FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

This presentation would be a review of a season delivered at the BFI entitled, Constructed, Told, Spoken: A counter history of Britain on TV, which retraced the establishment of Multicultural TV Units at the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4, in March 2026. My season told a chronological story of how this unique British phenomenon in television programming came to be, defining this timeline as a movement in television non-fiction. 


In this presentation, I intend to tell the story of the emergence of multicultural programming, illustrate how the season brought together a range of voices, and shed light on the conditions for establishing these units and the programming they provided for minorities in Britain. I will detail the archives I worked across and trace the emergence as it unfolded throughout the season.


The timeline is as follows: it began with the emergence of the BBC's immigrant programmes unit in the 1960's. Followed by a period of institutional absence for multicultural policy, during which anti-racist television was developed externally by activists and found a place on our screens through open-access slots in the 1970s. By the 1980s, a defined institutional lane had begun to emerge, peaking in the middle years with a clearly articulated political and social positioning grounded in community perspectives coached in this institutional voice. Ultimately, the season traced the movement's progression toward its eventual decline and the phasing out of multicultural units in the early 2000s.


My presentation will show the programmes and the development of this political and social position, as mirroring diversity in Britain, how it functioned as a counter-narrative to the news and how its preservation and rediscovery through the archive reframes this period.