Listen to Britain

Early in 1996 the subject matter covered by this chaper entered the limelight in a very unfortunate way. After watching the pilot of Hotel Babylon, a television programme made by an independent British production company and targeted at the young throughout Europe, an executive from the programme's sponsor, Heineken, wrote a fiercely critical memo. The programme should, he insisted, show people drinking beer, not wine. The audience should be more representative; in particular there should be fewer ‘extraordinary’ people, and fewer ‘negroes’. The presence of black musicians elicited no comment: the massive black presence in popular music is presumably taken for granted. Two of the stars of the first show were in fact black performers, soul singer Seal and raggamuffin Shaggy; the very name of the programme derives from Rastafarian culture. But the sponsor's representative was concerned at the presence of black people in the audience, reiterating among other prejudices the beliefs that white viewers would find their presence offputting, and that black people were not really consumers, too low in the economic order to buy even such a routine commodity as canned lager. As soon as the fax was made public, the company emphatically, even cringingly, apologised. ¹