3 hours ago
3
The editor of a groundbreaking Channel 4 show claims the BFI has frozen him out of an upcoming season on multicultural television and is presenting a skewed vision of the programme.
Tariq Ali was part of the creative team that produced the global current affairs Bandung File for Channel 4 in the 1980s. The current affairs programme spotlighted everything from the realities of apartheid South Africa to the fallout from the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
Ali said he was shocked to not be invited to participate in the BFI’s new season, Constructed, Told, Spoken: A Counter-History of Britain on TV, which has a dedicated evening where it will screen Bandung File episodes in March.
“They never contacted me,” he told the Guardian. “The first I saw was in the BFI programme that they had an evening of Bandung File stuff but the choices suggest that there doesn’t seem to be a knowledge of what the programme was.”
Ali, who wrote about his experiences on the show in his memoir released last year, said he wanted the programme to be presented correctly and placed in the right context.
He said: “The whole thing about Bandung File is that we did it in a way which unified the West Indian and South Asian communities, while looking outwardly as well; 50% of the viewers were white and 50% non-white, our philosophy was that white people also needed to be educated.”
The show, which took its name from the meeting in Indonesia held in 1955 between newly independent Asian and African states, was part of a wave of programmes made by, and primarily for, a black and south Asian audience.
Ali served as series editor alongside Darcus Howe, while the show was commissioned by Farrukh Dhondy, Channel 4’s editor for multicultural programmes. It ran from 1985 until its cancellation in 1989.
It was seen as a step change from previous multicultural shows on Channel 4, which were often magazine shows such as Eastern Eye and Black on Black, a chatshow hosted by the Selecter frontwoman Pauline Black.
Bandung File had a harder edge and was internationalist in scope, ushering in a new type of Channel 4 series such as Black Bag, which took on serious issues including the Cardiff Three scandal with an investigative rigour.
Ali said: “When I show Bandung File to students today the first question I’m asked is: ‘Was this actually on British television?’ They don’t believe it because of the output they see today. It shows what television can do if it’s sustained and properly supported.”
Bandung had several journalistic successes, including exposing a vote-rigging scheme in Roy Hattersley’s constituency of Sparkbrook, Birmingham, and uncovering the Greater London Council’s decision to fund a far-right Hindu political group. They also secured an interview with Rushdie amid the controversy over The Satanic Verses.
The current chair of the BBC, Samir Shah, also praised the programme for its coverage of the BCCI scandal, which he said “showed what that kind of journalism can achieve”.
Ali said a programme such as Bandung File would never be commissioned or succeed now. “At the time South Africa was very big news and we had a clandestine network of film-makers in the country who would send us five to 10 minutes of footage, which we would show every week,” he said. “Do you think that today the government would permit us to show footage from Gaza? I don’t think so.”
The programme itself might have been serious and considered but the team behind it had a sense of humour. After being cancelled they held a “funeral” for the show in Kentish Town with invites that read: “Bandung File, born 1985, died 1989; cause of death – execution … dress code: all black.”
A spokesperson for the BFI said: “We recognise how vital Tariq was in shaping Bandung File under his editorship with Darcus Howe. It was always our intention to include Tariq in the season and we hope to get him involved. The process of making contact with him has been delayed slightly due to sourcing his details, however it is not unusual for us to confirm guests once our brochure and season comms have been published, and we are in the process of confirming additional contextual contributors to events throughout this season.”
Constructed, Told, Spoken: A Counter-History of Britain on TV, looks at multicultural TV departments in the UK that emerged in the 1980s. It will run throughout February and March and includes screenings dedicated to the impact of Stuart Hall and the black gay television series of the 1980s.
