Episode 1 Black is the New Black

The name Black Is The New Black really made me smile.

I think we're on the edge of a revolution.

Boom!

We have our own thing.

And it's really rich.

We're the influencers, the tastemakers.

Remember when we invented jazz and you didn't know what it was?

Well, now we're going to do something else.

I've never really seen myself as an immigrant.

I see myself as a person.

I'm proud to be black.

I've never cared to be any other way.

Everybody wants to be us, but they only want the good parts of being us.

They want our physicality, they want our musicality.

Selling our culture, it's like one big hustle.

They want our talent, they want our dancing skills,

they want our singing skills.

Music hasn't got no colour.

The oppressed always find a way to celebrate, right?

It's a great feeling.

We are people of talent, people of vision, people of passion.

SHE LAUGHS

There's a great seam of British success.

When it stands out, it is dazzling.

And we should celebrate it.

We should celebrate it.

This programme contains very strong language.

I am Gina Yashere. I'm a comedian.

My mum and dad came from Nigeria.

Both my parents are from Barbados.

My mum's from Ghana, my dad's from Nigeria.

My father was Antiguan.

The wonderful island, the jewel of the Caribbean, as we say.

'We have different opinions.'

As you do.

My parents are Nigerian.

St Lucia.

Jamaica. You go to St Ann, you turn right and you go into Bush.

Turn left at the clock tower,

two men playing dominoes on a box next to a goat.

Ask for Mrs Harris. The shop is there.

Until I came to this country, I hadn't any Afro-Caribbean...

Caribbean friends.

HE LAUGHS

There is a wonderful Uganda proverb.

And it says,

"The person who has never travelled

"thinks that their mother is the best cook."

I think I was four when the present

Queen was enthroned,

and we had a tiny little transistor radio, so we were able,

through the World Service, to actually hear the entire service.

When the national anthem came on,

my dad used to make us all to stand.

I was born in Trinidad, in the West Indies,

which is right at the long end of

a nice geographical chain which ends up

almost on the South American continental shelf.

My parents were not what I would call,

sort of, formally educated people.

My father was an engineer at the oil refinery.

We were all pretty poor,

and so there was a natural aspiration to get out of that kind of poverty.

That was a very important part of West Indian life -

you had to try to make something of yourself.

Trinidad would not be your, kind of, ultimate destination.

We were colonies of the British Empire.

We learned a lot about the history

of how the people in Britain are governed -

far, far more than about my own country, Uganda.

We knew the English laws, we knew their customs,

we knew their history, we knew their tradition.

Britain was better and more

powerful, and when,

you know, the "Great" was in

Great Britain and all that.

"Let's go to this place."

'Wonderful.'

My parents were pioneers, but it's not something they chose.

My mother, from Zimbabwe, she was working in Zambia as a midwife,

and my dad, Nick Newton from Cornwall,

he had decided that he wanted to find the root of the blues,

and he felt that it was Africa.

They met and fell in love.

Think about it - mid-'60s, you fall in love with an African woman,

you want to marry that woman, bring her back to Cornwall,

which is SO not African...

SHE LAUGHS

You are fucking cool, man.

My dad is...

I mean, he really broke the mould.

I then think about my mother.

You know.

SHE SIGHS

She's a warrior,

because it wasn't like having stones thrown through the window,

it was the mind-fucking, and it was the...

The kind of feeling of needing to look over your shoulder,

and she responded to that by just keeping things small.

The name is Bill Morris. I'm a member of the House of Lords.

The significance of the photograph -

it was the day that I was declared General Secretary

of the Transport and General Workers Union.

My privilege was to lead that union for 12 years,

and I'm grateful for that opportunity.

I trust I've left something behind.

When I came to England back in 1954 as a 16-year-old boy,

it was a journey of experience.

I'd wake up in the morning

and there was smoke coming out of the chimneys.

I'd never seen a chimney before.

I thought the house was on fire, you know. These are the sort of things.

It was at a point where housing was your first challenge,

and it got to the point where

renting a room, a whole room, was a luxury.

You'd be renting a bed

and you woke up at four o'clock in the morning

and you've never seen the guy next-door to you.

My mum, when she first arrived, she was ill-equipped.

She didn't come with the right clothes.

So she had on a light jacket,

and arriving in November in '64,

a light jacket was definitely not the right attire,

so my mum spent a lot of the winter cold.

I couldn't understand what the romance about snow was all about.

I always hated the winters.

This business of overcoats and so

many pockets and so on, you can't...

I can't get myself in and out of them.

I'm still struggling with...

..winters and how to dress in them.

My name is Patricia Scotland.

I'm the Secretary General of the Commonwealth,

the 53 countries, which encapsulates 2.3 billion people.

