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Following the July 1965 conferences, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ hurriedly set up an "Immigrants' Programmes Unit" at Broadcasting House, Carpenter Road, in Edgbaston, and then almost immediately launched its new programme series on Sunday 10 October 1965, recorded at its Gosta Green TV studios.

It was initially called In Logon Se Miliye then Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye, translated as Make Yourself at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ. There was both a radio version, transmitted on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Service at the unearthly hour of 8.10am, before "normal" programming began, and a television edition, on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ One at the slightly more civilized hour of 9am.

The very first broadcast included a short contribution from the Minister who had been most active in pushing forward the whole idea, Maurice Foley. It was presented by Aley Hasan, who had been seconded from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Eastern Service at Bush House:

The programme represented a delicate balancing act for a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ which was keen to reach both Indian and Pakistani communities but also fully aware of the explosive situation between the two "home" countries back on the sub-continent. This showed itself both in the choice of language and the choice of key personnel.

The presenter on that first day, Aley Hasan, was an Indian Muslim, the other two regular producers and presenters would be Mahendra Kaul and Saleem Shahed, the former with a background in Indian broadcasting, the latter in Pakistani broadcasting. The language they adopted for the series was "Hindustani", described by the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ as a "mixture of simple Hindi and simple Urdu".

A great many immigrants at the time actually spoke Punjabi, and the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ was advised that its chosen approach was "unacceptable" to many Pakistanis. It argued, however, that Hindustani was a language "the bulk of immigrants from the sub-continent will understand".

What underpinned everything, however, was the programme’s obvious purpose: to assist integration. It was a commitment which emerges strongly in an interview the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s Sandra Harris recorded in October 1965, just a few days before launch, with the programme’s editor at Pebble Mill, the Indian-born David Gretton:

As Gretton predicted, the actual content of Make Yourself at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ turned out to be remarkably varied. Teaching basic conversational English was always a central concern. But early television editions also provided viewers with studio discussions and news items, while radio offered live dramas, and, as the main attraction for many perhaps, a steady supply of Bollywood music.

Budgets were tight, and production values suffered accordingly. Some of those who worked behind-the-scenes at the time recalled the complexities of studio production, when Sarfraz Mansoor presented an episode of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 4's The Archive Hour in 2006:

Mahendra Kaul has also discussed his own role as presenter. In 2011, he was interviewed by Sonia Deol of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Asian Network. In the interview, Kaul described his role in shaping the programme’s agenda. He also recalled one strange incident in which his on-air comments about hair oil apparently had an instant effect on listeners’ behaviour:

Kaul suggests the series had an enormous influence on its target audience. But the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, and in particular the programme’s editor David Gretton, anxiously monitored its progress. An undated document in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s own archives, but most likely written in the first few weeks of transmission, highlighted some of the thorny issues which quickly emerged.

Was Make Yourself at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ really was getting the balance right between Indian and Pakistani interests? Was its music selections appropriate, and, above all, was the decision to speak Hindustani right?

Another document in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s archives, written two years or so later, attempts to give an impression of range and balance through listing the kinds of topics covered and guests appearing on air. Discussions tackled subjects such as "Assimilation versus Integration", discrimination in housing, and whether all immigrants should unite. Among the guests: the Indian President, Miss World 1967, and the Pakistani and Indian wrestling champions.

By the beginning of the 1970s, the single most significant change in Make Yourself at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ had been switching English language teaching from radio to television. An extra TV spin-off had also been launched: Nai Zindagi, Naya Jeevan, or, New Life. Otherwise, half a decade on, the programmes had settled into a familiar pattern. And, as this extract from Sarfraz Mansoor’s 2006 documentary shows, had long since ingratiated themselves into the Sunday morning routines of many British-Asian households:

A long-term future, though, was never entirely secure. A document from October 1970 shows the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ continuing to grapple with the issue of language and what it called "the tightrope" in editorial policy. It explained that Make Yourself at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ never sought "to make Indians or Pakistanis living in Britain abandon their own culture and traditions": its aim was firmly "to help in integration, not assimilation".

On the other hand, it needed new arrivals to know the "set of rules" by which they would be expected to live, an approach which had the effect of making it rather more assimilationist in reality. And then there were the difficulties of treating many different communities as just one target audience, united by their common identity as immigrants but not much else. Overall, it is a remarkably candid assessment of the series’ progress, and of the thinking behind it:

The calculation contained in this 1970 document was that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s Immigrants Programme Unit was reaching "perhaps 85% or 90%" of its target audience, and its programmes had, as the writer put it, "contributed in a worthwhile measure to the dismantling of the party wall between "Us" and "Them".

So, was it job done? Within two years, the Controller of Radio 4 was hinting as much, or at least, that "enough time" had now passed for the first wave of immigrants to have "learned enough English". He was also hinting that regular Radio 4 listeners were increasingly irritated by "Indian pop records" on a Sunday morning. His first line of attack was to suggest the programmes leave Radio 4 altogether and find a new home on local radio.

Following consultation with representatives of the Asian communities, the idea was rejected. But the radio edition of Make Yourself at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ was soon shunted to an even earlier Sunday morning slot, where ratings soon fell, allowing the Controller to conclude that the programme was not, after all, "sufficiently needed by the immigrant community". The series title would survive for another decade. But, among senior ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ figures in London it continued to be tolerated rather than enthusiastically embraced.

