Christine Grandy, "Race on Screen: Audience Racism in Twentieth-Century Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

April 4, 2026·52 min·4 clips

After the BBC broadcast 'Rainbow City' in 1967 — Britain's first weekly series centering immigrant lives — its own audience research found racial prejudice 'alarmingly common' among 164 white London viewers.

Audience research becomes the hard archive. The guest describes a third archive, where hidden wants and racist ideologies leave textual traces. The findings are bleak. The material does not show a quick move away from racist ideology. It shows people holding on longer than the project expected. Empire Road matters here. Its 1978 BBC broadcast came after roughly ten years without anything equivalent, so the absence becomes part of the argument. Case studies around Till Death Do Us Part and Love Thy Neighbor build a depressing picture of discomfort mixed with loyalty to racist ideas. The archive is blunt. The point is not only that racist images existed. Audiences and critics helped keep them visible, popular, and enjoyed. The host stays with the question of duration. The Black and White Minstrel Show is striking because its explicitly racist performance stayed on screen, drew an audience, and had critical support while also facing resistance and criticism. That tension matters. The conversation rejects the tidy version where later disapproval makes earlier viewers innocent, because the transcript stresses that objections were there at the time. Reception history carries the weight. By tracking what viewers wanted, enjoyed, resisted, or criticized, the book turns screen culture into a record of social permission. The tone stays measured. Even the sharpest examples come through archive, chronology, and careful distinction rather than easy outrage. The close looks ahead. The guest describes new work on early web culture, historic blogs, pop-up spam, and whether the web was imagined as a post-racial space. It is early, but the connection is clear: both projects ask how media spaces preserve racial thinking in traces later readers have to learn to see.

As heard by us

A measured, unsettling conversation about audience research, archival traces, and racist screen culture.

Christine Grandy's conversation about Race on Screen: Audience Racism in Twentieth-Century Britain treats audience research as a third archive, one that can surface hidden wants, discomfort, and racist adherence that official records miss. That is the episode's strongest thread.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a focused look at how British audiences read race on screen.

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