My mother was a real lady,

and looking at Paddington in 1958 was a big shock to her.

People didn't bathe every day.

My mother was used to bathing

sometimes three times a day, changing for lunch,

changing for dinner, and my mother had help in the house,

and she was amongst people

who had behaviour that had her eyes out on stalks.

I think she thought Daddy

had brought her to Sodom and Gomorrah.

You know, I remember my mother talking about her being shocked at

British people who didn't know Shakespeare

and didn't know about the Magna Carta,

cos they'd been raised on all that stuff, you know.

She hadn't seen a fleck of snow but she'd read The Winter's Tale.

Britain had been sold as a kind of magical place - it was Oz.

There was a notion that the streets of Britain were paved in gold,

and I'm sure my parents were, you know, were bought on that illusion.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. What did they find?

Racism.

In those days, when my parents arrived,

there were still signs saying...

"No dogs...

"No Irish...

"And no blacks." I think they used to say "no coloureds" in those days.

One of the things I'd say is I really don't like remembering

some of those times, but I was subject to racist attack.

I was literally attacked, beaten up and bloodied.

You would be silly to go out on your own.

We used to go in groups and, in many instances, we didn't go at all.

Both my parents found that with kind words, kind actions,

eventually the frost thawed,

and I think it was the early '70s where the wheat crop had failed

and people were on strike and people were unhappy.

West Indians, of course, had their own bread, hard-dough bread,

so they just carried on as normal.

And the interest of English people going, "Oh, what's that?

"Is that your bread? Oh, can I try a bit?"

Food - always the way -

opened the door slowly to interactions

between the West Indian community and the English community

in Wolverhampton, yeah.

-Holding it up in front of you and you're looking into the main camera.

-OK.

That's when I was a little less black.

HE LAUGHS

That's early days. I'm about 17, 18 in that picture.

That was the uniform, the Nike tracksuit.

Family life was loud, chaotic, cos there was five of us.

My oldest sister's eight years older than me,

so she felt like a second mother figure

while my mum was out working.

I was one of them kids that'd be in and out of everyone's houses.

Everyone was my brother or my cousin or... You know what I mean?

We played and we fought and I shared a room with my older sister,

which was horrible because I wasn't allowed to touch any of her stuff,

so I'd try and sneak and play all of her Rick James records,

and then she'd come back and it was like a scene out of Misery.

She'd know that I'd moved something a millimetre and then beat the hell

out of me, so it was not fun sharing with my older sister.

It was always about food.

"What are you eating? How much you ate?"

We were a very popular family.

People were always in our house, in the West Indian front room,

playing music and having fun.

You'd come home from school

and there'd be no furniture in your living room

or in your front room, and suddenly a man with two massive speakers,

two turntables and a microphone would show up,

put it in the corner, and there'd be a dance in your house.

Really loud music that would go on till six o'clock in the morning.

Your mum would cook curried goat and rice,

and there'd be a bar that people would have to pay money to...

And there'd be like a club in your house.

And they were chatting over a mic.

"Go on, sister, move your backside."

I was always the joker, always the clown.

Always playing sport.

What did stand out for me, I remember, back in the day,

was the West Indian cricket team.

Me and my dad, we'd sit there for hours

and I'd come home from school and Greenwich would still be batting

and you'd watch Viv Richards just clart people round the pitch,

and that was the first real image of successful, dominating, black...

This was the West Indies.

Cricket was the only other time I saw black people just enjoying

themselves, being them, outwardly.

You know, the drums were playing and people were blowing whistles and

people were dancing. It was really joyous.

It was the first time I ever saw my

dad screaming and shouting and acting like a kid.

I'm looking at this man screaming at Geoffrey Boycott...

I'm like, "That's not my dad."

Just dancing and being so happy.

I would always like to see the West Indies win.

It was kind of a celebration of who we were.

It sort of felt great to be getting one over and winning.

Cos you never really saw that.

I never really saw success.

And I'll tell you...

..I used to support Leeds United.

Cos they were brilliant. I was about eight, nine,

and Leeds were playing Birmingham,

and I thought, "I'm going to go and support Leeds United."

I remember I walked into St Andrew's...

..and I walked into the Leeds end, through the gate...

and I heard the first... "Oo-oo-oo, nigger, nigger..."

And I kind of stopped and I thought, "Did I just hear that?"

And I thought, "I'll carry on."

-INTERVIEWER: Who were you with?

-I was on my own.

And then I heard another one.

And I remember my mum saying...

.."Stand up to bullies and racists," and...

..I said to myself, "Go and take your seat.

"Go and take your seat."

