The CRE's annual Race in the Media Awards was held last Friday at the Savoy Hotel. The running of the ceremony and the night itself couldn’t be faulted, the food was good, everything went without a hitch, and the wine flowed freely.

I managed to corner Sanjeev Bhaskar fairly early on, and he proved to be as funny in conversation as on the screen. He just got back from Australia, promoting the Kumar’s out there. He also divulged that he was working on an animation series featuring a character called “Bindu”, and on a new movie about call centres in India. The second project he seemed to be more excited about, saying the movie would be a mixture of drama and comedy.

The CRE’s aim in staging the ceremony is “to encourage informed coverage of race relations across all media in the United Kingdom”. Nevertheless I found it interesting how it was possible to make some generalisations about the award ceremony regarding the nominations and the awards, at the risk of trying to over-analyse the whole occasion.

The whole event was, I thought, too dominated by the BBC in the first place. Too many awards, too much of the programming and most of the nominations were by the BBC, signalling once again that the BBC seemed to be the only mainstream broadcaster taking ethnic minorities more seriously. Where were all the independent documentary makers? Very conspicuously absent.

Out of the awards presented, much of the content centred either around issues of asylum seekers, or of the Muslim community. Both topical issues no doubt, the latter since the events of Sept. 11th, but after a while it seemed that the nominee which tackled either of those issues was more likely to get an award. I’m sure the Muslim community of Britain, while glad that it’s getting sufficient positive coverage, will eventually start feeling like a guinea pig for documentary makers. I got the feeling that the mainstream media doesn’t sufficiently have a wide enough range of ethnic programming, and puts too much emphasis on tackling ethnic minority issues relating to current affairs rather than the simple fly-on-the-wall documentaries.

Another gripe I had was that most of the program makers were white. The argument that it doesn’t matter what the colour of the documentary maker is valid one, and talented should people get the recognition. But the high proportion of white people who were rewarded for making documentaries on Asians and black people is still worrying. For one it shows that a lot of our cultural space is being defined by white people, and not by the Asian community itself. Secondly it might signal inherent biases towards white people in the media.

One documentary maker, who didn’t want to be named, told me that racism was still quite prevalent in the British media industry. Whether this is true for everyone would depend on personal experience, but it looks like we are still a little bit away from ironing out those institutional biases.

The CRE is trying hard to give some emphasis to ethnic programming, but I get the feeling it’s efforts aren’t making Asians go out there and get involved in cutting edge media projects in the mainstream. Hopefully by next year things will have changed. Until then lets hope for more Asians in media.

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Article by Sunny Hundal.