Director, Udayan Prasad, one of the first Indian born British filmmakers working in the industry, discusses how the landscape of diversity in TV and film has changed since his career started in 60s Britain.
Udayan Prasad is a multi-award-winning director whose earlier films include My Son the Fanatic (by Hanif Kureishi and starring Om Puri and Rachel Griffiths) and Brothers in Trouble (starring Om Puri, Angeline Ball and Pawan Malhotra) and The Yellow Handkerchief starring William Hurt, Maria Bello, Kristin Stewart, and Eddie Redmayne. His television projects include several with the British writer Simon Gray including Running Late and two BAFTA-nominated collaborations with Alan Bennett: Talking Heads 2: Playing Sandwiches (starring David Haig) and 102 Boulevard Haussman (starring Alan Bates and Janet McTeer). His recent work comprises of Becoming Elizabeth (featuring Romola Garai, Tom Cullen, and Jessica Raine), and Selection Day, an adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel for Seven Stories and Netflix, on which Udayan was lead director and executive producer. He also helmed the closing episodes (including the show’s finale) of the BBC’s adaptation of The Musketeers featuring Tom Burke.
The Daleks scared the life out of me when I first saw them, aged ten on the television at a friend’s house in the early 1960s. Unsurprisingly at that age, I had no idea just how extraordinary it was that the very first director of Doctor Who, Waris Hussein was, like me, an Indian living in Britain. Nor that the producer, Verity Lambert, was a woman.
Even more extraordinary was that I would go on to work with Verity almost thirty years later. I got to know how rare the likes of Verity were and how that made it even rarer for people who were not white males to be regarded as creative people. Fiction in particular. All Verity wanted to know was whether you could film the script she had managed to get commissioned in a way that would grip the audience. Your ethnicity or gender were immaterial.
The prevalent attitude of the time (which to some extent still exists) was that producers and commissioners would only consider a director of colour if the subjects were of the same ethnicity or if the content dealt with racism. Much in the same way women directors were hired mainly to make programmes about the menopause or as one female colleague put it, ‘wimmin’s problems.’ God help you if you were a female director of colour.
I got my first hint of this attitude in an interview for a place at the NFTS in 1977. The film I had submitted as part of my application was about a young girl who found herself transported to another world, devoid of human beings, during a game of hide-and-seek. The girl was white as were her playmates and it was put to me by Colin Young, the then Director of the NFTS, that this film was not the work of an Indian. What he seemed to be suggesting was that had such a person made the film the girl would not have been white and the film would – or perhaps should – have been about the problems/difficulties faced by people of colour. As my film didn’t come close to touching such themes it might as well have been made by a white director. Completely bewildered by this statement, I was lost for words and needless to say, I wasn’t offered a place.
I did manage to get into the NFTS three years later, without submitting another film that ticked the right boxes and while Colin was still Director. And the more I got to know him the more I understood what a delightfully mischievous man he was. I realised that the statement he had made at my first interview had been, in all likelihood, a provocation to see if I could come back with an equally challenging retort.
Among the NFTS’ 1980 intake of students for the three-year course I was one of just two who were not white. The school had been established in 1971 and in intervening nine years the total number of students like me totalled nineteen. The figures for white women students were not much better. As for the tutors, the only person of colour had been Mamoun Hassan, Saudi born first head of production at the BFI. For me, such a situation was not at all unusual. From the day my family and I arrived in the UK I had almost always been the only person of colour in the schools and colleges I attended. The reason was simple. Unlike many immigrants from the old Empire territories, my parents did not settle in an area where others like us had ended up.
After graduating from the NFTS in 1983, it took a year of knocking on doors before being getting my first professional job as a director. Despite having directed a fiction short for my graduation film and having my sights set on being a drama director, this was for a Channel 4 arts documentary series commissioned about artists of colour who lived and worked in the UK. Shooting had started and the producer (white) needed a director, preferably of colour, for the next episode in the schedule. However, despite liking my work he felt unable to offer me the episode because the subjects were of Afro Caribbean heritage and I was not. But as he also needed a director for a later episode that was all about artists of South Asian heritage he offered me that gig. What was perplexing was that he had also hired white directors for the series even though not a single white person was the subject of any of the episodes.
At that time British television did give work to directors and producers of colour but in the realm of factual programming far more than in fiction. The arrival of Channel 4 in 1982 and its Commissioner for Multicultural Programming, Farrukh Dhondy, undoubtedly increased the opportunities for directors and producers of colour. But, in the overall scheme of things, not by much.
