Race on Screen
Audience Racism in Twentieth-Century Britain
Will be published approx. on 31. March 2026
Book
Hardback
311 pages
978-1-009-65096-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
594 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-65096-0 (9781009650960)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
approx. 03/2026
Cambridge University Press
€40.70
Not yet published
E-Book
02/2026
Cambridge University Press
€34.49
Available for download
Person
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).
Content
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.