British TV industry ignoring Asian talent: Meera Syal

LONDON: Britain's television industry has failed to promote Asian talent, both on-screen and behind the camera, according to prominent Indian-origin actress and writer, Meera Syal.
 
Syal said she raised the issue in a speech at the Edinburgh festival 20 years ago, but she could make the same speech again since nothing much had changed.
 
Syal is widely known for her comedy acts in the popular television serials Goodness Gracious Me and Kumars at Number 42, among others.
 
"That's depressing. There's been a certain amount of progress, but the change has been incredibly slow (and) a lot of it seems to be cosmetic," she said in an interview to The Independent.
 
The problem, she said, was even more acute behind the cameras.
 
"There are more black and Asian faces on screen, but for 2008 probably not enough. More worrying is that backstage, and in the boardrooms and the commissioning editors' seats, where decisions are made, I don't think that's really changed in 30 years," she added.
 
She said she wanted a more imaginative approach to casting, getting away from the Asian stereotypes of arranged marriages and suicide bombers, for example, and opening up more roles to actors of all ethnic backgrounds.
 
Part of the problem, Syal said, lay with casting directors, who feared for their jobs in a competitive TV market and did not want to risk putting forward ethnic minority actors when the part did not call for it.
 
Krishnan Gurumurthy, a presenter of Channel 4 News, said much had changed in the last two decades, but putting a few more brown faces on television was not enough.
 
"You've got to have ethnic minority channel controllers and commissioners: without that, you won't get the kind of step change you need.
       
"There's a sense at the top of the industry that 'we've done race, now we can move on'. People at the top are still appointing people in their own image, whether they are men or women," he said.