I am constantly compelled to ask myself, in considering the experience of viewing Black cultural and social history, if Black cultural knowledge through an encounter, visually or otherwise, of the Black is able to truly inform the contemporary. What are the real relationships that can be formed between Black imagery placed within white frames and cross-generational Black audiences, and between the idea of Black political knowledge and action? Can looking back at moments of largely unseen, everyday Black existence achieve some register on the present, and one that is defined not by the ballasting of the spectator within the spaces of the present? Or can it only remind us of how the narratives of racism and anti-Blackness as a conditional requirement of our existence pose no difference or change from the past presented? The looking practices of looking back, as an attempt to address such questions, suggest that a sensorial and gravitational pull towards the Black archive allows for the accentuation and accumulation of Black cultural knowledge, rather than simply its suturing. This means that, in our position as consumers of these visual forms of historical communication, rather than functioning simply as a mode of adjoining the racial past with the racial contemporary, the practice of looking back is an instinctive response to an often unrecognised desire; we know there is an infinite body of Black narratives and visualities that have been lost in the rapid historical, generational and technological flows and progressions that – once accessed – create new encounters with Black existences, circumstances and expressions that we have understood to have been part of our cultural and social history.
This affective practice of looking back at ourselves is encountered in my exploration of Open Door (1973–83), the BBC2 documentary series that created a novel but much-needed process of open-application commissioning that endeavoured to perform the radical act of allowing organisations and community groups access to the means of television production and self-representation. But what is of particular interest here is the fact that these programmes emerged within a period of cultural, social and political unrest, with a shared set of political coordinates. Taking place within the frames of British public service broadcasting was a new Black representational culture, shaped by the politicised Black British identities that were emerging within 1970s Britain, and whose engagements with British television served as a microcosm for the broader racial climate of the times.
If the political and racialised context of the 1960s and 70s was conducive to the accompanying demand by Black people to attend to the realities of our circumstances through the mediums of film and television, the BBC’s Open Door created the platform for community-based activists whose narratives, in the main, interrogated the manifold issues related to the struggles of the Black urban poor and working class in Britain through racial, social, political and economic optics. Like the Black-authored films of the 1970s, such as Pressure by Horace Ove? (1976), that enjoyed only fleeting and conditional institutional support and remained firmly on the periphery of British screen culture, many of these Open Door programmes and films were invested in exploring the clandestine, ideological functions of the legislative and everyday practice of race relations. This is a legislative practice that I, like so many before me, describe as a technology of racial governance and management through state institutions such as the police, the judiciary and the education system, which as Black Teachers (1973) – an episode of Open Door that exposed the inferior treatment of Black children within British schools – shows us, was inlawed and instituted for the containment of Black aspiration, prosperity, intellectual flourishing and political expression.
One of the more concerning structural features that accompanied Open Door’s liberal praxis of community access was a commitment to editorial and commissioning balance founded on the notion of freedom of speech. This would be observed in the broadcasting of programmes that paradoxically worked to expose the fallacies within the very idea of the BBC as constitutionally bound by the principle of impartiality and objectivity. For example, in 1976, a year in which the National Front gained political legitimacy through an increase in their vote share in a number of by-elections (most notably in Birmingham Stechford, where they gained 8.2%), and under the guise of neutrality, Open Door would broadcast an episode by the British Campaign to Stop Immigration, an overtly racist documentary purporting to address the concerns of the North and the Midlands, which argued vociferously against the emergent but still-benign race equality legislation in the UK. The documentary’s status as a product of representational balance permitted the unchallenged expression of discriminatory and denigrative perspectives on racial difference that here functioned as fact, and overtly racist comments from its white interviewees.
