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From multicultural programming to diasporic television: situating the UK in a European context

Public service broadcasting, particularly in Western Europe, has been very closely tied to the ideal of national broadcasting, raising particular issues when we complicate the idea of the national. In addition, it has also been suggested that the steady erosion of public service broadcasting (PSB) is reducing the shared national experience (Tracey). The question posed in this section is how thinking about television from the perspective of diasporic communities challenges traditional ways of conceptualizing, regulating and running television along national lines. As Europe’s diasporic communities develop their own unique affiliations and points of identification beyond national broadcasting and through other platforms, they are actively engaging with cable and satellite television services targeted at global television audiences. As delocalization develops, what is the role of national broadcasting as a kind of ‘social glue’ that produces the ideological pursuits of common culture and national unity? Within television research and beyond, ‘diaspora’ is typically (but not always) applied to groups from the South rather than to globally dominant ethnic groups such as the English. Within a German context, for example, the Turkish are the primary focus, for France, it is the ‘d’origine algérienne/marocaine/tunisienne’ (of Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian origin) or more generally ‘d’origine maghrébine’ (of Maghrebi origin) and for Greece, it is the Albanian, Macedonian and Turkish. Within the UK context, the focus here, ‘diaspora’ dominantly refers to South Asians and African-Caribbeans (commonly termed ‘blacks and Asians’) and it is these two communities that have historically been at the forefront of cultural diversity and diasporic television strategies. In order to acknowledge the historical situatedness of diasporic television in contemporary Europe, it is useful to map the connections between formative models of televisual address such as ‘multicultural programming’ and more recent developments that have led to an increasingly globalized communications market. Traditional national, analogue broadcasters since the 1930s (UK, Germany, France, Poland, Italy), 1940s (Czechoslovakia, West Germany, East Germany) and 1950s (Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland) have, since the 1990s, had to negotiate their position alongside satellite, cable and digital commercial channels. From the latter, diasporic television has emerged, enabling various ‘nationals’ to identify with ‘the homeland’ and build connections amongst and across dispersed regional, national and transnational audiences. For minority audiences, diaspora television has become a powerful mechanism for those sharing common cultural concerns, such as a religion, language or ethnicity, to defend their collective interests. The ways in which these diasporic identities are practised, performed and represented through the medium raises important cultural and commercial issues for Europe’s public service broadcasters who have long legitimated their position in the nation-state as a source of public value.