This programme contains discriminatory language.
We live in divided times.
An age of rising populism and tribal identity politics.
SHOUTING
But many of the arguments that divide us today
had their origins decades ago.
Since I was born in 1945,
epic changes have marked our country.
The end of Empire.
NEWSREEL: The tide of Britain's imperial power has ended.
The dawn of mass immigration.
The Empire Windrush brings to Britain 500 new...
Social and sexual revolutions.
Fierce battles over our land.
Time and again, these transformations have made us ask,
"Who are we now?"
We can't look for answers just in the speeches of politicians,
the daily news cycle, and certainly not in the blare of social media.
Rather, we should search where the beating heart
of society truly lives -
our common culture.
Culture is always upstream of politics.
That's why culture matters.
It's the arts that have heralded dramatic changes in our lives.
It just made you think,
"Oh, yeah, we do exist, or we do count in some way."
Movies that bite back against convention.
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
That's one thing I've learned.
Paintings that turn the tables
on those who look and those who are looked at.
Music, poetry and fiction that cross tribal boundaries.
I'm often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman.
A new breed, as it were.
In the most tumultuous times,
our culture does more than
merely capture the changing face of Britain.
The arts connect us in rare and precious moments.
Together they tell us
the complicated,
gloriously contentious story of us.
I come from a family of immigrants.
Grandparents on both sides arrived in Britain
at the turn of the 20th century,
settling in London's East End.
My mother, Trudie - that's her with the fiendish curls -
was born here in Whitechapel.
my father, Arthur, just round the corner in Stepney.
Their generation were proud to be both British and Jewish.
My father left school when he was 14 years old.
He led an Orthodox Jewish life,
but he also recited
enormous passages from Shakespeare off by heart.
When we were growing up, he read Dickens out loud to us.
It was synagogue on Saturday
and Shakespeare on Sunday.
And there was a day in 1953
when the whole family, and us kids in particular,
felt especially happy in our Britishness.
It was Coronation Day.
The beautiful young queen and her handsome prince
were riding through London in a golden coach.
NEWSREEL: Crowds have waited for this moment...
Our neighbours came round for the telly.
..as the golden coach appears in view for the first time.
And in the afternoon we had jellies, cakes and fancy dress.
The eyes of the world were on us,
and a lot of the world was with us.
The hours-long ceremony consecrating her
as queen of all the nations
and all the races over which she holds sovereignty.
It promised a new Elizabethan dawn,
offering a carefully choreographed
image of the British Empire
morphing anger- and anguish-free into the Commonwealth.
Men from all corners of the Commonwealth...
A frictionless evolution from ruling large swathes of the world
to the Commonwealth's voluntary affiliation
of equal, independent countries.
..men of all races and creeds marching in honour of their queen.
With the Queen at its head...
Many thousands of you came to London
from all parts of the Commonwealth and Empire.
I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.
The happiness of Coronation Day
wasn't, in fact, just confined to the amazing day of June 2, 1953.
We all felt the afterglow.
I was eight years old, in school.
We wanted that feeling of Britain
as the kind of radiant new family.
We were all going to grow up new Elizabethans.
We wanted it to go on.
And it did go on, because we had, in our classroom,
an enormous map of the world, very much like this one,
with a lot of it still painted, if not in bright red,
then in becoming pink.
And onto that map were little flags.
There were little Union Jack flags on the end of pins,
and we planted them around the route
that the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh would take
on their Commonwealth tour.
And we followed them round the world.
The royal trip covered 44,000 miles
and took in 13 countries
across the West Indies, Australasia, Asia and Africa.
We all saw news footage of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh
being applauded by exuberantly happy, joyous, loyal subjects.
We all felt that the Commonwealth
was genuinely a kind of harmonious club,
completely unproblematic...
..made for the happiness of everyone involved.
But in reality, the change of life from Empire to Commonwealth
in the wake of World War II
would be far from anger- and anguish-free.
NEWSREEL: But British rule is on the defensive.
In Kenya, too, Britain's influence is challenged.
And with it came a profound identity crisis for many in Britain.
The tide of Britain's imperial power has ebbed.
The British no longer rule the waves.
Right from the start, not everyone had bought into
the feel-good, post-colonial Commonwealth.
To some who had played a part in the defeat of Germany and Japan,
the Commonwealth was a consolation prize not worth having.
This is the age of the antihero.
All over the world, they're trying to sort of knock down the idols.
Ian Fleming, Old Etonian and journalist,
had been at the heart of naval intelligence during the war
and was acidly unreconciled to a diminished Britain.
I think this, personally, is a great mistake,
because I've got many heroes of my life.
People like Winston Churchill
and people I've met during the war.
If Britain no longer lorded it over much of the world,
Fleming would invent a reincarnation of British exceptionalism.
Bond.
James Bond.
I think that people like to read about heroes.
