Floella Benjamin could not have picked a more apt venue for today’s interview. Her new autobiography is called What Are You Doing Here? and it documents a lifetime of succeeding in positions where she was asked that exact question: presenting Play School as one of the first black children’s TV presenters, becoming the first female chancellor of colour at a UK university, entering the House of Lords as the first female actor to do so. Shamefully, it’s a question she was also repeatedly asked upon her arrival in England, as a 10-year-old member of the Windrush generation arriving from Trinidad in 1960. The book documents her first decade here, being verbally abused, spat at and beaten. Hoses and dog excrement through the family letterbox were not uncommon.
So it makes sense that today I’ve received an invitation to meet her at the Ritz, where she seems to know all the staff and how to locate the secret nooks and crannies to conduct an interview. It clearly means something to Floella to feel at home in this grand place. “I used to bring my mother here and she would spend two months choosing her outfit,” she tells me as we head downstairs. “And then she would walk in through the entrance, owning the place. She took ownership wherever she went. When I first introduced her to Diana, Princess of Wales, I noticed Diana rubbing my mum’s arm and saying, ‘I wish you were my mum.’”
Floella’s husband, Keith, whom she married in 1980, has joined us today. On Floella’s mum’s strict instructions he’s played a supportive role in her life since they first got together: opening a shop in Covent Garden with her, producing her TV programmes and managing her affairs. She’s still wearing the heart pendant he bought her in 1971 – you can see it on all the old Play School clips, too – along with a glitzy black dress. She’s an extremely youthful-looking 72, and when she smiles it’s the same smile I remember seeing on TV as a child.
“You look like one of my babies,” she says as we sit down. Floella calls the adults who grew up watching her present the show her “Play School babies”. The show ended in 1988, but she still encounters them everywhere. “Even coming on the tube here today, my babies were saying, ‘Floella, I can’t believe I’m standing next to you on the tube,’” she marvels. “It happens everywhere I go. A lot of people, even well-known people that I meet, burst out crying, saying, ‘You’re my everything, you don’t know what you meant to me as a child.’ Isn’t that incredible?”
It’s also quite helpful – her Play School babies include members of the current government (Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and Karen Bradley to name just three), and the emotional connection has, she says, helped her get things done in parliament. “I can usually get a meeting when I want to, because so many ministers now are my Play School babies,” she writes in the book, and she worked closely with Bradley – then secretary of state for digital,culture,media and sport – in trying to get major broadcasters to commit to creating a certain amount of children’s television. Her first words to Gove were apparently, “I’m so pleased to know that you’re one of my Play School babies! Now, this is what I want you to do.”
But it’s not all about power. “It didn’t matter if the children watching lived in a council flat or a palace. My joy of giving was so effervescent that you couldn’t help but be consumed by it. I gave them such a strong dose of unconditional love that it stayed with them. I feel like I’m a phenomenon!”
And it’s not just old Play School viewers who are entranced by her. “When young children see me they look at me like this,” she says, gazing upwards in adoration. “Honestly, just ask Keith.”
“It’s a very odd phenomenon,” he agrees. “Often, three or four children will be looking.”
At this, Floella breaks out into song: “I believe the children are the future, teach them well and let them lead the way…”
Floella has an astonishing life story. When her family first tried to better themselves by viewing a house in well-to-do Beckenham, south-east London, the neighbours called the police, assuming a robbery was taking place. Her parents bought the place anyway, refusing to be defeated, and now their daughter sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Benjamin of Beckenham (she chose the place in their honour). She describes herself as an “achievement junkie” – and she’s certainly not shy of talking about them – but until now thought herself too busy to write a book. Was it emotionally painful, having to dredge the memory back through the racism and sexism of south-east London in the 1960s? She says not.
“Nothing gets me. Good or bad. Because I never look back. If you look back, you’re going to be in trouble, you will suffer from depression, mental illness – no! Always look forward.” She moves her hands in a series of ninja-type moves. “I don’t let the bad things eat me up, oh no. Because I’m not a victim. That’s why people say to me, ‘When I see your smile I feel so happy, when I see your body, your aura, I feel as if I can cope.’ Because I’m Miss Optimist!”