So I remember walking towards an empty seat that I saw,

and it got louder and louder,

and the monkey noises and the monkey chants and the "nigger, go home"

and the "coon", "wog",

"black...cunt".

It was...

There must have been about...

It sounded like 10,000 people calling me a nigger.

I was eight.

And it shocked me to my core.

And I stopped...

..turned around...

..and left.

And I have never been to a football match on my own since.

Never.

Never.

Thank you.

For me, this picture is what my footballing career was all about.

To go home on a weekend, having scored the winning goal,

and seeing all these people here,

cos every man is standing up and cheering cos I scored a goal.

For me, there was no better feeling than that.

I had to prove a point to these people.

Forget my colour - I'm able to do a job.

And so this picture here just symbolises, for me,

being the best I could be.

-Take a seat and we shall begin.

-Cool.

Yes, man!

LAUGHTER

This is sick. This is wicked.

So this is my brother and I, first day of term, uniform pressed.

I'm just looking at this picture, thinking, "Mum, what a star."

Whenever I look at this picture, I smile because, you know,

it is just everything.

My big sister was, like, my best mate,

and my mum was the evil overlord,

the best friend,

the cook, the...

She was everything to us.

My dad died when I was a baby, so I was raised by my mum.

I felt like I was poorer than a lot of people.

As I've grown up, I've realised that people that I was around

might have really got into the drugs game.

What made me different is that I never saw none of that at home.

My mum made so many sacrifices. My mum wouldn't claim benefit,

my mum did three or four cleaning jobs

as well as... Sold clothes, was the Avon lady.

But then my mum bought me my first set of turntables. Like,

I know we didn't have a lot of money but she made sure it happened.

So...big up, Mum, innit?

My mother was an African woman.

She came from a well-connected family in Nigeria

and at home, my mother was a super-strict disciplinarian and

super into education, so I wasn't...

I had no freedoms.

I wasn't allowed to go to parties,

I wasn't even allowed to go on school trips.

My mum was over the top. Like,

my mum used to actually keep a scrapbook

of bus and train crashes and say,

"Look, these are children who died because they went on school trips."

I'm not even making this up.

It's 100% true.

She'd keep newspaper clippings and go,

"Look, these people are dead because they got on a coach." You know?

Some of my friends who were able to do what they wanted to do -

that's cos their dad was down the bookie's.

But the other extreme is...

"What kind of grade is that?"

The stereotypes of Jamaicans being

laid-back and rum-drinking and, you know... No.

My dad bought his own house when he was a bus conductor.

My dad knew exactly how much money

he had in his pocket whenever you asked.

"Dad, how much money you got in your pocket?" "£2.32."

He'd be able to tell you.

I was more scared of my dad than anybody in the world.

Scared of disappointing him,

scared of him ever raising his hand on...

You know. In those days, that's what happened.

My mum was my mum and my dad.

She had to discipline me, so it weren't a talking-to -

she'd beat me, innit? So I had to hold licks.

My white friends had different relationships with their parents.

My friend Greg would say something cheeky to his dad, like,

"Leave me alone," or something, and they'd...

"Ha-ha-ha!" His parents would laugh

and I'd go, "Oh, great, I'm going to go home and try that."

HE LAUGHS

"What did you say to me?"

Running round the house...

TEARFULLY: "I...wish...you...were... dead."

Nah, man, licks is love, man.

Don't get me wrong, there's abuse.

But when you're acting up in school

because you're just being a little shit,

because you need some attention or whatever it is,

and now your mum's had to take the rest of the day off work

for the 50th time to hear that you're acting up...

she's going to have to work even harder to make it up,

then you're going to get some licks when you get home, innit?

But I think white people beat their kids too, man.

I think pretty much everyone has a go.

I'm glad my dad could've given me licks if I was out of order.

And they wouldn't throw him in prison.

Cos I know I needed that barrier.

My dad never had to hit me.

Only once when I nearly set the house on fire, and I understood that.

I was being beat and it went on for quite a long time.

I just thought, "I wonder if she's angry at me or at something else."

Cos I think that

a lot of it wasn't about you.

You know, every day, going to work. Every day, being disrespected.

Every day, the burden of...

..being a visible "other".

I wonder if it wasn't some of that.

My dad is Nigerian, came over to England when he was young,

went to boarding school in Scotland, moved to London,

and my mum is English.

My dad's always been there,

and I suppose that that is a stereotype, isn't it?

That black men are not always there to provide for their children,

which is just not the case with my dad at all.

It's the polar opposite, you know, like, he would give everything,

do anything for us.

What was interesting is that I went to a small private school in Essex,

because I was born in east London and my dad sent me to a school that,

after day two of me being there,

one of my teachers being beaten up, took me out and said,

"I'm not doing this."