Spying has always been regarded
as a very romantic one-man job, so to speak.
One man against a whole police force or an army.
Through Fleming, a one-man empire of British style,
with lethal good taste, would fill the void of disappearing power.
It's fantastic to be in the presence of these beautiful
first editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels,
because I think there have been so many Bond movies,
and most people think about movies,
they've forgotten the kind of extraordinary spell
that these books cast.
What the Bond books tell us, really,
is someone who astonishingly
caught the mood of Britain in the '50s.
What did it mean to be British
when you actually were rapidly losing the Empire?
They had a sense in which Britain still had a kind of heroic,
adventurous, tough-guy kind of role to play in the world.
JAMES BOND THEME
James Bond was dreamt up in a colonial lair,
the beachfront villa in Jamaica Fleming called GoldenEye.
There, the Empire lived on.
Swimming against history, Fleming persisted with the colonial life,
sundowners and loyal servants.
Jamaica exercises this extraordinary
kind of hypnotic spell for Fleming.
In Fleming's own mind, everything about it is sensuously pleasing,
and the people are all absolutely obliging.
So he's kind of living as if the sun had indeed never set on the Empire.
The Jamaican, if he hears politics being talked on the radio,
he's rather inclined to turn it off and get onto music, you know?
He just doesn't really want anybody's politics.
Here's a bit of the kind of perfect imperial fantasy
from Live And Let Die.
Purple cover for a book which is full of purple prose.
In this passage, John Strangways,
a British agent based in Jamaica,
introduces Bond to the man who will serve as his local guide
as he prepares for his next mission.
"After breakfast, Strangways appeared in the veranda
"with a tall, brown-skinned man
"in a faded blue shirt and old, brown, twill trousers.
"This was Quarrel, the Cayman Islander,
and Bond liked him immediately.
"'Good morning, captain,' said Quarrel.
"Coming from the most famous race of seamen in the world,
"this was the highest title he knew,
"but there was no desire to please or humility in his voice.
"He was speaking as mate of the ship, and his manner
"was straightforward and candid.
"That moment defined their relationship.
"It remained that of a Scots laird with his head stalker.
"Authority was unspoken, and there was no room for servility."
That's Ian Fleming's ideal of the way things ought to be.
People kind of knowing their place.
Honouring the authority of people like Commander Bond,
and Ian Fleming in naval intelligence.
So it was, again, a kind of extraordinary sort of
fantasy about natural rank.
It was a delusion that would not survive the shock of reality.
NEWSREEL: Within days, Port Said reeled under the attack
of Anglo-French invasion forces
intent on wresting control of the Suez from the Egyptian government.
In 1956, in response to the Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal,
in a throw of the dice the shrewd gambler Bond would not have made,
Britain and France, together with Israeli forces,
invaded the Canal Zone.
The gamble ended in a busted flush.
Russia also says, "No war."
When the fury of the United States and the Soviet Union forced
an ignominious evacuation...
..Fleming put the derision of the world
into the mouth of the Japanese spy master Tiger Tanaka
in You Only Live Twice, sparking a telling exchange of hostilities
with a tetchy Bond.
" 'Bondo-san, you have not only lost a great empire,
"you've seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands.
" 'But when you apparently sought to arrest this slide
"into impotence at Suez,
"you succeeded only in stage-managing
"one of the most pitiful bungles
"in the history of the world, if not the worst.' "
And Bond comes back...
" 'Balls to you, Tiger, and balls again!
" 'Let me tell you this, my fine friend.
" 'England may have been bled pretty thin by a couple of world wars,
" 'and the liberation of our colonies
" 'may have gone too fast, but!
" 'But we still climb Everest
" 'and beat plenty of the world
" 'at plenty of sports, and win Nobel Prizes.
" 'There's nothing wrong with the British people,
" 'although there are only 50 million of them.' "
Yes!
Black belt for Bond.
Prime Minister Anthony Eden,
who'd presided over the Suez Crisis,
collapsed along with the expedition.
I'm deeply sorry to have to leave the country at this time.
I'm going because the doctors say I must.
Amidst the ashes of this ridiculous and irresponsible,
and immoral kind of adventure,
where does Anthony Eden fetch up?
Answer, GoldenEye.
The final decision of which Eden was capable,
in other words, completing the evacuation from the Suez Canal,
takes place at GoldenEye.
So, the end of Empire happens in the house
of the writer who wants the Empire to live forever.
But Britain's epic embarrassment
was catnip for the fortunes of James Bond and his author.
Sensing the need for an antidote to humiliation,
the unapologetically imperialist owner of the Daily Express,
Lord Beaverbrook,
serialised the new novel From Russia With Love.
It was the perfect pick-me-up,
and the escape-thirsty public drank deep.
This is a massive kind of compensation
for all those things
which seemed to be missing
for the vast majority of people.
