Overview

What did audiences want when it came to 'race' on screen in twentieth-century Britain? This was the question that drove producers and makers of film and television as they competed for viewers, and organisations such as the BBC and ITV developed a new field of 'audience research' to address it. Christine Grandy examines how film and television producers, censors and researchers sought to locate audience preferences when it came to presentations of 'race'. Through empire films, home movies and television classics such as Love Thy Neighbour and The Cosby Show, this study explores what was at stake for white British audiences as they consumed material featuring problematic and positive presentations of Black and south Asian people. Race on Screen further uncovers the efforts of Black and south Asian audiences to draw attention to their own roles as overlooked audiences and to name film and television content as racist.

Full Product Details

Author:   Christine Grandy (University of Lincoln)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Weight:   0.443kg
ISBN:  

9781009650939

ISBN 10:   1009650939
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   19 February 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

List of figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the historian, critical race theory, and audience racism in twentieth-century Britain; 1. Discovering the audience: anxieties and expertise; 2. Audience wants: film and the pleasures of racism, 1900–1945; 3. 'Expressing their own point of view': audience research on 'race' at the BBC, 1950–1968; 4. 'A traditional form of entertainment': blacking up on post-war screens and colour-blind audiences; 5. 'Too touchy': black audiences and the racialised every day in the black press; 6. 'A sneaking feeling': Institutional silences, racism, and audience research at the BBC and ITV in the 1970s; 7. 'Black magic': racially comfortable viewing and black sitcoms in the 1980s and 1990s; Conclusion of the time; Select Bibliography; Index.

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Author Information

Christine Grandy is an Associate Professor of Modern British History at the University of Lincoln. Her work examines the social history of Britain and its media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the author of Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain (2014).

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