What Are You Doing Here? recounts Floella’s idyllic childhood on Trinidad, and the sadness when her parents sold everything to fund a move to “the motherland”. The 15 months they spent apart is, says Floella, the only thing that has caused her lasting pain in her life. When the call came to join them, she took the long (and unsupervised) boat trip to Southampton with her sister. But Britain disappointed – “everyone in such dark, drab clothes, as if they were going to a funeral” – and soon came the realisation that some of the people staring at her weren’t impressed by her new cardigan, but full of hatred. The flat they lived in – all six siblings in one double bed – was cramped but full of love. Stepping outside it was the problem – would the shop serve her today? Would she get attacked? “But that uncertainty taught me how to ch-ch-ch” – she does an impression of a machine swiftly sorting and filing chunks of information – “read people,” she says. “When somebody came towards me I had to read what they might do to me – insult me? Spit? So you’re on alert all the time.”
At first she used violence to deal with her situations: “I was the Incredible Hulk. I never lost a fight.” But one time, after shoving a lollipop so far down a boy’s throat it looked like he might choke, she had a spiritual awakening: show the world who you really are. “My mum told me, ‘Look above their heads and walk tall with a smile on your face.’”
Despite the abuse, she refused to resent the country she’d arrived in. “That would make me a victim,” she says. Floella almost never let her guard down. And if she ever did – such as the time she was having fun at a bowling alley and ended up getting beaten up while the bouncers looked on – she admonished herself for doing so. Even now, in 2022 and as a member of the upper chamber, Floella says she can’t let her guard slip. After the Brexit vote in 2016 a man hit her with a shopping trolley and said, “What are you still doing here?”
“When you are black you carry your colour with you everywhere you go,” she says. “You’re always having to face it. You saw what happened to the boys when they missed those penalties at Euro 2020, the venom that came out. So you know it’s there in society.”
But she sees the positive change in society – the white people clearing up the vandalised mural of Marcus Rashford after that penalty miss, for instance. If the bowling alley incident happened now, she says, “white people would rush in to defend me”.
It’s hardly surprising that Floella was affected by the Windrush scandal, in which dozens of people who arrived around the same time as her were wrongly deported from the UK. “It made me think, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’,” she says. “If my parents hadn’t been forward thinking and got us passports, what could have happened?”
She’s spoken in parliament about the scandal, yet her book is remarkably forgiving of Theresa May, who was prime minister at the time of the scandal and who, as home secretary, enforced the hostile environment that led to it. Why? “Because she understood she’d done something wrong and I forgive people who turn things around. And if it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have a Windrush Day or a Windrush monument. Just think of little 10-year-old Floella, at Waterloo station with my mum… and now I’m going to be there next month to unveil a national monument. And May allowed that to happen. So, everything happens for a reason. Had that not happened, we wouldn’t have gotten a monument.”
What does Floella make of the current prime minister, who once notoriously wrote about the “watermelon smiles” of African people? “It just makes life a little bit more difficult. A little bit more work to do. I call it a work in progress,” she says, diplomatically. “But I know they will change their attitude. Because Floella is there, to hold up the mirror and say, ‘Do you like the person that is looking back at you? Do you want to hold back society?’ And when he sees how young children are feeling, that’s when things will happen.” It’s a remarkably optimistic view of a prime minister who doesn’t really do shame. Can she not entertain the possibility that he might just be a bad person?
Keith chimes in before she can answer. “You don’t really want to go there,” he says. “He’s put words in your mouth.”
“I’m not going to say if someone is bad or not,” says Floella. “I am there to move society on and even though I get obstacles I will overcome them because I am working for good. Floella’s not going anywhere. Floella’s not shifting.”
The book seems to bear this out. While on Play School, Floella protested about the lack of black, Asian and Chinese faces used for onscreen illustrations. “I could have been sitting pretty, getting a good wage, everyone telling me they love me, why rock the boat? But it’s my job to make people notice what’s missing.”
She did the same thing with the illustrations in Shirley Hughes’s children’s books, and Royal Mail stamps when she joined the Stamp Advisory Committee in the early 1990s. “I do most of my work behind closed doors,” she says. “I’ve paved the way for black people to be in the position they are in, in many areas. I’ve taken the flak, taken the wounds, taken the pain. And nobody sees my pain apart from my husband when I go home and cry. It’s like being a boxer, slumping in your corner.” As for overcoming the racial barriers to get her own job on Play School, she attributes it to one thing: “Confidence. I went in confident, the same as when I auditioned for Hair [her first showbiz role, in 1969] and told them I wanted £30 a week and I wasn’t taking my clothes off.”
The colour of her skin wasn’t an issue for the BBC, she says; they were just worried that her plaits and blue beads might be too “avant garde” for the children watching. They asked her to wear a wig instead. “And the audience wrote in asking where the plaits and beads had gone! So that’s how I became known as the lady with the blue beads and changed the face of society. Because I was the first person to walk around like that.”
