My favourite photo
Broadcaster June Sarpong shares a treasured snapshot
“THIS photo with my older brother Sam was taken 15 years ago when I was on holiday in Los Angeles and we were visiting a local artist. We just sat talking, and the artist said, ‘Can I take a picture?’ and we said, ‘Yes, go ahead.’ She took the shot – and this was the time when they still used to print pictures. The next week we went to pick the photo up and we both loved it, so the artist did two copies: one for me and one for Sam. Since that day, it’s been my favourite picture.
I was doing the teenage strand on Channel 4 called T4 then, so I just went over for a holiday and was having a really lovely day. Sam was fully living in LA at the time. He had been for years, because he went with my father Samuel to America after my parents separated when I was seven.
Although Sam and I had separated childhoods, our sibling relationship was still close, even with the distance. I wouldn’t recommend living in different countries from your family. I wouldn’t say it was ideal, but we made it work. As a child I spoke to my father and Sam every weekend. Even with the distance we were still close.
We took our experience of blended families in our stride. Our parents were divorced when we were young. My father remarried in America and his wife has three children and they became our extended sisters. I have a much younger sister, Gina, from my mum’s second marriage. For us, blended families was the norm.
Sam was a child actor. He did ads as a kid, he did a lot of commercials in America. But he was still at school, so had to act after school and the weekends, so it wasn’t like a proper career. But we both ended up going into entertainment roughly at the same time and not really talking about it.
Sam’s death in October 2015 is still so raw. But I have to talk about it because it’s part of his story. When he died, one of the toughest things I ever had to do in my life was go with my dad to help pack up his house. It was awful. And both of us had this picture in more or less the same place. It was weird. It was on the table before you entered our bedroom. So it wasn’t in the bedroom, it was on the way to it. Packing up his house, I took his version of the picture, too, so I have both.
You meet people and you never know what they’re dealing with, so it’s made me even more compassionate to strangers. You may meet somebody and think everything in their life is great, but you just never know.
What reading Diversify and Black Enough, where I wrote the foreword, already does, in different ways, is make you understand what it feels like to be disenfranchised in society and what it feels like to know you are not playing on a level playing field and the odds are stacked against you. The odds aren’t insurmountable but they are hard. Both books are about helping people connect with the other, whatever the other is for you.
Spending my early years in Accra as a banker’s daughter, then having to flee Ghana’s
1984 military coup and live in London’s East End, has helped me understand what it’s like to be discriminated against because I’m black and to be discriminated against because I’m a woman,
But I also know what it feels like to get special treatment because of the job I do. I’m able to see it from all sides. It gives you much more compassion for all sides. I’ve just got back from Ghana with the charity Afrikids and we had a campaign with the UK Government called Time to Dine. We raised £1.2 million for education projects in the poorest parts of Ghana. With everything going on around Comic Relief’s publicity photos, what we mustn’t lose sight of is the lives being helped with these campaigns, so it was wonderful to participate.”
To buy Diversify: How To Challenge Inequality And Why We Should (£9.99), by June Sarpong, and Black Enough (£7.99), see Express Bookshop on page 77.