My teenage years were punctuated by my father shouting from the living room whenever an Asian person appeared on television. Invariably, by the time I got there, the object of all the excitement had disappeared because, up until the Eighties, television literally marginalised black and Asian people. They generally appeared on the edge of the screen, lingering on the sidelines, rarely taking centre stage. The arrival of Channel 4 changed that forever – and its impact was so great that all other channels were forced to follow suit.

It is a measure of how successful this initiative was that 25 years later it seems rather quaint that anybody should find the routine appearance of a black or Asian person on television as being anything remarkable. But in order to get to this happy position, broadcasters had first to acknowledge how dire the situation was, which none of the first three channels were ready to do. Channel 4 not only took cognisance of the problem but tackled it head on, which resulted in a wealth of challenging and innovative programmes (and a few disasters – but let’s not dwell on those).

My teenage years were punctuated by my father shouting from the living room whenever an Asian person appeared on television

The first of such programmes to hit the screens were two magazine shows, Eastern Eye and Black on Black. They brought a nuanced approach and subtlety of language to the reporting of black and Asian issues that hadn’t been seen before on British television. Their subject matter was eclectic, ranging from politics, social affairs and the arts to nostalgia and humour. This set the tone for Channel 4’s multicultural output as a whole; in its opening years, the Channel aired a dizzyingly rich mix of programmes: foreign-affairs series like Bandung File, dramas such as Partition, and sitcoms like No Problem and Tandoori Nights. Many of these programmes broke new ground not just in their subject matter but also in terms of how they chose to express themselves, which resulted in some genuine innovation.