The response to new arrivals in the 1960s had been paternalistic and instrumentalist. Programmes had been ghettoised on the schedules. Whatever the official rhetoric, immigrants had, in effect, been treated as a separate audience. Yet, with growing numbers of ethnic minority viewers and listeners having been born in Britain rather than having moved here, the "Immigrant" label was beginning to feel redundant.

One response to this demographic change was for the "Immigrants Programme Unit" to be re-designated the "Asian Programmes Unit" in 1974. But by the 1980s, a much bigger, broader shift was clearly required if the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ was to embrace the ethnic and cultural diversity of Britain as a normal part of the country’s identity, and therefore as something reflected across the whole range of "ordinary" output.

The extent to which this demanded a wholesale change of approach among those who actually ran the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is revealed in this newly-released recording with David Waine, who had taken charge of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s Birmingham base at Pebble Mill around this time:

David Waine is a valuable reminder of the special significance of Birmingham in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s ecosystem as an incubator of multicultural broadcasting. He also mentions the start of programming reflecting the lives of Black British viewers and listeners. Yet this reached television screens at a glacially slow speed: the decision back in 1965 to make programmes specially for Indian and Pakistani immigrants but not for "West Indians" had left a powerful legacy.

There’s a deeper history that shouldn’t be forgotten, though. And, once again, drama, which had been embracing ‘social realism’ since the 1960s, was often ahead of any other genre. In 1965, for instance, one of the Wednesday Plays was Fable, which imagined an apartheid Britain where black people ruled white people; a bold attempt to challenge the idea of racial prejudice.

Two years later, a whole 6-part series, Rainbow City, was dominated by black characters and featured a mixed-race relationship. And in 1977, there was Black Christmas, directed by Stephen Frears, written by Michael Abbensetts, and starring the Guyanese actor Norman Beaton. In this scene, near the very beginning of the play, we get a sense of the overall approach, namely, portraying what Abbensetts called "an ordinary Black Family’s Christmas" in Handsworth:

Beaton’s character described himself as "special" and "unique". But it was his ordinariness that struck home. With the support of the so-called "English Regions Drama Unit" headed by David Rose at Pebble Mill, Abbensetts took Black Christmas’s portrayal of black people as an unremarkable part of British life and, in 1978-9, developed it into a full-scale soap-opera, Empire Road.

Other parts of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ took longer to adjust. Managers kept worrying about the choice between creating "specialist" programmes or broadening the mix within mainstream output, but were reminded regularly that there was room for both. Radio London, for instance, had been running Black Londoners, presented by Alex Pascall, since 1974 and very successfully.

So, representatives from the city’s ‘West Indian Community’ asked, why not more of the same, perhaps on peak-time national TV? And why, they asked, did the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ have an "Asian Programmes Advisory Committee" but not an "Afro and Caribbean" one?

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s approach was perhaps at its most risk-averse in the area of news. In this newly-released interview from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s Oral History Collection, we get a revealing insight from Richard Francis, one of the Corporation’s most senior news editors in the 1970s and ‘80s. In this section, he talks about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s desire to hire more specialist correspondents in general, but also his unease at the specific role of "Community Relations Correspondent".

The idea of a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Correspondent being too much "on the side of racial minorities" would have come as a surprise to many journalists working on the ground. In this 1975 document we see the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ discovering the extent of "antipathy" being shown towards its staff in parts of Manchester:

The "West Indian" referred to in this memo was Mike Phillips, a freelancer who worked for several years on the World Service’s Caribbean Magazine radio series as well as briefly spending time at Manchester’s local radio station. In this interview filmed in 2018, Phillips recalls his frustrations while working in the city, and his frustrations with a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ newsroom claiming to be in touch with the community:

There was no unifying pattern to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s response to a multicultural Britain. For a long time, it saw the desire for specialist programmes and the desire for increasing representation in mainstream output as contradictory demands. It was inclined to supporting integration, but it also saw a duty to report on and dramatize prejudice and conflict.

Its national status made it more comfortable with the establishment than with marginalized communities, but it always had people in its ranks who pushed for change. But if it navigated these issues with difficulty, it was almost always self-aware. The answers weren’t always right, but it kept on asking itself the right questions.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s experience is perhaps best captured in this fascinating 36-page document from 1977, which looks backwards and forwards in time. It speaks eloquently of what the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ had achieved. It also cannot help but use the word "Problems" prominently in its title -and on almost every page that followed:

Whatever the progress made, one of the conclusions in the document was that the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ acknowledged many people still considered their voices were "unheard or misconstrued". In the next section of this website, we explore the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s response to this, and the broader story of "access" programmes.

Further reading

• Stephen Bourne, Black in the British Frame (2001)
• Stephen Bourne, Mother Country: Britain's Black Community on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Front 1939-45 (2010)
• Stephen Bourne, War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939 to 1948 (2018)
• Darrell M. Newton, Paving the Empire Road: ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Television and Black Britons (2011)
• David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)
• Gavin Schafer, The Vision of a Nation: Making Multiculturalism on British Television, 1960-80 (2014)
• Wendy Webster, Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain (2018)