And then, really, the sales absolutely take off
because of the serialisation.
He goes stratospheric.
He becomes famous, and he never looks back.
Bond went global.
100 million colourfully-written and jacketed books sold,
a movie franchise birthed with Doctor No spanning 25 films,
an empire of fantasy fed from the remains of a real one.
Good evening, Mr Bond.
An empire in which, unlike the original, the sun never set.
Fleming's brother, Peter, would later reflect that...
"Britain had lost an empire, yet all at once, through Bond,
"became reunited with the world."
GULLS CRY
But the aftermath of Empire was a two-way journey.
Ian Fleming might hide away from modern reality
in his Caribbean make-believe,
but West Indians were going in the opposite direction.
NEWSREEL: The Empire Windrush brings to Britain 500 Jamaicans.
Many are ex-servicemen who know England, citizens of the British
Empire coming to the mother country with good intent.
One ship, at Tilbury Docks, didn't come with a billboard
saying "big historical moment".
Britain needed labour, and hundreds of immigrants from the colonies
showed up to provide it.
Now, why have you come to England? To seek a job.
They came where the work was.
Now, you're ex-Air Force, aren't you? Yes.
Are you going back into the Air Force again? Yes.
The Nationality Act of that same year
said anyone from the Empire could come.
And many had earned that right through wartime service.
I am also an ex-servicemen.
You're ex-service? RAF, are you?
Yes, RAF. I took a course in Scotland in case-making,
and I'm desirous of going back there to see if I can further,
because I like it very much.
No big deal, then.
Only in hindsight can we see the arrival of the Empire Windrush
in 1948 as historically momentous.
The start of something that would change what it means to be British.
Right from the off
came an unstoppable joy and confidence in their own culture.
Aboard the Windrush were three lords of calypso,
friends from Trinidad who'd toured the Caribbean together.
Lords Beginner, Woodbine, and the most well-known, Lord Kitchener.
Now, may I ask you your name? Lord Kitchener.
Now, I'm told that you are really
the king of calypso singers. Is that right? Yes, yes.
Will you sing for us? Right now? Yes.
# London is the place for me
# Dum-a-dum-a-dum-dum
# London, this lovely city
# You can go to France or America
# India, Asia or Australia
# But you must come back to London City... #
The music the newcomers brought with them was breezy with optimism.
# Well, believe me I am speaking broadmindedly
# I am glad to know my Mother Country... #
It would be Caribbean sunshine
beamed onto rain-dark, pleasure-rationed Britain.
# London, that's the place for me #
TRAIN WHISTLES
Any good calypso artist composes his own song.
You do have the phoney types that pretend to be good,
but we're not speaking of them now.
We're speaking about the true artists.
Are you born with this gift, or what?
Well, I suppose you must be born with that gift.
CHEERING
# Cricket, lovely cricket
# At Lord's, where I saw it... #
When the West Indies thrashed England at Lord's
in the second Test in 1950,
the Caribbean crowd danced onto the field
and through the streets of London to a calypso written by another
of the Windrush immigrants, Lord Beginner.
# At Lord's, where I saw it... #
We kids all sang it, too.
# After all was said and done
# Second Test and West Indies won. #
A vibrant new cultural energy was taking root.
Calypsonian Lord Woodbine -
real name Harold Phillips,
the youngest of the three lords
who'd arrived together on the Windrush -
formed one of Britain's earliest steelpan bands
who, in the late '50s,
took up nightly residence
at the Jacaranda Club in Liverpool.
Sometimes you've got to come to the place
where something enormous happens in the life of British culture,
and it's an incredibly important moment
because, actually, some lads from round the corner -
called John Lennon and Paul McCartney and George Harrison -
come here, they hang out at the Jacaranda,
and they hear this fantastically alive music
from a different part of the world, from the Caribbean,
something that's totally its own kind of thing.
And it switches something on.
It's like the touching of wires.
Everybody hung round in this club called the Jacaranda,
and that was the place in Liverpool,
had these steel bands on and the rock bands.
And so we started hanging round there
before we really formed the band.
You know, when it was just me, Paul and George.
They were fascinated by the steelpan.
John and Paul sometimes would get up and jam with the musicians.
They just bounced off each other.
My father, there was something special about him.
You know, he was charismatic and funny.
Lyrically, stuff would just roll off the top of his head.
They became friends with Lord Woodbine,
the first songwriter they knew.
He became a real mentor to them.
They're known, The Beatles are known, as Woodbine's Boys.
And it's really through him they get their first gigs.
This will be loud. Watch out.
So I haven't drummed for years, since the old Lord Woodbine days.
Before the Cavern Club,
this was the very first place the band performed
under the name The Beatles.
And it happens right here at the Jacaranda.
It's a fantastic moment.
