Rupa Huq
Main Page: Rupa Huq (Labour - Ealing Central and Acton)
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
I am from a generation in which the cathode ray tube ruled supreme. Many moments of my life have been mediated through the idiot box—sometimes it has been in the foreground, forcing me to sit up and take notice; sometimes it has been in the background, flickering like a fireplace.
When I first went to school, we were probably the only family on the block, in the hood or whatever we call it—I was dragged up—to have a black and white set. Among my early memories of TV is watching “The Black and White Minstrel Show” on a monochrome set. Even at my tender age, it was baffling to me. For those too young to remember that light entertainment show—is that what we would call it?—it ran for 20 years, from 1958 to 1978. It had white actors and singers blacked up to imitate American minstrels of the 19th century. At best, that can be described as bad taste, and there are many other words—unparliamentary language—that we could use to describe the programme. Even in the ’70s when I was tuning in, the accusation could have been made that the BBC was not representative of the population in modern Britain.
I welcome this debate and congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) on bringing this subject to the House. There are parallels with this place. Ethnic minority representation both on TV and in politics is a case of “could do better”.
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Lady’s speech, but I have sat through 45 minutes of this debate—I apologise that I was not here at the beginning, Mr Deputy Speaker—and must point out that this is an issue across the media. I suggest to the hon. Lady that the situation in this House, though bad, is considerably better than that across a large portion of the print media. I am surprised that journalism and political journalists have not been brought up. This is a broader problem, not just one at the BBC, and it is a much more acute problem at newspapers, magazines and across the print media.
Kwasi Kwarteng
Indeed, I was. The Guardian is the only newspaper that consistently misspells my name. I just wanted to get that out.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
On that basis, we will want to know when it improves.
Dr Huq
That is a hazard for people with a name like mine or the hon. Gentleman’s. The sooner we take steps to acknowledge and address this situation, as we are doing today, the better. He is right that this is a sector-wide issue across the media.
It goes without saying that the nation’s front rooms should be illuminated by more than just white people, and clichéd representatives of white people at that. The late sociologist Stuart Hall used to talk about representations and reality. There is a circuit between them and they feed off each other.
Sadly, “The Black and White Minstrel Show” was not a complete one-off. As my viewing habits progressed, there was ITV’s “Love Thy Neighbour”, which ran from 1972 to 1976—a situation comedy in which the situation was having a black family next door. It seems absurd now. Astonishingly, the TV Times trailed the programme with the line:
“You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your neighbours”.
Also on ITV, there was “Mixed Blessings”, which the British Film Institute describes thus:
“Christopher and Muriel are in love. But since he is white and she is black, their marriage raises tensions among their respective families.”
The BFI—this programme is now a BFI classic—says that it
“understandably reflects the confused racial attitudes of the time”.
Confused.com! The racist ranter Alf Garnett in “Till Death Do Us Part” was on the BBC. We can excuse the other two because they were on a commercial broadcaster. All of these things are now excused. It is like Jimmy Savile’s crimes. These things were acceptable in the ’70s, which was a pre-politically correct time.
We can cite examples of where we have not really moved forward. Sorry, I missed another programme—“It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”. There is a bit of a pattern in these things, because they all demonstrate an inferiority. In that show, it was with Asians. There are academic theories that show that things like slavery are based on the inferiority of another race. These programmes, to some extent, had that sort of attitude at their core.
A current programme I would cite, which has been going since 2012, is “Citizen Khan”. If I did not know what the year was—I do not know if people know that programme. It is the everyday tale of a Birmingham family of Muslims, but they are really quite backward. Again, it relates to the point about Islamophobia made by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), who is no longer in his place. There is a beardy-weirdy chap. They are not quite cutting off people’s hands, but I could imagine that being in a future episode.
Mrs Helen Grant
I just want to give a contrast to the terrible programmes the hon. Lady has recalled, which I remember too. I want to mention one positive and diverse story that I saw this morning on “BBC Breakfast”. It was about the 276 girls from Chibok in Nigeria who were abducted by Boko Haram. It was a brilliant story that was well done and well produced. It was the BBC at its best. It has also allowed me to say a little in this Chamber to highlight the fact that today is the second anniversary of the abduction of those girls. It is two years on and the vast majority are still not back. It is important that these girls are remembered. We must not forget them and must do everything we can to campaign for their safe return.
Dr Huq
The hon. Lady’s excellent point anticipates a later part of my speech, which is about the difference between black and Asian people over there, compared with the ones here.
I do not want to bash the BBC. I am a former employee of the corporation. Ealing and Acton are very BBC places—the wage slips we used to get were issued from Villiers House in Ealing Broadway. Ealing Studios is in my seat, as is the wig and prop department in Acton, where there are various warehouses. It is a very BBC area, on the whole. I have had 361 separate communications from people begging me to argue that the charter renewal should go through and that the Reithian principles—to educate, inform and entertain—should be preserved in the new settlement.
I do not want to attack the BBC, and the point has been correctly made that the examples that have been chosen are selective. People see the BBC as a world standard. My cousins in Bangladesh always say that when they want to know the truth they turn on the BBC to hear what is going on, which chimes with the hon. Lady’s point. But with power comes responsibility—it is an old phrase—and the mainstream media have enormous power. They do not have simply to reinforce; they can also challenge. If there is any broadcaster that does not run only on supply-oriented lines, it is the BBC.
As many Members have said, diversity does not just stop at ethnic diversity. There was the case of the “Countryfile” presenter Miriam O’Reilly, a woman in her 50s who was discriminated against just for reaching her half century. We could do a Venn diagram of all these things: gender, ethnicity—I would fit into quite a few of them—sexuality, regional diversity and class representation, because we want to see the people downstairs as well as those upstairs. We also need to know what is going on off screen as well as on; it is all very well having a pretty person who can read the autocue, but we need to know what is happening at board level.
To go back to my couch potato days, Michael Buerk’s reporting on Ethiopia in the 1980s put the issues underlying what became LiveAid and BandAid on the agenda, but there is a worry that sometimes factual broadcasting can resort to clichés, showing gangs, or Muslims who are repressed. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham mentioned the character of Benny in “Grange Hill”; at the same time, all the Asian people in the programme were victims of the bully, Gripper. That gave me, as an Asian person, a very negative portrayal.
I did not want to make my speech about statistics, because other Members can do that better than me, but there is progress. For example, I am encouraged that Aaqil Ahmed—I do not know him personally, but that is definitely not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant name—is the commissioning editor for religious broadcasting at the BBC. John Pienaar got the amazing interview with my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) when it came out that she had been mistaken in the lift for a cleaner—sadly, many of us have had similar experiences, although not perhaps as extreme as that. I have just heard today that he has been promoted to deputy political editor at the BBC.
That perhaps reflects progress in this House, with the new Serjeant at Arms, who is British-Moroccan, and the chaplain Rose Hudson-Wilkin, who also represents progress. Again, however, we need to look at things like hyphenated identities, because the Serjeant at Arms is British-Moroccan. Old slogans like “Black, white, unite” make it sound as if people can be only one category, but mixed race is predicted to be the biggest demographic segment in global megacities such as ours before long. We need to represent that. We should also think about Chinese people and Jewish people; there are Irish stereotypes on “Mrs Brown’s Boys”—all of those things. [Interruption.] Okay. I need a killer conclusion.
Many people have referred to “hideously white”, the famous slogan of Greg Dyke when he was director-general. Sometimes it feels as though progress is painfully slow.