How television still suffers from stereotyping

Traditionally stereotyped as unassuming accountants, doctors or shopkeepers, British Asians are breaking the mould and making a name for themselves in television comedy.

Outsiders might not have heard of him, but Anil Gupta was the executive producer of The Office, no less. He also put together the genre-busting comedy Goodness Gracious Me and is now producing the fifth series of The Kumars at No 42.

Hardeep Singh Kohli wrote, directed and acted in Channel 4's recent comedy Meet the Magoons; Nitin Ganatra starred in the series, and before that in Gurinder Chadha's film Bride & Prejudice. Saurabh Kakkar was appointed head of comedy for Granada last year. Gupta's producer for The Office was Ash Atalla, of Iranian origin, who has since joined Talkback Thames to pursue more comedy.

So things are changing, you might think. Even so, as he sits in the office of the independent Hat Trick productions, Gupta explains that he and his peers have had to negotiate a long and winding road to reach their current heights. Stereotyping, he says, has dogged him for much of his career, and it still makes things difficult. "People think, 'If we cast an Asian person, we have to do the whole race thing.' But I would ask why you have to do that. If it's not written in the script, then why?"

Gupta recalls being in a production meeting early in his career. One of the executives dismissed the idea of casting an Asian in a comedy, saying: "Oh you know, I don't think [Asians] are funny." But then, Gupta says, "that person thought Absolutely Fabulous wasn't funny because he thought there was nothing funny about drunk women".

Gupta is clearly unhappy with the way TV executives treat Asian producers, writers and actors. After the success of GGM, he passed on the chance to produce The Kumars. "I did not want to do it because I didn't want to be the guy who just did the Asian thing," he says.

It might sound at first as if he is afraid of associating with his ethnic roots, but Gupta's sentiments are the product of his experience of the television industry taking the view that Asians exist only at society's margins.

"There is an attitude with people running big mainstream channels. They [think] that if they cast a brown person in a lead role, the country - who they assume only read the Daily Mail - won't watch it," he says.

"I was really furious that they would not put the cast of Goodness Gracious Me on the front cover of Radio Times. The bottom line was that they did not want to put brown people on the front cover because they thought their audience was a bit racist," he claims.

"When they first commissioned GGM, it was in a graveyard slot. They were very surprised when it made the cross-over to a wider audience. The Kumars is on BBC1 on its sixth series. That should have been on BBC1 from the second or third series. It's not an Asian show, it has a great crossover appeal."

The same issue affects not just Asians, but minority ethnic workers throughout the audiovisual sector, from writers and producers through to the editing suites and camera technicians.

"The industry still tends to recruit from within itself," Gupta says. "Old habits die hard and people tend to go through their informal networks. But these become barriers for new talent." The insinuation behind this view is that if the practice carries on, it will primarily be non-white talent that finds itself left out in the cold.

Starting his career as a runner on the set of , where he managed to get some of his sketches used, he was invited by the BBC to take up a script editor bursary aimed at ethnic minorities.

"There was a big danger, especially if you came from an equal-opportunities scheme, that such a programme would become tokenistic, about ticking the boxes. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to make successful, broadly appealing comedy. Something to rival The Fast Show, which was big at the time."

At the same time, however, he was anxious to destroy stereotypes. "At the time, minority programming had a genre of its own. It was only made for those audiences. Asian people being funny wasn't on the radar," he recalls.

Gupta eventually found two budding writers, Sharat Sardana and Richard Pinto, with whom he has formed a small production company called Gasp, within Hat Trick. Sardana and Pinto had the idea to do The Kumars at No 42, but Gupta declined involvement, fearing that he would be pigeonholed.

Instead, he went straight into developing The Office with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Gupta says that only now, after The Office's success, have his circumstances become "a bit easier". "People in comedy are scared of different ideas. There is a quieter conservative attitude that you do not expect," he says.

His latest project has been an animated series for Channel 4 about a group of loud, oversexed schoolgirls, titled Bromwell High. But, yet again, Gupta has been frustrated by the decision to schedule the programme late at night. "This is the channel who paid a million quid per episode of The Simpsons. You think, 'What are you scared of?'"

Anil Gupta is clearly successful in television, but the industry is still failing to recruit its talent from a diverse background. The employment statistics for London alone testify to this.

So it is timely that a two-year research project carried out by London Metropolitan University, supported by the TUC and other partner organisations, is now being undertaken to examine the barriers to progress for ethnic minority workers in broadcasting and to produce a series of recommendations for action; for more information, see www.asiansinmedia.org/survey.

Sunny Hundal is the editor of 'Asians in Media' magazine

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