MUSIC: Love Me Do by The Beatles
And it was Lord Woodbine who helped the early Beatles get a residency
in Hamburg, where they famously cut their musical teeth,
changing their lives and the course of British music.
# Love, love me do
You see, the steel band went over and came back
with this glorious news.
Hamburg is this fab place, you could play every night.
# Please
# Love me do... #
This is the only photo we have of Harold
on this incredibly momentous trip to Hamburg.
He's the reason, really, why they got the Hamburg gig.
But here they all are, with the exception of John Lennon.
He's in the van, because he's a pacifist
and this is a war memorial.
It's a touching moment.
They're kids made into musical men.
He's absolutely a formative figure in what they become.
It's a remarkable thing that this, you know,
Caribbean musician, promoter,
is at the heart of the beginning of The Beatles' story.
Harold and the thousands of people like him from the Windrush
are part of the Caribbean community in Britain.
They were fantastically essential for British culture...
..and a lot, right now, depends on who we think
are at the heart of our story.
The heart of our story of modern Britain.
# It's a shame, it's unfair, but what can you do?
# The colour of your skin makes it hard for you... #
NEWSREEL: An angry crowd of youths chases a Negro
into a greengrocer shop,
while police reinforcements are called up to check the riot.
From the outset, the newcomers often faced extreme hostility.
In Notting Hill, then an impoverished district of West London
where many had settled,
a fight in 1958 turned into
a full-blown race riot.
And Lord Kitchener, wondering if London really was the place for him,
changed his tune.
# If you're white, everything's all right
# If your skin is dark, no use, you try
# You've got to suffer until you die. #
This kind of prejudice has echoed right across my lifetime.
REPORTER: ..personal stories caused by the Windrush scandal.
He couldn't prove he had the legal right to live here.
Institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness
towards the history of the Windrush generation.
CLIVE MYRIE: I think the Windrush generation
fundamentally changed this country for the better.
So the Windrush scandal fills me with sadness, anger and regret
because there's so much that band of men and women
brought to this country, and yet it was thrown back in their face.
That's just shameful.
The Windrush scandal called into question the citizenship
of tens of thousands of Caribbean immigrants.
A result of the Hostile Environment policy,
an aggressive clamp-down on illegal immigration
first introduced in 2012.
THERESA MAY: This is not just about making the UK
a more hostile place for illegal migrants.
It is a bill that will make it easier for us
to be able to remove people.
Illegal migration is an issue,
there's no question about that.
The problem was, at the same time, it scooped up people
who were legally, rightfully allowed to be here.
Denying people benefits.
Denying people access to the NHS.
Denying...
..the right to life in this country.
You needed to prove that you had a right to live here. Yeah.
And in order to do that, you needed to produce
certain pieces of evidence
for every single year you had been in this country.
And that happened with my two older brothers, Lionel and Peter.
Although Clive was born in Bolton to Jamaican parents,
his elder siblings were born in Jamaica,
only rejoining the family
here in the UK in the late 1960s
when his mother and father decided
to settle permanently.
What was so appalling about it
was that there was no suggestion,
when they first came here,
that this was going to happen.
Yeah. So there was no need to have proof or evidence,
and they were freely invited into this country in the first place.
It's an ongoing crisis that stems from decades
of rancorous political conflict around the question of immigration.
MARGARET THATCHER: Racial harmony in Great Britain will benefit most
if we cut the number of immigrants coming in now.
And various attempts to row back on commitments first made
in that landmark piece of legislation from 1948
called the British Nationality Act.
Everyone was made a citizen, equal citizen, across the empire.
That not only meant that people could go to Britain,
and a lot did from the Caribbean and some from other parts of the Empire,
but it meant people could leave as well.
A lot of Brits decided they were going to leave.
Two million people.
And that accentuated the problems that there were
at the end of the war
in finding a workforce to help rebuild this country.
We just talk about "all these black people coming here,
coming here en masse.
The Windrush generation,
"they come to sort of take our jobs and blah, blah, blah."
They came to fill a skills shortage.
And part of that was because so many Brits actually left.
While Winston Churchill described emigrants
as "rats leaving a sinking ship",
Clement Attlee's Labour government,
who introduced the Nationality Act,
hadn't fully anticipated its impact.
What's interesting about '48 is that...
..I don't think the Attlee government...
..believed black people would be the people coming.
I think they thought it would be Aussies and Kiwis
and South Africans, Canadians.
There was a blind spot to the possibility
that black people would want to come and make their lives here.
NEWSREEL: Whatever our feelings,
we cannot deny them entry,
for all are British citizens, and as such are entitled to
the identical rights of any member of the Empire.
If you sort of follow the trajectory
of official government policy
in relation to mass migration,
from '48 all the way down to the '70s and '80s
and the Hostile Environments policy,
more and more people have voiced their anger and their concerns.
Those angry and anxious about immigration
found an unlikely champion
in the form of a classical scholar and poet.
