When I was a girl, my mother used to tell me that being mixed-race made me special. In me, and in her – my mother is also mixed-race – were united Black and white. We were the realisation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, that ‘little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers’. It’s quite a grand mantle to place on the slouched shoulders of a seven-year-old kid. But I didn’t feel over-burdened. I liked it.

Now that I am older and have read, among other relevant texts, the full transcription of MLK’s speech from the 1963 March on Washington, I no longer believe that justice will be achieved one adorable brown baby at a time. I do, however, appreciate what my mum’s lullaby of racial identity did for my self-esteem. In particular it was good to see, through her eyes, a positively construed version of who I was, because there was very little of that sort to be found in movies or television, at the time.

Representation matters: this is a sacred tenet of contemporary thinking on media and screen culture, and, in large part, the impetus behind the writing of books like this one. But what constitutes good on-screen representation? What does it feel like to be misrepresented or not represented at all? What are the consequences for society if certain groups of people cannot see themselves and their lives reflected in popular screen culture? And once we achieve this state of ideal representation, will all our problems with race and racism be solved?

I can tell you what it was like for me. I was born in Hackney, East London, in 1983, as the only child of soon-to-be divorced parents, and the first sixteen years of my life were divided between their separate residences, on two different council estates in the borough. This was the pre-gentrification Hackney of the 1980s and 1990s, a place known across the rest of London and the UK for its concentration of poverty, immigrant communities and high crime rates. This reputation kept the rents low, in turn attracting the kinds of artistically inclined layabouts who usually constitute the first wave in the now-familiar cycle of urban gentrification. But we weren’t quite there yet.

My parents were both from working-class backgrounds and educated to degree level, in the time before university tuition fees made such a trajectory vanishingly rare. My white father was an immigrant of sorts, having moved down from the north-eastern city of Newcastle in the early 1970s to study for a teaching qualification at a North London polytechnic. My Black mother definitely wasn’t, having been born and raised in the neighbouring borough of Tower Hamlets – though since her father had immigrated from Jamaica in the 1950s, and her mother was the daughter of Irish immigrants, she knew something about what it meant to wear that label. Hackney became home for both of them, and it was the only home I ever knew. Being from Hackney – a ‘Hackney girl’ – figured much more in my burgeoning sense of identity than race or class ever did.

The primary school I attended was, like me, a mix. The Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty, whose mother, Mrs Chakrabortty, taught me in Year 2, has described the staffroom of our school as ‘a whistlestop tour of the British empire: Nigeria, Trinidad, Ireland, India, Pakistan. All women, quick on their feet and with their wits, and on pay far below their qualifications.’1 I’d only add that the children encompassed an even broader range of backgrounds. Some of us were the descendants of earlier immigration waves and others were more recently arrived. You could keep more or less abreast of current global news events by greeting the new kids in class, direct from civil war in Somalia, or a major Irish Traveller site eviction somewhere in Essex.

As children, we were as familiar with the stories of Rama and Sita from the Hindu epic, or Anansi the spider from West African folklore, as we were with the Fresh Prince theme tune or Marvel’s Spider-Man. In assemblies, in place of C of E hymns, we sang songs in Congolese, nursery rhymes about the Australian kookaburra and Whitney Houston’s 1985 hit ‘Greatest Love of All’. Thirty years later, I can still recite the words to all of them, although I’d struggle to get past the first verse of ‘God Save the King’. In this environment, it was also not at all unusual to be mixed-race, so while I didn’t know anyone else who shared my specific combo of canny-Geordie-lass-Jamaican communist-revolutionary-Armada-Irish-Hackney girl, I still fit right in. When all of us stand out, none of us do.

Did I see my multicultural self, and my multicultural world, reflected on TV and in film? Actually, yes, to a point. It was my good fortune to be born in the year after Channel 4 began transmission with a ‘cultural diversity’ remit and around the time erstwhile British Black Panther Farrukh Dhondy was appointed as their first ever ‘commissioning editor for multicultural programming’.

By the time I was old enough to work a remote control, the fruits of these efforts were ripe for my appreciation, in the shape of Channel 4’s barbershop sitcom Desmond’s (1989–94), and shows on other channels that followed C4’s programming lead. The BBC sketch show The Real McCoy (1991–6) was one of these, and it featured plenty of the Black comedians who’d come up at the Hackney Empire, a familiar neighbourhood theatre and former music hall, which I walked past almost every day of my young life. The British South Asian follow-up Goodness Gracious Me (1996–2001), co-created by Real McCoy regulars Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar, was responsible for ‘kiss my chuddies’ entering the playground lexicon in a big way (I remember my classmate Sunil’s proud grin; he’d been saying ‘chuddies’ for ages). The nineties was also a heyday for Black American sitcoms, such as The Cosby Show (1984–92), Hangin’ with Mr Cooper (1992–7) and Moesha (1996–2001), starring pop star Brandy, which we caught either on first UK transmission or as reruns. None, though, rivalled the popularity of the Will Smith vehicle The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–6), which was staple viewing among all my friends, Black, white and brown.

The cult-status films that all the cool kids had seen, or claimed to, were also often Black American comedies like House Party (1990) or Friday (1995), or nostalgic, civil rights-era coming-of-agers like Stand by Me (1986) and John Waters’s original Hairspray (1988). My favourites, though, were more racially segregated. I had taped-off-the-telly VHS copies of the must-see musicals, Grease (1978) and Bugsy Malone (1976), at both my mum’s and my dad’s homes. Indeed, the only time I remember my divorced parents successfully co-parenting was when they somehow conspired for all four of these well-worn VHSs to be ‘accidentally’ recorded over on the same weekend.

They probably felt pretty smug about it at the time, but from there on in, my viewing tastes only deteriorated. I turned thirteen at the end of 1996, meaning my growing obsession with film coincided with a boom in US indie auteur cinema. I read Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew and The Guerrilla Filmmakers Handbook, and my favourite films – Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ’66 (1998), Ted Demme’s Beautiful Girls (1996) – were all directed by white men, and typically featured grown men with attitudes to girls around my own age that 2020s Twitter would term ‘problematic’ at best. When, aged fifteen, I got ID’d and turned away while attempting to purchase an 18-rated VHS copy of Pulp Fiction at HMV Oxford Street, I recorded it off late-night Channel 4 instead. The cover I collaged myself, from pictures of Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson cut out of back copies of Neon, Hotdog and Premiere magazine, which also served to decorate my school folders and bedroom walls.

Superficially, then, there was no lack of diverse racial representation for people growing up in the UK during this period. But if your interest in film and television went any deeper, the gaps became noticeable. People of colour remained mostly confined to comedy and musical entertainment spaces. If it was a fully rounded, nuanced, dramatic representation of a human being you were after, someone with internal life, in all its contradictions and complexities, then you were looking at an indie film about a probably middle-class, probably thirty-something, definitely white man. There were three – but only three – films made during the 1990s that referred to Black British life. These were Young Soul Rebels (Isaac Julien, 1991), Welcome II the Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah, 1995) Babymother (Julian Henriques, 1998), and sadly none of them crossed my radar until much later.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve been missing out on until it belatedly arrives. That was the case for me and likely other British people with Black Caribbean heritage – the...