Of course, the editorial and commissioning equivalencies of Open Door also allowed for the broadcasting of counter-narratives. In 1979, the actress Maggie Steed (who would, incidentally, in the same year play a racist resident in Franco Rosso’s film Babylon) and Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall, with Campaign Against the Media, presented an eviscerating documentary on the subtle and overt racism of sitcoms, current affairs and news bulletins in ‘It Ain’t Half Racist Mum’. This episode has become one of the most well-known Open Door programmes, in part because of Hall’s position as the lead presenter. It also gained notoriety thanks to the simple and accessible way it communicated the highly complex and often invisible processes of racialisation funnelled through the normative framework of current affairs documentaries and comedy shows – something that would become the disciplinary and methodological basis for the highly sophisticated academic analysis of race, racism and the ideological functions of television. At the time of broadcast, Hall was Professor of Sociology at the Open University, and one of the UK’s foremost public intellectuals. His presence in the programme compounded the Open University’s existing relationship with the BBC – since 1974, they had been screening early-morning programmes that brought university courses to a remote viewing public. ‘It Ain’t Half Racist Mum’ served as a form of public sociology, and offered a different, visual outlet for Hall’s developing research on the British media, undertaken as the director of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indeed, ‘It Ain’t Half Racist Mum’ is a text that was very much in concert with the evolving nature of Cultural Studies, which by the late 1970s had begun to focus on the particularities of cultures founded on social divisions of race and gender, as well as class and nationhood, seeing cultural products, of which television was very much a central form, not as unified expressions of society, but as sites of contestation. ‘It Ain’t Half Racist Mum’ provided a critical interrogation of the modalities of racism to be found in news reports, documentaries, comedy shows and media reportage that had come to support and accelerate the nation’s projection of denigrative, violent, and consenting ideas towards Black identity.
Whilst there is an instinctive unity within the Open Door documentaries concerned with the circumstances of the Black experience in Britain and the question of a denigrated and marginalised Black identity, there is also tremendous aesthetic and formal diversity to be observed in the documentaries’ stylistic and narrative approaches. It is this absence of homogeneity that is very much part of the practice of looking back, and with this, the assessing of the nature of Black identity on screen. The presence of racism and anti-Blackness as a habitual reality for Black people, and the pervasive discourse of race relations and racial inequality as a subject of public debate for the state-of-the-nation representative functions of public service broadcasting, created both the thematic necessity and the medium conditions for varying the format of engagement. ‘Open Door Forum: Unheard Voices’ was a strand of the Open Door series broadcast throughout September 1975 that would alter the primary mode of televisual documentary as filmed within the location of Black community activity. The episode with Young People from the Afro-Caribbean Section of the Kentish Town Youth Club, for example, filmed within a structured studio setting, functions as a forum for Black debate over the racial inequalities within housing allocation within the borough of Camden and beyond, self-determination vis-a?-vis institutional intervention, and the purpose of youth club provision as a space of unguarded expression and connectivity, or the suppression of anti-racist political action amongst Black youths in the region.
I earlier described the encounter with historical images of Britain’s Black community, as we find in the Open Door archive, as a looking practice of looking back, through which the past allows us to better comprehend the Black present. I am therefore somewhat justified in terming this a form of Black cultural (re)imagination, this being the ways in which our engagement with the unseen histories of our televisual (and therefore social) presence allows us to reconsider current constructions of Black identity, framed through the lens of television or otherwise, as an inherently London-centric existence. The documentary ‘Crazy Dream’ (1982), made by the Stoke Caribbean Community Enterprises, focuses on a group of Black people located within the Shelton area in Stoke-on-Trent. In the camera’s capturing of the city’s Black people against the soundtrack of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘It Noh Funny’, the documentary becomes a meeting of the Black identities of Kwesi Johnson’s Brixton, South London, with the Black community of Stoke-on-Trent. We see here their efforts to transform a disused coal storage building into an arts centre that would function not just as a venue for the expression of Black vernacular cultural and creative practices, but also as a space of multiracial and cross-cultural connection and bridging. Like the 1977 episode of Open Door, Harambee Housing Association’s ‘A Black Experience’, which captured the activities of a Birmingham-based Black co-operative, Open Door’s Black televisual archive, where community-centred and community-driven programming display an interest in the cities and locations beyond London, is further experienced in a 1977 episode centring on a group of unemployed young people who have been invited to Bradford College to participate in a workshop, where they develop fictional scenes based on their experiences for a participatory film. Alongside this, the participants are interviewed about their own existence within a deeply unequal and discriminatory employment landscape. Despite this being a multiracial group, the issue of racism as a structuring reality of their experiences of the job market and the police become present through the documentary’s seeking of the perspectives of both the Black and white youth, and by factual information on screen: ‘Black youth unemployment is twice as high as for whites’. This becomes the basis for the episode to perform as a polemic on the racism underpinning youth unemployment in the city, a stance further emphasised in the film that emerges from the episode’s workshop, ‘Black Future’. In this film, we are introduced to a dystopian Britain five years in the future, where a post-recession economic boom has produced the status of permanent unemployment amongst the young within Britain’s urban, post-industrial inner cities, and where the government has succeeded in the creation of an official, policed geographic barrier between the decaying and marginalised North and the economically flourishing regions of the South. In this vein, the Open Door series, and the programmes specifically concerned with race and Blackness through this period, can be thought of as being in dialogue with other modes of Black political expression that were emerging in reaction to Thatcherite Britain, and the racial tensions, inequalities, and brutality which were accentuated and normalised by the manipulative narrative conventions of dominant British television. Indeed, it is the concentration and intensity of these programmes that addressed racism within the British body social, which gave their work the unifying imperative of a manifesto, given that such programming was being produced within a technology of British television as site of racial struggle, exclusion, and – as articulated by Stuart Hall – as part of the broader continuum of the protracted dialectic between cultural institutions, Black people and the rights to our representation.
