperial past, placing

the challenge of accepting the other into the hands of a particularly connotative Britain.

Multiculturalism as a political discourse that addresses the nation is fraught with these


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kinds of ambiguities. A buzzword in political and cultural studies, multiculturalism

manifests itself in the actuality of British society but it has increasingly been under attack

in recent years. Assertions of a singular national identity have replaced multiculturalism

as a model of integration and assimilation to a vehement harking back to cultural

sameness for the supposed maintenance of social cohesion and unity. This renewed

possessiveness over cultural borders has been re-asserted over the late panic over asylum

seekers, the war with Iraq, changes in Europe occurring in spite of, and perhaps because

of, the multicultural actuality of Britain. It is therefore possible to see that the psychic

national borders of Britain are under constant oscillation, on the one hand, celebrating the

cultural diversity of Britain, and on the other, maintaining older conceptions of

Britishness.

Changing the Channel

The proliferation of television in the majority of peoples homes occurred during the

1950s alongside the mass migration and settlement of Caribbean, Asian and African

citizens who came from former colonies of the Empire to the metropolitan centres of

Britain to start new lives and to re-build a war-torn economy. It is this relationship

between the changing demographics of Britain and its representation on the screens of the

nation that asks us to question how the Black British experience has been worked into the

nation under particular regimes of representation.

Black presence on British screens in the early years of television was expressed in deeply

racist and stereotypical ideas of race, emanating from Britains colonial past. The


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history of colonialism still iniquitously marks British television, from Buck and

Bubbles to the Black and White Minstrel Show, producing enduring motifs such as the

happy slave, the noble savage and the entertainer (Hall in Mercer, 1989) that are now

being rehabilitated for contemporary audiences, a past difficult to shake off.

However, shifts within the socio-political context of Britain have meant that media

portraits have changed with them in altogether more positive ways but the legacies of

colonialism and racist discourses are never entirely absent from our screens. The

structures of dominance and the context within which black communities are and have

been situated needs to be understood if arguments about positive or negative

representations are to be less than spurious.

During the decades following the introduction of television in British society and the rise

of people coming from the diaspora, the notion of black people as entertainers or

exoticized others began to shift to programmes that placed black people as a problem

within British society. Racist hostility continued throughout Britain in the 1960s and

70s and the popularity of Powellism and anti-immigration laws showed its face in

programmes such as Til Death Us Do Part (1966-74) and Love Thy Neighbour (1972-

5) highlighting fears of Britain being over-run by migrants from the colonies. Whilst

these programmes presented issues of racism in the private sphere, the more pervasive

and damaging forms of institutionalised racism were rarely documented.

Public service broadcasting, so-called, became the target for dissatisfaction and

viewed as part of the same oppressive structure which operated against black

autonomy in the real world (Ross, 1996: 120)


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By the late 1970s, there were various anti-racist interventions such as the Annan

Report in 1977, which expressed the need for broadcasting to better reflect the pluralism

of British culture. The discourse of multiculturalism was beginning to work its way

into the British nation. However, criticisms emerged over the ideological bandwagon of

multiculturalism in that it had merely been co-opted to manage racism in

inconsequential ways. This was occuring against the backdrop of the soon-to-be-elected

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her televised speech in 1978 warning the native

members of Britain that they were endangered of being swamped by people with a

different culture (Malik, 2002)

Against this paradox, the media was identified as an ideological space in which the Black

struggle against the State would play a crucial role in which getting access was

acknowledged as the key bridge to cross in order to achieve genuine civic equity and

change prevailing attitudes towards race (Malik, 2002: 18). The connection between the

debates about the racialisation of geographical space and the racialisation of the airwaves

became more apparent. The establishment of Channel 4 was imminent and

multiculturalism was being exhorted and inserted into popular discourse. This new

imagining of national identity, however, was to emerge from social conflict and tragedy:

the New Cross fire attack in which 13 Black teenagers died, Operation Swamp 1981

which further encouraged SUS laws as a legitimate form of racial discrimination, and

the race riots which were to follow in Bristol, Brixton, Southall and most major cities.

