A VERY BRITISH HISTORY

February

BBC Four

First broadcast on BBC One in different English regions in December, this series of four documentaries focuses on key moments in the stories of different British communities. Ugandan Asians, for example, remembers the events of 1972, when Idi Amin expelled those of Asian heritage from Uganda. Among the 30,000 who fled to the UK were the parents of food writer Meera Sodha. The unwilling émigrés, British passport holders, were given just 90 days to leave. In the UK, most were initially rehoused in disused army barracks before permanent accommodation could be found for them.

Even given this unpromising start and the acute sense of displacement so many must have felt, the Ugandan-Asian Crisis, as it was dubbed, is widely regarded as a situation that was successfully resolved. But is that the whole story? Meera traces how Ted Heath’s government looked at other solutions rather than resettlement, and discusses how the authorities refused to send newcomers to ‘red’ areas – places that already had established communities of Commonwealth immigrants.

In the other documentaries in the series, Birmingham-born poet Sue Brown traces the lives of The First Black Brummies, while in Romany Gypsies writer Damian Le Bas explores how Gypsy people in the 1960s had to give up life on the road, and what was lost and gained in the process. And film-maker Simon Glass tells the story of The Jews in Leeds, people who escaped the pogroms of the late 19th century. He also explores his own family history as part of the film, visiting Lithuania and Belarus to track down his roots – and to discover what happened to some of those who didn’t emigrate.