"We, today, at the heart of a vanished empire
"amid the fragments of demolished glory seem to find,
"like one of our own oak trees, standing and growing,
"the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring,
"England herself.
"Our generation is one which comes home again
"from years of distant wandering.
"We discover affinities with earlier generations of English
"who felt no country but this to be their own.
"For the unbroken life of the English nation
"over a thousand years and more
"is a phenomenon unique in history."
CROWD CHANTS: Enoch, Enoch Powell!
Enoch, Enoch Powell.
This hymn of praise of England,
everybody come together in our shared common memory,
were the words of somebody who became notorious for being
one of the most divisive politicians in our history.
Enoch Powell.
Powell wrote poetry.
He was no dope.
He was a professor of classics at Sydney University when he was 25.
In classical education, rhetoric comes first.
He is this sort of master of the art form of rhetorical persuasion,
and he has this extraordinary kind of augmented, lyrical view
of the absolute uniqueness
of the English past,
the sense of pride in the inheritance of being English.
The 12th century, up to the...
Short of the top story.
And this perpendicular window is late 14th, early 15th century.
And he was doing this for a very particular moment
and a very particular reason.
Powell's words are from an address
delivered to a private dinner on St George's Day in 1961.
It was less a speech than a prophetic oration,
a summons to a new patriotism
that would heal the wound left by the loss of Empire.
HORN FANFARE
The cause burned hot inside Powell
because, while stationed in India during the war,
he'd fantasised about one day becoming viceroy.
NEWSREEL: An era has ended. Independence day for India.
A new epoch...
With whatever chagrin, he adjusted to bitter reality.
The imperial moment had gone.
The compensation was that we can recover what always made us great
before we went off on this madcap imperial adventure.
We can come back to the oak trees.
We can come back to old England.
But Powell's mystical reverence for a shared historical communion
of national memory, custom and kinship,
was being delivered against the backdrop
of a rapidly changing nation.
Once he's living inside this imperishable,
lyrically expressed notion of what Old Merrie England is,
then there are the aliens, you know,
who somehow have been allowed
to believe that they share it, whereas they don't.
They have no organic psychological connection to that past.
And they will...
They will essentially invade you and conquer you,
and then it'll all be over.
He always kept on saying, "I speak for the ordinary people
"who don't know what's hit them, who suddenly are living,
"feel they're living in a foreign country."
Did he have a very shrewd intuition?
He sure did.
And he really connects with the wiring
that millions of people in Britain actually feel.
We must be mad,
literally mad, as a nation
to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents
who are, for the most part, the material of the future growth
of the immigrant descended population.
When Powell delivered his infamous Rivers of Blood speech
seven years later in 1968,
immigration numbers were rising,
as was prejudice against non-whites.
I can't let you in. Um...
I've got 14 English boys in here.
A new Race Relations Act before Parliament
would make it an offence to deny housing or a job on grounds of race.
A move Powell believed discriminated against the native population.
To enact legislation of the kind before Parliament at this moment
is to risk throwing a match onto gunpowder.
BOOING
In fact, it was the alarmist tone of his oratory,
studded with quotes from his constituents,
that would ignite and divide the nation.
In this country,
in 15 or 20 years' time,
the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.
But not all of the speech was filmed.
Missing was its most apocalyptic line,
quoting the classical poet Virgil.
"As I look ahead," Powell concluded,
"I'm filled with foreboding.
"Like the Roman, I seem to see
"the River Tiber foaming with much blood."
I told Mr Powell that he could not remain
a member of the Shadow Cabinet
because of the inflammatory nature of his speech at Birmingham,
causing, I believe, grave damage to race relations.
He'd lost his place on the Conservative front bench,
but every day saw yet another
bulging sack of letters singing his praises.
100 to 1 in support,
they offer insights into the concerns and frustrations
of the many who rallied behind him.
"Dear Mr Powell, thank you for saying what I'm sure
most of us are thinking."
"I admire your guts."
"Britain is backing you."
"Your speech was magnificent.
"Immigration MUST - capital letters - be stopped,
now - double underlined."
There are 100,000 letters.
He has his finger on the pulse
of the fears of people
all over the country.
It's a kind of national breakdown.
"Our country is quickly heading for ruin."
"Why should we have to become a multiracial society?"
"We are now an occupied country."
Their response is awful,
but Powell is quite right.
It's enormously widespread through the population.
88% of Slough people say
they support Enoch Powell.
88% Slough people.
They do feel that they've been
put into a corner, really,
that they don't know their own towns any longer.
Though far fewer,
there were 800 letters expressing an altogether different kind of anger.
"Although it's now obvious you can claim much support,
"this is not to say you are right
"or that your outburst can do anything but harm.
"Yours in disgust."
"Your conceit has allowed you to make
"a frivolous and irresponsible speech
"which threatens to unleash brutal instincts
"reminiscent of the early 1930s in Germany."
