Editor of groundbreaking Channel 4 show says he was shocked not to be invited to participate in new season
The editor of a groundbreaking Channel 4 show claims the BFI has frozen him out of an upcoming season on multicultural television and is presenting a skewed vision of the programme.
Tariq Ali was part of the creative team that produced the global current affairs Bandung File for Channel 4 in the 1980s. The current affairs programme spotlighted everything from the realities of apartheid South Africa to the fallout from the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
Ali said he was shocked to not be invited to participate in the BFI’s new season, Constructed, Told, Spoken: A Counter-History of Britain on TV, which has a dedicated evening where it will screen Bandung File episodes in March.
“They never contacted me,” he told the Guardian. “The first I saw was in the BFI programme that they had an evening of Bandung File stuff but the choices suggest that there doesn’t seem to be a knowledge of what the programme was.”