It is possible to trace similarities in approach and subject matter in other concurrent BBC programming, including the Omnibus documentary series that ran from 1967 to 2003. In its profiling of the radical Black dub poet, musician and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson – in the documentary ‘Dread Beat an’ Blood’ (directed by Franco Rosso, 1978) – we encounter a powerful and authentic orator for the Black colonial conditions within Britain, firmly placed within the Black cultural and social grass roots. Further, Channel 4’s emergence in the early 1980s, with its specific mandate for minority representation, would advance a more experimental mode of screen representation, inaugurating a critical break from the dominant mode of documentary realism for exploring Black identity and conditions, and, with this, a timely recognition of Black subjectivity. Finally, there is a much closer alignment with Open Door to be observed in BBC2’s 40 Minutes (1981– 94), a documentary series that, whilst not editorially fixed on the direct representation of community, included ‘Struggle for Stonebridge’ (1987), again by director Franco Rosso, which charted the activities of the Harlesden People’s Community Council (HPCC) who, in an effort to prevent the racial uprisings that had been seen in Brixton and Toxteth, acquired a disused bus garage near the Stonebridge Estate and transformed it into Europe’s largest community-owned enterprise centre. In describing such programming as a concerted form of collectivised and participatory television, I am equally describing a period where the very notion of public service broadcasting cannot necessarily be made distinct from the idea of ‘public access’, which is to suggest that this was a moment where community-focused practitioners like Franco Rosso were creating a mode of Black political representation where the central praxis was to develop and sustain a horizontality between subject, documentarist and narrative form, displaying an embeddedness in the Black community from which the narratives were drawn, and with an overtly anti-racist narrational and aesthetic intentionality.
It appears to me that public service broadcasting of the present day and its renewed interest in Black identity has consigned itself to representing the very extremes of Black living, which, whilst well intended, are built on the climate of social mourning in the wake of a moment of Black tragedy and collective social and physical laceration. Such programming seems to be able to trade on historical ideas of television as an instinctive space of Black public access, and we have witnessed the glacial reconfiguring of the notion of the Black community, Black cultural value and social relevance by the liberal but capitalistic instincts of our public service broadcasters. Where such programming does exist, it is, at its most fundamental level, a star-led vehicle, which sees British popular culture’s most well-known Black figures positioned as the essential racial and cultural intermediaries between the Black image and the Black audience, even though such figures remain socially, geographically and economically removed from the most affected Black people. Here, Black community representation within public service broadcasting as the unspectacular and everyday is replaced by a more consciously pyrotechnic and ambassadorial version of Black self-authorship and representation, through which the audience is compelled to invest in the creation of an ‘imagined’ Black community, where the productions strive to homogenise the experiences, interests and expectations of Black identity whilst further extending the gulf between what is being presented, and who is presenting. In many respects, this is consistent with how Blackness is visually confronted more widely through the irresistible entanglements of neoliberalism; documentary in this form has relegated itself to the mere visual presentation of such social situations, while eschewing the presenting of credible solutions and counter-methodologies beyond the positive spectacle of Black representation and visibility in itself. This is why Open Door, despite the complexity of its editorial practices, and our own potential romanticising of the space as a representational sphere devoid of any institutional politics of race, is indeed an arena where the possibility of a non-professional, Black political programming as a modality of open access but, more importantly, direct address, can both agitate and adorn contemporary Black cultural and social knowledge through our practice of looking back, and equally imagine the function of the Black community-led public service broadcasting television documentary as both a meta-discursive and meta-dialogical medium.