The challenges Floella has overcome in the book include some #MeToo encounters, which she has never spoken about before. The first was when she took her car to be fixed and was told by the mechanic that she was the payment (“I’ve never had a coloured girl before”) – she told him no chance and left. She faced harassment later on, even as she became more famous and powerful, but always rose up against it. Was she scared of speaking out? “No,” she says. “I won. And I’m telling women that they can win.”
Sometimes I wonder if Floella’s trajectory – the fact that her force of nature is rarely dampened – has led her to believe that every challenge can be faced down; that life is all just a case of winning and losing. She thinks about this. “Maybe if someone had attacked me from behind, I wouldn’t have been able to read the body language,” she decides. “But because I’ve gone through so much adversity I’ve been able to read what to do in other situations where I could have been attacked. I tell people it’s that sixth sense of knowing how not to get into the situation. I should have read the situation with the mechanic but I was a young girl and grateful to him for fixing my car.”
But was it her responsibility to read the situation? And can we expect everyone to deal with things just like her?
“I try and pass it on,” she says. “I did a Women’s Institute yesterday in Aylesbury and a lot of the women said, ‘You’ve now empowered me to know what I should be doing.’ Another little Muslim girl in Bradford came up to me and said, ‘Floella, how can I be confident like you? Teach me how to do it.’ Sometimes people need to go through some kind of adversity to know how to deal with it. If you’re mollycoddled too much, you won’t really know.” At this point Keith steps in again. “You’re getting bogged down on stuff now,” he says.
“If you see yourself as a loser,” continues Floella, “you become a victim. You mustn’t do that, because it’s other people who have done bad things to you. It’s happened for a reason, so what are you going to do about it? Sit there and cry and become a victim? Or are you going to go out and form an organisation, tell people how to be aware, how to work out the situation, what to do, use your experience and be a fighter, be a winner – not a loser?”
I understand Floella’s individual experience, and that it comes from a lifetime of overcoming hurdles. But I wonder whether her well-meaning comments could be construed as victim-blaming – passing responsibility on to the woman to deal with the situation. She clearly wouldn’t call abuse victims losers, would she?
“She didn’t say victims of abuse are losers,” says Keith, when I bring this point up. “You’re not going to print that are you?” “No, please don’t print that,” says Floella.
And of course I wouldn’t, because she didn’t say those words at all, but by now there’s too much uneasiness in the room to discuss the nuances any further. And so we move on to one final thing in the book that stood out to me: her experience of motherhood and miscarriage. After having their first child, Aston, in 1981, Floella took to the airwaves enthusing about the joys of motherhood, with tips for other women on how to have an easy birth just like she did. Then they tried for a second child… and it didn’t happen, at least not at first (their daughter Alvina was born in 1988). Floella endured a series of miscarriages. “It was a painful journey, learning exactly why, for the first time in my life, I hadn’t achieved something I’d set my heart on,” she writes.
Today she says: “I’d thought, oh aren’t I clever, having this wonderful pregnancy, being adored by millions of people? Then I started having miscarriages and realised that many other women were in the same position I was in. I was looking into prams just walking down the street. So imagine if you didn’t already have a child. It made me reflect on the trauma I was causing other people, to have someone boasting about how wonderful mother-hood was.”
In a book that reels off a litany of triumphs against the odds, it’s a rare reflective moment. Life can be so much more complex than simply winners and losers, as Floella realised during this painful time. But I get why her outlook – all ninja moves and bursts of song – is focused on being seen as the former. She is quite unlike anybody I’ve ever met in my life. And one thing I can say with absolute certainly is that she knows exactly what she’s doing here.
What Are you Doing Here? An extract from Floella’s Benjamin’s memoir
Play School had really changed the face of children’s television, and its influence was huge. I loved watching it myself, I’d seen what fun Derek (Griffiths) had on the show, and I wanted to be part of it. In 1964, when Play School started – the very first programme ever shown on the newly launched BBC2 – the fact that it actually used onscreen presenters whom children could see and get to know and love was a great step forward.
The first producer, Joy Whitby, had originally devised Play School to help parents cope with the shortage of nursery school places. It meant that infants at home, whether rich or poor, could start learning how to tell the time, and establish other basic concepts about shape and size and so on. By 1976, the three windows which led to the daily film sequences – round, square and arched – were already iconic.
