Desi Rascals: why British Asians fare best on reality TV
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Version 0 of 1. Television drama can be a two-dimensional place for British Asian characters. When they’re not diagnosing an ailment from the surgery floor or donning a robe in the courtroom, they’re in a dingy basement somewhere, putting together a weapon of mass destruction, angrily ordering an honour killing or attempting to extricate themselves from a loveless arranged marriage. Hope has come in the unexpected form of Desi Rascals, a new show from Bend It Like Beckham and Bhaji on the Beach director Gurinder Chadha. Produced by Tony Wood, the co-creator of The Only Way is Essex, and ordered by Sky Living, the scripted reality show will follow a cast of multigenerational British Asian characters for 12 episodes. In a statement, Chadha said: “I’ve been wanting for a long time to create a story which allowed me to show the British Asian community in a truly three-dimensional way.” Although some might balk at the sometimes crude nature of reality TV, there has been no better television platform in recent times for a taste of this “three-dimensional” British Asian experience. From the Siddiquis on Gogglebox, to the Grewals on The Family, to Musharaf Asghar heartbreakingly overcoming his stutter on Educating Yorkshire and Stammer School, the visibility of British Asians and the plurality of their different experiences has been best served by this format. Put in its simplest terms: reality shows are an accurate depiction of British Asian life because they are reality. They are the real face of Britain. Because even though 9% of the British population is not white, this is not necessarily the reality depicted when we switch on our televisions. In this version, British Asians are often consigned to the sidelines, observing while the interesting stuff is happening to the white characters. A British-Asian actor who wished to remain anonymous told me: “I did a modern British urban drama a few years ago and every single cast member was white apart from myself and a black woman. Both parts were tiny and were simply exposition to the main plot.” Still, when the British Asian characters are front and centre, their stories so often fall ungracefully into the realm of cliche, stereotypes concocted from headlines rather than anything which feels real or honest. And although there have been attempts to portray a modernised British Asian experience, with the Sharmas on Emmerdale and Dev Alahan on Coronation Street, soaps have traditionally operated in this world of low expectations. The Masood family in EastEnders is a relatively recent offender, with actor Deepak Verma (who played Sanjay Kapoor for five years on the show in the 1990s) not unfairly calling them a “two dimensional, ill-conceived Asian family” with “stupid clothes and stupid accents”. “EastEnders doesn’t represent the whole of British Asian life,” says the actor to whom I spoke. “Like white British life, it’s incredibly varied. You can have a very wealthy working class family based in Bradford or a middle class Asian family in Surrey; you can have a secular British Asian family or a non-secular one. But there’s no sense of this variety in TV.” She adds that the problem extends to the production room. “The conversations I’ve had with British Asian writers tend to be that they don’t get the ear of the commissioning editors unless they’re writing about things like radicalisation or terrorism.” It seems like a question of representation: there needs to be a realisation that not all the interesting stories on TV are happening to white people. Could that change? Chadha hopes so, adding in her statement that Desi Rascals will explore “what it means to be British Asian as values become fluid”. |