The storm which swept through Britains inner cities in July 1981was also the

wind which blew black television onto our screens (Gilroy quoted in Morley,


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2000: 47)

The underlying rationale for the emergence of Channel 4 is complex but pressure from

black media practitioners such as Equity Coloured Artists Committee and the

Campaign Against Racism in the Media, the Annan Report and the political and social

conflicts of 1981, led to its remit to provide programmes catering for minority interest.

Whilst Channel 4 did provide greater opportunities for black representation on television,

it is necessary to deconstruct the messages of the regimes of power that operate to

differentiate one group from another, to represent them as similar or different, to include

or exclude certain bodies from constructions of the nation and the body politic. Even the

term minority interest becomes problematic as Avtah Brah points out. In Britain there

has been a tendency to discuss people from the diaspora along a majority/minority axis.

Minority was applied primarily to British citizens of African, Asian and Caribbean

descent, which merely operates as a polite substitute in post-colonial code for coloured

people (Brah, 1996). The term minority relates to old connotations of minor in

tutelage which was reserved for women, colonial subjects and the working class.

The discourse becomes an alibi for pathologized representations of these groups

(Brah, 1996: 188)

Therefore, even when the majority/minority dichotomy is used to signal unequal power

relations, it retains its older connotations which naturalise rather than challenge the power

inequality. Markers of difference serve to articulate facets of power, and the fixing of

identities along any singular axis should be called into question.

However, the 1980s was also a crucial decade for opening up debates about essentialist


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notions of race and the moving away from imposed identifications. Paul Gilroy took up

the concept of diaspora as a useful means by which to understand the diversity of Black

British communities.

Black Britain defines itself crucially as part of a diaspora. Its unique cultures

draw inspiration from those developed by black populations elsewhere. In

particular, the culture and politics of black America and the Caribbean have

become raw materials for creative processes which redefine what it means to be

black, adapting it to distinctly British experiences and meanings. Black culture is

actively made and re-made (Gilroy, 1987: 154)

Gilroy cites the symbolic value of the term Diaspora which points emphatically to the

fact that there can be no pure, uncontaminated or essential blackness anchored in an

unsullied originary moment (Gilroy, 1993:99)

Acknowledging the heterogeneity of different black communities was part of the

emerging trend of multiculturalism, which was to manifest itself so prolifically in

Desmonds.

Desmonds- the making and unmaking of strangers

Brainchild of St Lucian born Trix Worrell, Desmonds can act as a useful barometer for

understanding the particular socio-political climate of the time. Whilst undoubtedly

providing more positive representations of the Black British experience in the public

sphere, it needs to be examined closely in order to understand its popularity and under

what discursive influences it was allowed a more equitable share of the national pie.


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Broadcast on Channel 4 from 1989 to 1994 Desmonds responded to issues such as the

experience of diaspora, black identities in Britain, aspects of hybridity, inter-generational

conflict, institutionalized racism, family and the multicultural nation.

We wanted to say something positive about black families and, more

importantly, about migrant families within this country and what it is to be black

in England. (Worrell quoted in Pines, 1992: 184)

Trix Worrell initially expressed his reservations of going into sitcom through

discussions with friends who felt he would be letting the side down, simply reiterating a

clichd territory. The issues held up by many black practitioners over the

representation of black people in comedy reflect the scarcity and unequal opportunity in

British broadcasting which creates a pressure to speak-for black people as a whole.

If every black image, event or individual is expected to be representative, this

can only simplify and homogenize the diversity of black experiences and

identities. In other words the burden of representation reinforces the reductive

logic of the stereotype (Mercer, 1989: 9)

Trix Worrell addresses the problem that many black productions are situated in comedy

and that the one-only mentality means that the diversity of black experiences is not

represented.

We should be examining the black experience in England and we should be

seeing that experience incorporated much more in television output At the end

of the day, it seems to me that theres always this one-only mentality which says

its OK to have one black show, but if theres more than one, then theres a


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problem. (Worrell quoted in Pines, 1992: 187)

Many sitcoms have relied upon essentialist notions of race most notoriously in Mind

Your Language (1977-79) the epitome of crude stereotypes. In Desmonds, Worrell

attempted to move away from these kinds of cheap racial jokes and concentrate on the

experience of diaspora and black people in Britain.