SHOUTING
There isn't a decent white man amongst you!
Powell has warned that there will be race violence.
There'll be literally blood on the streets -
River Tiber foaming with blood -
if this is not stopped.
The extreme right wing would have taken heart
from having someone who comes from the centre
of the political establishment.
They would have taken courage from the rivers of blood.
And it kind of injected this...pathogen
into the cultural and political life of the country
which has absolutely not gone away.
Absolutely not gone away.
My country! Let's have it.
The way it did unfold was terrible kind of...
..violence.
The kind of excited aggression
of skinheads and white nationalists...
CROWD CHANTS: National Front! National Front!
..to sort of kick off real, bloody awful trouble
in the industrial heartland.
# You've done too much much too young
# You're married with a kid when you could be having fun with me... #
For those who were appalled by Powell
and what the white nationalists stood for,
Britain could be a place of defiant, multiracial creativity.
# You're married with a son when you should be having fun with me... #
An idea embodied by the Coventry band The Specials
and their 2 tone revolution.
The brainchild of visionary artist Jerry Dammers.
# Just another burden on the welfare state... #
This was a Vox Continental,
which was what we went on the road with
originally around the first album.
A lot of them got stolen in Coventry.
The original did turn up on the internet,
and this guy, he got in touch with me.
So, he was blackmailing you and basically extorting...? Yeah.
I hope you told him to sod off. No, but I wanted to get it off him.
I said I'd give him the going price,
but then he realised it was worth a lot more, so he disappeared.
When The Specials started, it was a total concept.
The idea of it was to take the message to the people
who were vulnerable to being recruited by the National Front,
the British movement, all that racism.
This was something that everybody could relate to.
# I'm going out tonight
# I don't know if I'll be all right... #
The Specials were part of a wider Rock Against Racism movement
at a time when support for far right groups on the street,
and at the ballot box, was rapidly increasing.
A band like us, which had black people and white people in it,
was kind of unusual, to put it mildly.
I wanted it to be a mixture,
and that tied in with my politics
and, you know, the whole black and white, unite and fight.
CROWD: Fascists out! Fascists out!
The 2 tone was not just about
black and white musicians performing together in the same band.
It was a musical fusion.
The rhythm and melody lines of Jamaican ska,
the next wave of Caribbean music after calypso,
juiced up with punk rawness and bite.
A coming together across the lines,
skinhead aggression channelled into charged fun.
A genuinely alternative message for their audiences.
# Stop your messing around, ah-ah... #
The message is a message to all the rudies, yeah?
It's not worth getting into trouble.
It's just a message to all the
kids who go and cause trouble.
The original idea for the band.
Everything was very tribal at that time.
The punks and Teddy boys,
and rockabillies, and skinheads,
and mods and... Yeah.
And, you know, my idea was always unity.
You know, there would be one person
representing all these different tribes, you know.
# Stop your fooling around... #
Wardrobe department!
LAUGHTER
All second-hand gear.
Very nice, too.
Nice piece of mohair.
Whoa!
It all happened very fast for us.
One minute, we were in the pub.
The next minute, we were number one on Top Of The Pops.
First of all, I all, I like the music. Yeah.
I believe in all what they're trying to do, you know?
Unite the blacks and whites and what have you.
They're a Coventry group.
That's something to be proud of, you know, sort of thing.
See you, then.
But despite The Specials, and other bands signed to their 2 Tone label,
enjoying unexpected hits,
their hometown, Coventry,
was fast becoming one of the ugliest theatres
of race violence in the whole country.
I think the message of 2 tone got through
to the vast majority of kids.
But of course, there are some that it didn't get through to,
and it was very depressing to me that
some of those were in Coventry, our hometown.
NEWSREEL: Coventry is a very important centre of engineering.
This city has grown faster in numbers
than any other city in the country.
It's a car-making city which has seen better days.
Racism, unemployment and urban deprivation
have undoubtedly played a part.
This is England.
This is our country, no-one else's.
Tensions that are threatening a once prosperous city,
and the shock caused by the killing of one young man.
In April 1981, a 20-year-old Sikh student, Satnam Singh Gill,
was stabbed in broad daylight in a shopping precinct
for the crime of having a white girlfriend.
NEWS ANCHOR: Two white youths have been charged with murder.
For the Sikh community, in Coventry and beyond,
this was a horrifying trauma.
One of many at the time.
The events in Coventry were absolutely horrific.
Satnam Singh Gill murdered.
Dr Dharry murdered
20 yards from my front door
in the chip shop.
We felt that we had to do something.
Against a backdrop of awful, terrible things in Coventry,
The Specials put on their peaceful protest against racism right here.
# Why do we have to fight?
# Why must we fight? #
This was a neighbourhood festival of how things
could be better with music.