For my initial interview, I decided to cover up my hair beads with the bubbly wig I wore on stage with Kenneth Williams. That seemed safe. It’s the BBC, I thought. Staid and respectable. It didn’t seem the right time to take a risk. Dressed in a checked shirt and jeans, I sat and waited outside a relatively small office on the fifth floor of the East Tower of White City. I had some experience, which was essential, since I knew from Derek they didn’t want beginners. I wanted the job very much. But what unique qualities could I bring to the programme?
Anne Gobey, the producer, called me in. She was a tall and slender woman, very pretty, in glasses, a brown jacket and a blouse with a frilly high neck. Her lovely smile immediately put me at ease, and before long, her girlish laughter was ringing out encouragingly. Full of enthusiasm, I told her what I’d been doing, and about my varied work in musicals, theatre and TV dramas, and slowly she began to lean back in her seat.
Hmmm. I’m not impressing her, I thought to myself. I had learned by then to read every situation in which I found myself, and something about her made me feel I was losing her attention. I knew I only had one chance to prove myself. But something wasn’t working. So, I leaned forward.
“Oh, by the way, I don’t really look like this, you know.”
She giggled, uncertainly. “What do you mean?”
“This is what I really look like.” I swept off my wig, shook my head, and my long plaits threaded with hundreds of blue beads rattled out around me. At last I was completely myself.
“Oh, my goodness! That’s amazing!” said Anne. She’d never seen anything like it. “How fantastic! We must give you a camera audition.”
They fixed a studio date for a Tuesday afternoon in June, a few weeks later, so that I could audition on the Play School set after they’d finished recording the week’s programmes. They’d send me a mini script to learn in advance. I was thrilled.
But on the very morning of my screen test, our dog, Arrow, disappeared. Keith and I had taken him for a walk in Brockwell Park, near our flat in south London. He came out of the main gate ahead of us to wait at the zebra crossing, looked around carefully as usual, and set off. In front of our very eyes, a car suddenly sped by so fast that it hit him. Stunned and disoriented, Arrow limped off out of sight, too fast for us to catch up with him.
We searched in vain. Feeling ever more drained and wretched, I wondered whether I should cancel my screen test. But Keith persuaded me to go, and assured me he wouldn’t give up the hunt for Arrow.
I thought I’d better explain my situation to Anne Gobey as soon as I arrived. “My dog got hit by a car and ran away. He’s still missing. I’m devastated.”
The mood immediately changed, and everyone was sympathetic, but I knew I had to put on a brave face, keep going, and do my best.
The studio was vast, with three cameras and camera operators waiting. The famous Play School windows were reassuringly familiar. I forced myself into the right mood for the tasks ahead of me. The whole afternoon was something of a blur. Outside, I was bright, bubbly Floella, talking to every child as if they were right in front of me. Inside, I was broken-hearted. Even now, I can’t remember what I had to sing or make – perhaps a bus, out of a cardboard box? I do recall that the story was about Chicken Licken, who thought the sky was falling down. I impersonated all the different farmyard birds with great vigour.
But when I left, I felt very sombre. Late that evening Keith heard a knock on the door. To our great delight, we learned that someone had found Arrow, and traced us through his collar tag, and brought him home. Our reunion was ecstatic. We couldn’t stop petting him, and vowed never to let him out of our sight again. A few days later, a letter arrived to say that I’d got the Play School job.
My first show was broadcast the week beginning 26 September 1976. But that very first week, after the Thursday programme had been filmed but not broadcast, Cynthia came to tell me that someone high up at the BBC was rather concerned about my beads-and-plaits hairstyle. The public may not like this, they decided. The next day I was due to come in to record the final programme of that week, the Friday programme.
“So, for this last programme, could you put on that bubbly wig you wore for your audition?” Cynthia asked. “We want to show the public that you have another side.”
I was a bit taken aback, and, frankly, a little disappointed. “Oh. OK. If that’s what the BBC wants, I’ll change my hair.”
We recorded the Friday programme with me wearing my bubbly wig.
The following week when the programmes were broadcast, it seemed I was a hit. “Who is this smiley girl with the beads?” Children and parents alike loved how the blue beads and plaits flew in the air and made a noise when I sang and danced. The publicity was fantastic. But what happened? Why had the beads vanished by Friday? Lots of people didn’t realise I was wearing a wig, and worried I’d taken out the plaits they loved. There was a protest, and people wrote into the BBC. “We like the beads. We want the beads back.” So, the wig went out of the window, and I quickly became widely known as the Lady with the Blue Beads.
What Are you Doing Here? by Floella Benjamin is published by Macmillan on 23 June at £20. Order a copy from guardianbookshop.com at £17.40
