Kwame Kwei-Armah
Published 25 October 2007 (New Statesman)
The debate over the exodus of Britain's black actors has finally begun. Now it is time to start talking about solutions
On 15 October at the Screen Nation Awards - dubbed the "black Baftas" - the founder of the awards, the distinguished Ghanaian producer Charles Thompson, bemoaned what he called a "talent drain of British actors running off to the States". I was both saddened and pleased by his comment: saddened because, as a black British actor and playwright, I know how serious the problem is, and pleased because, at last, people are actually starting to talk about it.
The overwhelming majority of black actors of my generation have found that their only hope of a career lies in America (an old maxim states that "in Britain, white actors have careers and black actors have jobs"). Rather than passing on tips about auditions, my contemporaries exchange advice about the "01 visa", the document that "provides admission into the United States of persons with . . . extraordinary achievement in motion picture and television production". I once read a very interesting comment referring to the former US general and later secretary of state Colin Powell. "It is his good fortune that they [his Jamaican-born parents] took the New York rather than the Southampton boat. If they had, he might have made sergeant." That sentiment increasingly appears to apply to the television and film industries, too.
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