It was an explicitly corrective text; designed to work against the types of

negative images of comedic Blackness which had hitherto been seen on

television (Malik, 2002: 101)

Set in a barber shop in Peckham that doubled as a kind of drop-in social centre for friends

and family, the comedy centres on generational misunderstandings between Shirley and

Desmond as West Indian parents, their fully assimilated son Michael, and their British

born children; Sean and Gloria as well as the relationships between various friends such

as Louise.

Louise: This is more than a barbershop Mr Ambrose, this is a community

centre, a confessional, a drop-in..yeah..this is a place where people

serve tea and toast, watch TV and engage in social intercourse

Desmond: Not in my shop they dont.

(Series One, Episode Two)

The characters of Porkpie, Desmond (both Guyanese) and Matthew (from the Gambia)

form a comedic trio in the shop as daily life plays its hand. Banter between Matthew and


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Worrell creates a plethora of images connoting a convivial atmosphere enshrining the

discourse of multiculturalism. As has been discussed, multiculturalism has been imbued

with incongruous connotations oscillating between the smoothing over of difference,

which merely serves to neutralise conflict, and opening up a space in which diversity can

be lived out and celebrated.

Desmonds has received some criticism and been compared to its American compatriot

The Cosby Show in its ability to gloss over or ignore inconvenient truths. The Cosby

Show has received much criticism in that it caters to serve a particular ideology of the

American dream, lending credibility to the idea that anyone can make it, a myth that

sustains a conservative political ideology blind to the inequalities hindering persons

born on mean streets and privileging persons born on easy street. (Jhally and Lewis,

1992: 9).

Racism is never acknowledged in the saccharine sweetness of the Huxtable family life,

which arguably subverts any radical impact it may have had (Ross, 1996).

The awesome power of television is its ability to gloss over or ignore

inconvenient truths in order to present a more hopeful scenario, where hard work

can overcome every disadvantage, even endemic racism(Ross, 1996: 98).

Conversely Desmonds is set in a working-class environment in which racism and

inequality is revealed, albeit in occasionally fleeting ways. A similar Thatcherite

discourse of an entrepreneurial Britain is made but argued in spite of racism rather than

glossing over inequality.


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Porkpie: Apart from a barbershop in Peckham and a few dodgy goods off the

back of a lorry. What business do we own?

Desmond: Well, judging from the papers we seem to have a monopoly on

mugging and street crime.

Shirley: Wellwhat a negative conversation. Now we are excelling in all

sorts of areas and I dont mean just athletics and pop music and

boxing. We now have members of parliament, we in education, local

government, on the telly. Take our eldest son Michael for instance.

Now if you want to achieve, you have to just go for it.

(Series One, Episode Two)

Desmonds creates a space where the experience of racism, migration, diaspora and

hybridity can be worked into the national collective memory that hitherto had largely

been ignored or pathologized. A recurrent theme in Desmonds is that of his wish to

return to Guyana:

Desmond: I dont know if I want to run no more(reaching for the photograph)

I just want to rest, build a house on me plot of land back home and

retire.

Shirley: Stop dreaming Desmond! This is England 1989and were no nearer

building a house in Guyana now then we were in 1969!

Desmond: You think I aint gonna make it, you think I aint gonna get there

well, Im going to build that house if its the last thing I doeven if I

dont live there. It will be for the children so that they know their

country of origin, their culture, its roots so that if then one day

Thatcher decide to throw us out, we have somewhere to go and that

goes for you too Linford Christie!

Shirley: Daley Thompson

(Series One, Episode One)

The diaspora experience is an important theme in Desmonds; we can look at diaspora as


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being both a descriptive category as well as an analytical one.

Avtah Brah sees the concepts of diaspora, border, and the politics of location as useful

conceptual connections for the historicised analyses of contemporary trans/national

movements of people, information, and cultures, creating a disaporic space inhabited

not only by the diasporic subjects but also those constructed as indigenous.

In order to theorize diaspora in Desmonds, I will approach it as a specific historical

experience of Afro-Caribbean migration as well as considering it as a theoretical concept.

Each diasporic experience is different and as such is far from fixed, as each experience is

lived out through many different trajectories.

The concept of diaspora delineates a field of identifications where imagined

communities are forged within and out of a confluence of narratives from annals

of collective memory and re-memory. (Brah, 1996: 196)

I see Desmonds as providing an alternative sphere in public discourse whereby a

collective memory is sought out through narrative that can be seen to provide positive

identification of the diasporic experience in Britain for Afro-Caribbean communities.

