YET another TV programme reveals depths of racial prejudice sullying our country’s reputation — but, this time, ordinary British people were, to the surprise of the presenter, Nadifa Mohamed, the heroes, standing up for interracial respect and friendship.
Churchill: Britain’s secret apartheid (Channel 4, Saturday) told the story of the United States military based here in preparation for D-Day and beyond. The problem had been identified from the start, at the highest level (although the documentary’s title, fishing for the interest kindled by any mention of the wartime PM, greatly exaggerated his part in the narrative): US forces, like US society, exercised strict racial segregation. It was agreed that they could bring their system with them; but, in true British fashion, this top-secret deal was not publicly admitted.
The 15,000 black troops (all volunteers, of course) were deemed unsuitable for combat positions, capable merely of support tasks; they lived in separate barracks, and were supposed to live quite separately from white GIs. It was these white GIs who demonstrated prejudice and, worse, were quite unprepared for the equal welcome that locals extended to the “coloured” troops.
In the night-long “Battle of Bamber Bridge”, the villagers sided with the black soldiers against the white military police; and there were similar episodes in Tiger Bay, Leicester, and Bury St Edmunds. White GIs’ deepest ire was kindled by black GIs’ walking out with English women. Perhaps the most startling evidence is the 33,000 English signatures petitioning against the death sentence pronounced against a black GI convicted of raping a white woman. On the eve of D-Day, Eisenhower himself overturned the sentence. Post-Windrush to this day, racial hatred is a deep blot. Might these revelations reawaken a kinder and more generous national instinct?
Prejudice against Afro-Caribbeans in the UK is the motor driving the eight-part series Mr Loverman (BBC1, from Monday 14 October), but, here again, it is not white antagonism: the prejudice is entirely from within the community. Successful and supremely elegant Barrington has a dark secret, but it is not the string of affairs with women which his wife, Carmel, bitterly suspects. His true love, throughout adult life, has been Morris, known as “Uncle” to all the family. Deeply religious, Carmel brings home from church her group of friends who blight Sunday lunch with an appalling barrage of homophobic sentiment — all based, alas, on scripture. It is subtle, complex, and brilliantly acted.
Britain’s mysterious depths are, supposedly, plumbed in Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country (BBC3, Sundays). In This Country, Cooper and his anarchic sister, Daisy May, revealed the squalid truth behind the chocolate-box fantasy of life in the Cotswolds; now he’s looking for Norfolk’s Black Shuck and King Arthur’s treasure. Best of all is the crop-circles episode. Does he believe, or is the whole farrago a wind-up to fool his family?