Irish screenwriters have to understand that immigration is not just about the knee-jerk reaction to it, writes Shane Hegarty
Channel 4 recently ran a series of short comedies, Missing Chink, about the invisibility of Britain's Chinese population on television. Two Chinese stood behind a take-away counter discussing the dearth of Chinese actors. The best they could come up with was David Yip, star of The Chinese Detective 20 years ago.
"What was his gimmick?" asked one.
"He detected things in a Chinese way."
As they bantered, David Yip walked in, collected his takeaway, and left unrecognised.
It might have been aimed at British viewers, but those who make Irish television drama cannot ignore the lesson. There are approximately 400,000 Chinese in Britain but even there, where television drama is progressive, plentiful and the racial demographics don't offer the headache they do to US television executives, it has yet to fully explore the issues of race, immigration and integration. Irish television has begun this journey several decades later and without any idea of when it will reach its destination.
Its experiments have been brief and sometimes clumsy. But they are increasing. Fair City has gone from Ashti the Kurdish refugee to Lana the Russian cleaner in three years, the latter an upgraded, less-clichéd version of the former. The recent thriller, Proof, meanwhile, featured the topical issues of human trafficking and forced prostitution. Meanwhile, the background colour has been altered subtly. In both these dramas, black faces are increasingly seen among the extras sipping pints in the pub or designing pages in a newspaper office.
Irish television drama isn't awash with cultural diversity but then Irish television isn't awash with home-grown drama. It is constrained by volume. Unlike the UK, there is little room to experiment or to get the balance wrong late at night when few are watching. The budgetary limits of RTÉ, TG4 and TV3 mean there are already few opportunities for drama of any kind. Now, writers must also incorporate a changing demographic - and in the process decide whether to make it a background feature or a central theme, and then face the consequences if they get it wrong.
The first attempt in Fair City at tackling the issue was an embarrassment. Ashti was a character of painful caricature. He was played by an actor with Sri Lankan roots - casting uncomfortably reminiscent of Hollywood's old habit of cultural pick-and-mix.
It is strange that Fair City could have made such an error. We have absorbed much from British television. It is not unusual for an Irish viewer to turn on the television and see Asian, African, Caribbean or Indian faces. Britain has offered many of the lessons of the Irish viewers' cultural education.
We begin from a different start-point. British television has been through an arduous, often uncomfortable, process. The 1970s are as well known for the casual racism of its comedies as for bell-bottoms. It would be unthinkable that RTÉ might today make a comedy such as Mind Your Language, in which a classroom of national stereotypes learned English. Likewise, we would hardly be given an Irish Alf Garnett, even if the satire behind that character was lost because too many admired him for representing their views. These comedies, along with others, have become retrospective embarrassments, to be locked up and the key thrown away.
But they have been as valuable to Irish television as to British. We should be able to learn from those mistakes, to avoid lazy racial stereotyping and to understand that immigration is about more than just a native population's knee-jerk reaction to it, but also about the motivation behind those people making a life for themselves on a small, damp, expensive, green and grey island far from their true home. And it offers a glimpse of how this will alter Irish culture in the years to come. While our observation of the British experience has hardly meant an open-hearted welcome to immigrants, it has at least softened the landing somewhat.
More immediate are the issues British television confronts, so that Irish won't have to. On US television, it is still unusual to see an inter-racial kiss. Like its movies, the medium is deeply segregated. Whites watch white dramas, blacks watch black dramas and Latinos watch Latino dramas. There is so little cross-over that there is hardly even token variety. Friends has been under pressure for years over its overbearing pastiness, yet has hardly deviated from its path.
British television, though, has generally avoided such problems. There is variety in its programming, including black and Asian comedy and drama, but there is also the relaxed racial mix best typified by EastEnders. That its rival, Coronation Street, has accommodated only one Asian family and a handful of passing black and mixed-race characters has been a sore point for several years.
When Fair City gave Niamh a black boyfriend, then, it was no longer a particularly ground-breaking event. When Capt Kirk kissed Lieut Uhuru in Star Trek, it could only be done under alien influence. Sure, Ross has a black girlfriend in Friends, but she is obviously of mixed race, a comfortable shade of black.
Irish drama, though, will need to find its own way towards balance. In her three most prominent roles, Irish-based Russian actress Tatianna Ouliankina has hardly been cast against type. She played an immigrant in Paths To Freedom, an immigrant cleaner in The Clinic and an immigrant housekeeper Lana in Fair City. Yet, this is the context in which most Irish meet Eastern European immigrants. It might have appeased the social conscience a little more to cast her as an Eastern European lawyer, but it would hardly have reflected the reality. The difference between her immigrant and the Ashti character is that she is being given a storyline that goes beyond that of stock character. Ashti was a refugee whose script and acting would never allow him to move beyond that. Lana might be looking for a work permit, but she is finding love with taxi driver Leo along the way, being given more conventional storylines to ease the burden on the heavy social issue.
So far, high-flying characters are still likely to have Irish or English accents. When Ros Na Rún introduced a black Irish-speaking law student, questions of cultural accuracy could at least be countered by the very presence of a black, Irish-speaking actor. In Fair City, meanwhile, Niamh's boyfriend was an English doctor rather than a Nigerian supplementing his income by passing us paper towels in a nightclub toilet.
It is interesting to see that the latest RTÉ drama series, The Big Bow Wow, includes an Irish-Arab character, although her race is immediately commented upon and she is subject to a casual and none-to-subtle racism from her flatmate - suggesting a script that might be eager to force the issue somewhat.
Full integration in drama, as it is in society at large, is a few years, or perhaps a whole generation away. Given the only widespread integration is currently happening in schools, it might be that children's drama will be the first to deal with it. Eventually, of course, change will come when television is eventually made by the next generation of hyphenated-Irish. There will be Nigerian-Irish producers and Romanian-Irish scriptwriters. We will have our own versions of such dramas as Channel 4's Asian drama Second Generation. We may also have a complex cultural icon to match Ali G, who some disdained as a white boy deriding black culture, while others lionised him as a white mocking white's ugly hijacking of black culture.
Given the relatively small population, it will certainly be some time before there will be dramas aimed at individual communities. The lives of asylum seekers in Mosney would give a soap opera writer plenty of material, but simple demographics hint that there may be only a limited viewership.
Drama, though, feeds off the conflict brought about by change, so it will undoubtedly continue to grow as an issue in drama. For Irish screenwriters, who were for so long obsessed with the past, it presents a challenge for the future.