Making a TV series, by its nature, involves a deep dive into the topic, an opportunity to engage with the specialists and read all the key books and documents. The result, usually, is that by the time the programmes are ready for broadcast, the team behind them have reached firm opinions, or at the very least, know more or less where they stand on the subject. My new series explores the history of the union of the nations that make up the UK but, more than 18 months after I started work on the project, I feel only marginally less conflicted than I did at the beginning about the history of the union, and its future.
It was my own conflicted sense of identity that first made me want to make the new series, because I – like millions of people – don’t have to dig very deep or ask myself too many difficult questions to uncover a mass of contradictions. For example, I happily describe myself as Black British. But despite having grown up in one English city and settled in another, and despite supporting England through every football tournament, I would never tick the box for “Black English”, on a monitoring form. Perhaps tellingly, that box is often not even there to tick. On the last census there were boxes for both “Black British” and “Black Welsh”, but “Black English” was not among the options.