According to racialised imagination, diasporic communities and their descendants have

been seen as in Britain but not of Britain. I think Desmonds does much to interrogate

these notions in firmly placing black Britons in Britain whilst still acknowledging the

diasporic experience and at the same time challenging notions of fixed racial and national

identity. Paul Gilroy acknowledges the insecurity of absolutist views of black and white

cultures:

It is constantly under challenge from the activities of blacks who pass through


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the cultural and ideological net which is supposed to screen Englishness from

them, and from the complex organic process which renders black Britons partially

soluble in the national culture which their presence helps transform (Gilroy,

1987: 61)

Therefore, Desmonds deconstructs essentialist notions of identity, re-writing and

interrogating the black British experience both through the perspective of diaspora, which

can be explored through aspects of hybridity and also the experience of migration itself.

The experience of migration is articulated in Desmonds and the idea of home is a

recurrent theme. Home becomes a mythic place of desire for Desmond and is

repeatedly sentimentalised as a place of belonging but as he is reminded by Shirleys

sister Susu, is a place of no return.

Susu: Tell me Desmond, what are you going to do with that plot of land?

You still going to build a house upon it?

Desmond: Yes, me gonna build a house upon it and retire.

Susu: You still have that fool-fool idea?

Desmond: What foolish about it?

Susu: The West Indies have changed, its different.

Sean: You said its still the same, nothings changed.

Susu: Well, its changed since your father lived there, theres a whole heap of

muggings and killings and tings, Sean.

Desmond: So whats new?

Susu: A whole heap of unemployment

Desmond: Susu, Im going there to retire, not to work


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Susu: What I am saying is that theres a whole heap of people with the same

idea but when them get back home them cant settle down, its

disappointing and some people cant take disappointment.

(Series One, Episode Four)

For Desmond, the idea of origin of home is called into question throughout the series

and the relationship this bears upon construction of hybrid identities of the black

experience in Britain.

Migration can be understood as a process of estrangement, a process of

becoming estranged from that which was inhabited as home (Ahmed, 2000: 92)

Susu questions Desmonds cultural identity in the same episode saying that he has

become English that he even eats fish and chips. For Hall, the experience of diaspora

and identity is one that is constantly producing and reproducing itself, through a process

of hybridity.

The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple,

factual past, since our relation to it, like the childs relation to the mother, is

always-ready after the break. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy,

narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of identification or suture,

which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. (Hall, 1990: 226)

Gilroy theorises hybridity as embodied in a symbolic ship, which points to the trajectory

between the point of departure and destination, a liminal in-between that captures the

spirit of the Black Atlantic. The ship represents the idea of entire life worlds in motion,

exemplifying the myriad experience of migration. The Empire Windrush is captured in


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the beginning title sequence of Desmonds, signifying the experience of migration and the

anticipation of arrival hallmarking and symbolising a hybrid world (Kraidy, 2005: 58)

The term hybridity itself is a complex and risky notion and is of dubious usefulness as a

conceptual umbrella without concrete historical, geographical and conceptual grounding

(Kraidy, 2005). The term hybridity was referred to in the nineteenth century as a

physiological phenomenon categorizing the mixing of races, usually in a derogatory way.

Whilst its meaning has changed notably through theorist such as Homi Bhahba, Stuart

Hall and Paul Gilroy, it is worthwhile to noting that ways of thinking about race, identity

and culture cannot be separated from racialised notions of the past.

The nightmare of the ideologies and categories of racism continue to repeat upon

the living (Young,1995: 28)

Hybridity can both invoke contrafusion and disjunction as well as fusion and

assimilation.

In post-colonial studies it was popularized to explicate cultural fusion experienced by

people from the diaspora and reputed by Bhabha as representing a third space, enabling

a resistance to the discursive conditions of cultural and political dominance.

Hybridity becomes the moment in which the discourse of colonial authority loses

its univocal grip on meaning and finds itself open to the trace of language of the

other, enabling the critic to trace complex movements of disarming alterity in the

colonial text (Young, 1993: 23)

For Stuart Hall it also represented a shift in black cultural politics and the process of


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transmuting essentialist notions of blackness to an awareness of the black experience as

a diasporic experience allowing for multiple subject positions. The term Black was

coined as a way of referencing common experience and marginalisation in Britain which

allowed for the politics of resistance that worked along side and allowed for the process

of hybridization.