The turnout wasn't great,
but the fact was phenomenal.
You know, it's a moment of joy.
And very brave.
Very, very brave.
There's this rumour going around that the National Front
were going to organise a march, you know.
What, in favour of murder?
You know? It's like, that is how pathetic they were.
# Tell me why, tell me why...
For the people who were there, it was a fantastic event.
Really good mix of black and white.
# Tell me why, tell me why... #
That's a case where, you know, art and music can make a difference.
Yeah, it was tough, but we had to do something.
CHEERING
MUSIC: Ghost Town by The Specials
In the weeks following the stadium gig,
an edgy, eerie song Jerry had written
would catch, with pitch-perfect tone, the dark national mood.
Riots had exploded on the streets of Brixton in April 1981,
and, that summer, spread across the country.
Police would no longer be able to contain the riots.
The uncontrolled fury...
Cars and vans were overturned and set...
And The Specials' Ghost Town seemed like prophecy and punk lament.
Let's talk about Ghost Town.
Well, when we were on tour, we saw, you know, the results of recession.
We saw shops boarded up in Liverpool.
In Glasgow, we saw people out on the streets
just sort of selling whatever they had.
You could tell that something was not right.
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.
Where there is error, may we bring truth.
# This town is coming like a ghost town
# All the clubs have been closed down... #
Thatcher was busy closing down industry.
Eventually, it got to three million people on the dole.
# Bands won't play no more
# To much fighting on the dance floor... #
Police provocation, you understand?
It's been coming for a long time.
There was a lot of resentment between black people and the police.
You know, black youth were prepared to stand up and say
they wouldn't take any more of this.
This very dark, slightly mad,
unbelievably affecting,
haunting, haunting, haunting song
climbs and climbs and climbs
till it's number one for three weeks.
# Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town? #
And there's this kind of elegy feeling to it.
# And the music played in a de boom town... #
You know, boom town to ghost town.
# This town... #
It's an extraordinary moment, really, and an astonishing sense
of absolutely being in key with the times.
# Government leaving the youth on the shelf... #
So disaster and crisis generates something
that really is a genuine work of art.
Complicated, powerful, passionate, affecting.
Something that gets into your head.
The perfect match, really, between music and the moment.
# This town's becoming like a ghost town. #
Seizing the moment, too,
were thrilling new literary voices
across theatre, film and the novel,
exploring, with witty irreverence,
their own place and experiences
in the minefield of multicultural Britain.
"My name is Karim Amir, and I'm an Englishman born and bred,
"almost."
That comma and the "almost"
is the defining mark of the children
of first-generation immigrants.
Hanif Kureishi, one of our most gifted and bracingly original
novelists and screenwriters,
was born and grew up in Bromley, South London,
to a Pakistani Muslim father and a white working-class mother.
"I'm often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman,
"a new breed, as it were,
"having emerged from two old histories.
"But I don't care.
"Englishman I am, though not proud of it,
"from the South London suburbs and going somewhere.
"Perhaps it's the odd mixture of continents and blood,
"of here and there, of belonging and not,
"that makes me restless and easily bored."
What you want to do as a writer...
..you want to find a subject that enables you, as a writer,
to do your best work, but you also want to find
a material or a subject
that other people aren't dealing with.
We were first generation, I guess, of mixed-race kids.
So when I began to write seriously,
the field was really open for writers like me
because this subject -
which was race, racism,
the new demographic of the UK -
had hardly been tackled.
What's amazing about your writing is that it's so funny, you know?
Well, I grew up on comedy.
I grew up on watching, you know, British sitcoms, Steptoe & Son.
I mean, that is Beckett on television.
You'll be stuck on a stud farm with a rosette behind your ear'ole!
I don't think I'd ever wanted to write a line
that didn't have a spin or a twist
from a comedic point of view.
Hanif's breakout moment arrived in 1985,
when his subversive screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette
became a hit film.
Nothing but a toilet and a youth club.
A constant boil on my bum.
I'd written My Beautiful Laundrette in around '83, '84.
It's a love story about Thatcherism.
You can't say fairer than that for entertainment.
All right, get started.
There's the broom. Move it!
I don't only want to sweep up.
Well, what are you, Labour Party?
I want to be manager of this place.
I think I can do it.
Please let me.
It was, in part, a story drawn from Hanif's own youth,
exploring the complex relationship between two young men,
school friends estranged...
I'm dead impressed by all this.
..when one becomes a fascist thug.
You were the one at school.
The one they liked.
All the Pakis liked me.
I mean, even as we're talking about,
you know, the richness of comedy.
Um... That was a scary time, really.
There was a lot of National Front activity...
..and it was really the influence of Enoch Powell. Yeah.
And I remember going to a girl's house
and her father chasing me away.
And indeed, setting his dog on me,
shouting, "We're with Enoch."