Moved out to Essex and they basically spent all of

their money, every single penny they had,

sending me to a school that I couldn't afford to go to

because he was determined that I got a good education.

So, yeah,

we used to pull up round the corner in a car with the door falling off,

and I used to go to this school, and that was my life by day,

and then my life by night was back in east London, at the dance studio,

working, teaching, learning, just trying to make ends meet.

My name is Maggie Aderin-Pocock

and I'm a space scientist and a science communicator.

So this is a picture,

and I'm looking incredibly happy

because I am actually at Nasa Headquarters.

Firstly, it's the International Space Station,

and, of course, one of my dreams is, still, I want to get into space,

even at my age. It's more of a retirement plan now,

but I still want to get into the real thing one day.

My fascination with space... It happened at a very early age.

I used to watch a cartoon called the Clangers,

and so when I was a three-year-old,

I believed the Clangers were out there

and I wanted to go and visit them.

But also I think my dad...

I don't know, he was just so...

To me, growing up, he was just wonderful.

He just taught us things, and he was always interested in science.

He had a dream of studying medicine,

but I think having four kids and sort of

being in a different country,

that dream went by the by, and I think he did regret that.

But he didn't just teach us things - he got us to think.

I think that is the best gift you can give anyone,

the ability to think.

Just watching a television programme and he'd say, "OK,

"so why is that guy doing that?

"Do you think it's right or wrong?"

So he sort of set my moral compass and made me think about things,

and I think that makes me, probably, a better human being,

so I always thank him for that.

Listen, mate, there was...

There are a few things I grew up hearing over and over again.

A lot about education, but the one about

"you have to try twice as hard to achieve" was in stone.

It might as well have been on the wall.

It's like, "Well, why do I have to try twice as hard?"

"You just do."

"If you want to succeed in this country, you have to be twice as good as anybody else

"to be accepted as an equal."

Well, that's... How are you going to win that?

I could get eight out of ten

in an exam and my dad would go,

you know,

"That's OK, but why did you not get ten?"

And that was a constant in my life, my brother's life, my sister's life.

You know, perfection is what you're aspiring to

and anything less than that was you slacking, basically.

I wasn't raised to do something 50-50.

I worked in Topshop, I was the best sales assistant there was.

Whatever I commit myself to doing, I'm going to do it with 110%.

Poor Steve McQueen.

He makes Shame and his mum's there, going,

"You have to do better than that, you know.

"Where that book about the slave? "Make that one."

That's good.

You know, I was brought up by Ghanaian parents

and everyone who's brought up by

African parents pretty much lives through the same thing,

which is that you're told very early on

that it's important that you get a good career,

it's important that you become a professional.

She'd already picked out our jobs when we were kids -

like, I was meant to be the doctor of the family.

One of my brothers was meant to be a lawyer,

one was meant to be the engineer.

"A stockbroker."

"You have to be a solicitor."

"Be a doctor..."

"Think about becoming an accountant..."

If you couldn't be Garfield Sobers or Frank Worrell or somebody.

All of these things weigh slightly heavily on you as a child

but, actually, the whole dialogue around "you need a profession"

and so on is really another way of saying,

"How can you live in a country where black people are routinely

"stereotyped as 'other' and different

"and physically threatening and..."

So their answer to that, at that time, was to say, "OK, look,

"you need a proper job, you need a proper profession,

"and that way you'll be safe."

My dad feared for us.

I-I knew it.

He was always telling us, because he was saying that, you know,

he has four daughters, and he wanted us to be independent and educated

so we could look after ourselves.

I don't think any of us understand the importance

of why our parents were so strict with us

until we're almost parents ourselves.

Because everything was a need to get to a point of paying the bill.

"Make sure you turn the lights off, make sure you..."

There was constant struggle.

In fact, as a tribute to my dad, the first time I got a job,

he made me put £10 away in an account.

I still do that, that same account, out of respect for him.

All of my sisters went through the university system

and have been totally self-sufficient.

And I think that was his dream -

that we would have better opportunities than he did -

and I think he succeeded in that dream,

so he didn't fulfil all his own dreams,

but I think he succeeded in his dreams for us.

That's my icons, man.

These great British people came here and really...

They fought for us, man.

Close your laptop for a second, have a moment with your family,

cos everything else is exterior.

It's a rather nice picture.

That's my grandmother.

And my dad and my mum.

My family are my heroes, I guess.

Cos they transcended whatever it was that afflicted them...

..that stood in their way when they came here, and they raised a family.

Anybody who's gone through that and

put food on the table

and looked after their family, those are the real heroes, really.

There's nothing stronger than that, nothing more powerful.