They are two phases of the same movement, which constantly overlap and

interweave (Hall quoted in Young, 1993: 24)

The representation of black British identities in Desmonds allow for these multiple

subject positions which include the alterity of gender, generation, class, location and

sexual orientation. For Desmond, the condition of that transformation require him to

preserve a certain degree of cultural and ethnic difference to avoid living in rootless

times. However, the relationship of the first generation to the place of migration is

different to that of subsequent generations and the concept of diaspora is one of multi-

locationality across multiple cultural and psychic boundaries (Brah, 1996).

Whilst Desmond finds the elasticity of these boundaries sometimes stretched too far,

particularly in relation to his son Michael who he posits with an upper-middle class

British identity;

Michael: Now lets just get this straight. Just because Im black doesnt

mean that I cannot appreciate the finer things in life and just

because Im black it equally doesnt mean that I cant have

ambition or speak the Queens English. It wouldnt go down toowell if someone came to ask me for a loan and I said Wapn me

cant give you a loan coz I-man feel you is an idiot! What you

dont realise is that times are changing and youre not changing

with them!


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The position of Lee, a friend of the a family and the local Peckham wide-boy, is to see

himself as West Indian with his roots in England.

Desmond: Instead of going to Spain, you could have saved your money and gone

to Jamaica, check out your roots and see where you was born

Lee: Ive seen where I was born; I drive past it everydayKings College

Hospital, Camberwell, London.

The multiplicity of black identities in Desmonds, creates what Brah names a diasporic

space:

It is where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or

disavowed; where the permitted and the prohibited perpetually interrogate; and

where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptibly mingle even while these

syncretic forms may be disclaimed in the name of purity and tradition. (Brah,

1996: 208).

What Desmonds successfully does is mobilise resistance against orthodox images of the

black other which have been perpetuated by the white media industry and through the

processes of decentring, these new political and cultural formations continually

challenge the minoritising and peripheralising impulses of the centres of dominance

(Brah, 1996: 210).

It rehabilitates a history that has been denied rather than constructs an absolute truth and

creates an important mythical arena for the experience of Black Britons to be written into

the history of the nation.


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Here today gone tomorrow?

Having analysed Desmonds in relation to a socio-political upheaval in the trajectory of

time and how different black identities have been represented, it is possible to see that

within the bounds of institutional fervour it managed to achieve an alternative space

where experiences of the diaspora could be played out. In this cultural thickening of the

nation state, it seems that of late, it has all but thinned. Traditional broadcasting still

dominates the viewing practises of the majority of people in Britain, even in light of

satellite and the possibility of multiple channels, and remains an important point of

contact and debate. However, the Broadcasting Standards Council in Britain has failed to

secure significant improvements in the representation of black people. Departing from

Channel 4s original remit, Michael Jackson (the appropriately named Chief Executive)

declared that the channel no longer wished to be seen as a minority channel for minority

audiences as he felt British culture had now moved on to the point that ethnically

defined minorities are so much part of the mainstream culture that ghetto broadcasting

is anachronistic (Morley, 2000: 47). But there is still remains a lack of diversity;

minority audiences have not simply become white. This kind of attitude is refracted

in the light of the political concept of an all-inclusive One Nation as discussed in the

beginning part of this essay.

New Labours leaders have recently confirmed their detachment from the world

the rest of us inhabit by speaking heavy-handedly about the transmission of

English norms, the management of national identity and belonging and the


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necessity of assimilation (Gilroy, 2002: 3)

The beginning of the third millennium has seen nearly all major terrestrial British

broadcasters pledge as improvement in their approaches to cultural diversity, in response

to the alternate viewing systems by disillusioned Black customers, the post-Macpherson

report, and the governments 2000 Communications White Paper. This has occurred

namely in the form of the Cultural Diversity Network which is a cross industry action

plan aiming to promote cultural diversity both on and off-screen. This remains to be seen

when television programmes are still made with one eye on the ratings and the other on

limits of acceptability- whose line is drawn around a white audience.

desmond's final essay

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