Ashley Banjo: Britain in Black and White, review: a righteous cause aimed at the wrong targets

Just over a year ago, the dance group Diversity went on Britain’s Got Talent to perform a Black Lives Matter-inspired routine. Nearly 24,000 people complained to Ofcom. Seven months later the routine won the Bafta Must-see Moment, chosen via public vote. What happened?

In Britain in Black and White (ITV), Ashley Banjo, Diversity’s leader, used the binary reaction to his routine as a prompt to look for some answers. Unfortunately for his programme, he got his answer pretty quickly: David Olusoga gave a brief history of covert racism in Britain, talking of how black people have long been accepted and celebrated as athletes or dancers but not deemed capable of possessing analytical or cognitive capacity. As long as everyone stays in their box the status quo can prevail. So when the dance troupe we all voted for a few years ago strays in to politics, or even when we’re expecting light entertainment and we get something more challenging, people get upset.

This to me was a well-founded and compelling rejoinder to the Diversity love-hate response (as well as to the whole fandango about footballers taking the knee). Banjo’s search for answers, his journey, you might say, was now complete. If it looks like racism, and smells like racism… Yet there were still 40 minutes to go. What to do?

Banjo then embarked on one of those opinion buffets that involve a lot of pretending to ring someone’s doorbell and them looking surprised when it’s you. He sought out everyone from Alesha Dixon to Jim Davidson to get their thoughts on the matter. Someone called Dominique Samuels admitted that though she initially thought Diversity’s dance was gesture politics (and had been happy to go on every news bulletin the day after telling people so) on reflection she realised it wasn’t.

Leila Hassan Howe and Clive Driscoll gave Banjo a 101 on the New Cross Fire and the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Twitter, as usual, declined an interview, just as it did when Jermaine Jenas tried to get a social media firm to be accountable for fuelling fires in his programme on racist trolls last week.

Trails either side of the ad breaks showed that the programme was leading up to an encounter with the former comedian Jim Davidson, one that he would walk out of in high dudgeon. This should not have been the climax of what was otherwise an educational and well-measured documentary.

What was to be gained by having Banjo “confront” Davidson over an offensive film Davidson posted on his social media channels when the Diversity furore first broke? If there’s one thing Twitter has taught us, surely, it’s that public head-to-heads don’t lead to self-reflection and regret, they just sharpen tongues. Ironically, Davidson’s realisation that this was pointless – and so walking out – was actually the right response.

Overall then, Britain in Black and White started well and ended badly. It wanted to spark debate, unpack what racism means in Britain today, promote the conversation – all of which is laudable. But not every conversation is helpful or even valid. Discretion is advised.