So I kept on making documentaries whilst developing ideas for dramas. To that end I contacted Hanif Kureishi shortly before My Beautiful Launderette went into production. Even though we did not have a project of our own, we stayed in touch. One day in 1987, Hanif happened to meet the head of BBC Birmingham’s Drama Department who bemoaned the lack of directors of colour. Hanif told him that there were plenty, he just had not looked hard enough and then mentioned my name. That encounter led to my being offered a place on the BBC Drama Directors course, the focus of which was on directing studio based, multi-camera dramas. Unsurprisingly, I was the only person of colour on the course and the multi-camera scene I directed was from Getting On by Alan Bennett. I had got to know Alan while working as an assistant film editor on two of his plays for London Weekend Television directed by Stephen Frears. All the characters in the scene were white and I like to think I chose such a piece to convince the doubters that I was perfectly capable of filming white people. As luck would have it Caroline Oulton, a young, incredibly bright, and dynamic producer saw the scene. She was about to embark on a new drama series, South Of The Border, about two young women, one black and the other white who find themselves becoming private detectives in Deptford. Caroline wanted me to direct three of its eight episodes. What made the whole enterprise unique was that of the other three directors, two were women, Antonia Bird and Lesely Manning and the third, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, another man of colour. And among the directors Caroline hired for of the second series were Ngozi Onwurah and Suri Krishnamma.
A moment that stands out was the first day of rehearsals for the third episode, which was written by Winsome Pinnock. Among the cast present was Angela Bruce who, with a look of astonishment on her face, remarked that this was the first time in her professional life she had worked on a television drama where the writer, director and majority of the cast were people of colour. This was in 1988.
Luck came my way yet again when Kennith Trodd saw the first of my three episodes of South Of The Borderand offered me an episode for BBC’s Screen Two anthology series. The first draft for Here Is The News, by G F Newman, had almost forty speaking parts. Of those just one was black and he stole a car. Following several intense discussions that part was cut and the number of speaking roles reduced to twenty-four. Better still, the ethnicity of some were changed, most importantly that of one of the leads played in the film by Josette Simon. All well and good but when one looks at the Screen Two page on IMDb, of the ninety-seven directors hired between 1984 and 1998, just nine are women and just four are men of colour. I really am one the luckiest in that I was asked to direct four films in total. Angela Pope and Jean Stewart directed two each and the other ten, just one apiece.
Two of the four I directed were written by Simon Gray and through him I went on to meet and work with Verity Lambert in 1992. Running Late written by Simon was for Screen One. The IMDb page shows that of the thirty-eight directors who worked on the series, just four were women and I was the only director of colour.
The television dramas I managed to direct undoubtedly helped in getting my first feature off the ground. However, the entire process took eight years. Brothers in Trouble was based on a book I came across while making an arts documentary for BBC’s Arena strand in 1987. The novel, written by London-based Pakistani author Abdullah Hussein was about a house full of illegal male Pakistani immigrants. We already had ready access to Abdullah Hussein as, despite being an acclaimed author in his native Pakistan, he ran an off license in Clapham. What helped get us over the line was persuading Om Puri one of the greatest actors India has ever produced to play a key role. In 1995 BBC Films, agreed to commission it on condition that it would be entirely in the English language. By now it was 1995 and as eight years of playing Sisyphus had been more than enough, I reluctantly agreed. It was a terrific story and even though it would be less rich and indeed not truthful to have the illegals speaking to each other in English, audiences could still engage with it.
The shoot of My Son The Fanatic, written by Hanif Kureishi took place in 1996 and that has been followed by other feature film, television drama and documentary projects. As far as diversity is concerned the landscape has changed over the years; initially at a snail’s pace but gradually picking up speed. The NFTS, for example, reached gender parity in its Fiction Direction course intake for the first time in 2020. The number of women accepted for the 2025 intake will exceed the number of men. And more than the fingers of both hands are finally needed to count the number directors of colour working in the industry today. Forced by movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter, the industry is now definitely doing more than it has done in the past.
One of the reasons for the slow pace of change could be that as we grow up what we consider to be normal depends on who we grow up with. After arriving in the UK, I was the only pupil of colour in my primary school. The result was that my name was considered strange if not weird. However, for my children’s generation names like mine are rarely odd because they have grown up in a far more diverse environment. Furthermore, the nature of the industry being what it is, most of my contemporaries went to schools in which people of colour were either a rarity or a minority at best. The likes of me are more the ‘other’ to them than my kids are to their contemporaries. So when it comes to hiring a director those in positions of power tend to lean towards whatever they are familiar with. As the younger generation grows up they will do likewise but because their idea of what constitutes the ‘other’ is shrinking, hopefully heritage will be of less importance to them when making decisions about whom to hire.
The generational aspect of things also means that we tend to collaborate with people more or less of our age, maybe a generation older or younger. As we reach a certain vintage the number of our contemporaries diminishes; people drop out, retire, or simply die. At that stage we find that the heads of commissioning are in some instances younger than we are and being unfamiliar with most of our oeuvre, do not regard us as being ‘hot enough’ to hire.
Perhaps we need a version of The Voice where the judges are not allowed to see the singers when they first audition; the choice of whom to take on is made only by the quality of the voice. So, maybe directors and HoDs should send work without any credits to those looking for talent and have that meeting only if the potential employers like what they see. The cynic in me thinks I have a bit too much faith in my fellow human beings – particularly as we enter the era of AI – but I am afraid that has always been my problem.
Picture credit: Wiktor Gutt
Udayan Prasad is represented by Casarotto Ramsay & Associates
Jon Creamer
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