You know, he was a great inspirer of skinhead life.
And I remember, one day, one of my friends came round, as it were,
to play, and he was dressed entirely in the skinhead gear.
And I remember thinking how weird that was, because my father,
when he came home from work on the train,
was always nervous at the station
because the skinheads gathered around looking for fights.
And so we lived in fear
of my dad being pursued and beaten and kicked around.
And yet my school friends were becoming skinheads.
And of course, they would say, you know, "We're not after you, Hanif."
You know, "You're one of us."
And when I came to write My Beautiful Laundrette,
that really stayed with me.
There ain't nothing I can say to make it up to you.
There's only things I can do to show you that...
..that I am with you.
So, the relationship - the gay, loving, romantic relationship -
between Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke
really came out of those kinds of incidents.
It seems that the England that I inhabit
hadn't been portrayed on the screen.
Nobody has written a film about two gay men who run a laundrette,
you know, before. There aren't many. Why hasn't it been done?
I've got to do that.
The nominees for best screenplay written directly for the screen...
And the big thing was that it was released in the US,
where it was also a big hit and took a lot of money.
Hanif Kureishi for My Beautiful Laundrette.
Hanif's transatlantic success
showed that multicultural Britain was not doomed,
as Enoch Powell had predicted,
but remaking itself anew.
Yet having experienced, first-hand,
the violence of far right nationalists,
Hanif was also one of the earliest writers
to confront the rise of Islamic fundamentalism
among a small minority in the UK.
NEWS REPORTER: The tempo of protest over Salman Rushdie is rising.
Rushdie was a friend of mine, a fellow writer,
and I was horrified by the fact that,
you know, in the north of England,
they were burning a book.
I got really interested in why all these young Asian people...
Why they were not liberals,
because you would imagine
that their parents had come to the UK in order to...
..enjoy, let's say, the so-called liberalism of the UK.
And so I started to write my novel, The Black Album
and, of course, the movie My Son The Fanatic,
about kids who were...
..creating a new identity,
I guess,
called Muslim.
In the end, our cultures, they cannot be mixed.
Everything is mingling already together, this thing and the other.
Some of us are wanting summat more besides muddle.
What? Belief. Purity.
Belonging to the past.
I won't bring up my children in this country.
I mean, we'd never called ourselves Muslims before.
It was a new word. Mm.
Nobody ever defined themselves by their religion.
It is a very modern idea, that.
And it really came out of, you know,
post-colonial rage, really. Mm.
Remember two things.
There are many ways of being a good man.
And I will be at home.
Will you come and see me?
Multiculturalism does rely on one thing,
which is this idea of liberalism,
and always assumes a compromise as well. Yeah.
If you go to an extreme,
then multiculturalism dies.
One place you might think that liberalism had planted a flag
was the British election,
but it was instantly followed by race riots.
Did that surprise you?
It would, I think, surprise me more if racism ever went away.
But I would say,
on the whole, overall, Britain's done a pretty good job.
Most of us got along with our neighbours
without killing one another most of the time.
How much do you think all these conflicts and difficulties
have generated cultural energy?
If anybody asked me, you know,
why I would call myself a proud Britisher,
I would say it's to do with culture.
We're really, really good at this stuff.
Culture and the arts...
..is not going to solve anything...
That would be ridiculous.
..but it is a very good place where we can talk about
what matters to us, what's important to us, you know?
It's really crucial and really what's beautiful about this country.
Although our backgrounds are very different,
much like Hanif,
I've always felt proudly British
on the strength of our shared culture
and appreciation for this nation's open-mindedness.
Something born of my parents' experience here in the East End.
My mother and father always felt that East London,
even though it was overwhelmingly Jewish,
was a kind of tolerant place, really.
They thought they'd been dealt the best possible deck of cards
by landing in Britain...
..and that you could find a home in Britain
that was not tribally paranoid or nervous.
The East End, then, was a kind of exhilaration of ethnic chaos.
There was a big Irish population,
an Italian population as well.
Later on, my mum knew the leaders of the Bangladeshi Muslim community.
There was kind of organic feeling that immigrant culture gave you.
Not a kind of terrifying battle to be fought,
but another lease of life.
Another lease of life, that was...
And they passed that on to me, really.
You know, the flowering of culture is not a zero-sum game.
You look at politics around the world and you despair.
People are actually taught to fear the other culture.
And then the damage starts.
I still have the sense of Britain as a mansion of multitudes.
You can have your arguments,
but you don't want to live separately,
and you don't want to live in a kind of time
where you're, you know, you're shaking your fist
over the garden fence at your neighbour.
You try and bring passionate feelings on both sides
into the same discussion.
And culture is very good at that.
Britain is a place, ultimately -
you know, call me a kind of dopey utopian -
where you have the gift of immigration.
You have the gift of lots of different cultures.
Mr Sunshine, that's me.