The importance of a distinct ethnicity was of a varied priority amongst the stations.
At both Asian Fever and Somali on Air the ethnic identity of their presenters was seen as crucial for being able to reach and be trusted by their communities. A manager at Asian Fever confirmed this when she said ‘ethnicity as far as the makeup of the radio station is concerned is very important, we look at it very, very closely when we bring in people…we do need to have people who represent the community, who understand the community and who can voice their concerns for them on their behalves and that is what, to me, ethnicity is about in this place’ (Co-Manager, 2008). The manager summarised the staff at the station as being ‘capacity built’
which reflected the ‘cultural competences’ (Moores, 2005) recognisable as structures of seeing and feeling those from within the community were particularly attuned to.
Within the South Asian community that Fever served were several distinct identities and the managers felt that they needed to mirror this by choosing volunteers for specific programmes. The presenter of the Kashmiri poetry programme accentuated his ethnicity, broadcasting in a village dialect of Punjabi as well as speaking Urdu.
He felt the popularity of the show was linked to his authentic accent and language retained after thirty years of living in the UK. The community responded well with listeners calling the station to ask ‘if I can speak English to which I reply ‘yes I think so’’ (Afternoon Presenter, 2008).
Presenters and managers who had come to the UK as children talked of a strong Punjabi and English identity that came from having never formally learned Urdu as their older siblings would have done in Pakistan. Therefore, the majority of the community ‘got along with Punjabi and learnt English really’ (Manager, 2008). This connected with the manager’s diverse adolescence spent with both black and Asian friends during the 1970’s as they sought to avoid the ‘paki-bashers’. The younger presenters of the drivetime and bhangra shows were more comfortable speaking their mother tongue of English though the managers encouraged them to reflect their Punjabi and Bangladeshi identities with the listeners. When their courage at the mixing desk had grown, these presenters, depending on their background, skilfully switched between mixtures of Punjabi, Urdu and Bengali combined with urban slang such as ‘cool, wicked and phat’.
These presenters, some of whom had grown up outside the broadcast community in mainly white areas of Leeds spoke about occupying different ethnicities depending on who they were talking with. The Co-Manager moved between ‘herself’ as a modest sisterly female member of the community, assertive ex-lawyer and single woman. The manager moved between his younger self, integrated into the black music scene and his current self, facilitator of ‘Punjabiness’ within the Asian community.
Presenters at SOA also presented multiple sides to their ethnicity, especially the managers who had left Somalia in the 1990’s and lived in countries such as the Djibouti, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands before finally gaining refugee status in the UK during the late 1990’s. Their movements and education had lent them a fluidity that enabled them to move between Somali, French and English identities with heightened awareness of what that meant for others in the community.
Such experiences formed their reflexive biographies, recounted during programmes and everyday interactions and reflected and renewed by similar storied identities of
The programme was co-hosted by both young British and Somali born presenters who worked together in correcting each other’s second languages. They identified with their British and Somali peers; those feeling adrift from a core Somali identity, those who had difficulties integrating and members of the community who had recently fled Somalia, many of them teenagers. These young listeners were felt to occupy the most difficult spaces having ‘migrated from a different country, come from a completely different society and background, having to adapt and conform to the main society’ (Female Presenter, 2008). This fuelled programme content where British and Somali born listeners were able to discuss how they were adapting to life in the UK and the extent to which it was important to retain their Somali-ness.
Both the white and Asian staff at the Asian Network in many cases shared diverse backgrounds, located in their growing up with South Asian music and culture in areas of London and Birmingham that during the 1970’s and 1980’s were as diverse as Leeds. First generation staff in particular had seen their parents simplify their ethnic identity to assimilate into British society. One DJ recounted that his father retained a firmly Sri Lankan identity whilst being ‘a real anglophile…voted Tory his whole life, got the Times delivered to the house everyday’ (Phone in DJ, 2008). His experience was of a father who took him to Sri Lanka ‘but he never spoke Sri Lankan, Singhalese in the house, so we never picked up the language, he never really taught us about our religion’ (ibid). This had led him to explore his ethnicity, language and religion himself whilst living a British, South London accented, hip-hop, bhangra and R&B musically grounded identity.
His reading of his ethnicity was: ‘I think there are probably some Asians that believe that I am a coconut, [brown on the outside and white on the inside] and yet, I married Sri Lankan and I go to Sri Lanka every year, we have a house there, I spend a month there a year, I have a lion holding a sword tattooed my whole arm which is the Sri Lankan flag, you know, I go to temple not as often as I should but I am very Sri Lankan’ (ibid). Such emblems and behaviours called on ‘structures of seeing’
(Karner, 2007) ethnicity, an ordering of schemas that brought Sri Lankan-ness into actions within daily life.
This experience was not unique; staff and listeners shared a curiosity which led many to ’wanting to connect back to their parents' cultures, they go back to South Asia say for a family trip or something, they work out who they are and become very, very keen on the culture and they look back at their history and culture as a defining point of ‘who we are’ so it's a less of a homogenisation’ (Arts Producer, 2008). In exploring their histories and shared identity, staff were reproducing and
reinterpreting structures of feeling, an emotional grounding that called on new
‘sounds, sights, and smells that…become familiar, and…trigger memories’ (Karner, 207, p. 34). Rather than seeing ethnicity as a hybrid construct the programme manager felt that such exploration was a ‘cycle that will continue with different generations, the next generation will want to know more’ (ibid). Identity and ethnicity for second and third generation South Asians is a fluid process that will be continually revised in the context of shifting understandings.
The manager/presenter at Irish Spectrum referenced his narrative of coming from a
‘small farming background in the rear end of Cavan in Ireland’ (Manager, 2008) as part of his radio identity. Within the community, Cavan was often the source of humour about the inhabitants’ lack of business acumen so the manager revelled in disproving this regional stereotyping. For him, his Irishness was ‘an identity, it’s what you grow up with, you know, it gives you in this crazy world perhaps a little bit of equilibrium, of feet on ground’ (ibid). Yet his identity was as reified as it was fluid and his home was as much his local community ‘where I live, I don’t insist on living in a puritanical Irish street, you know’ (ibid).
It was difficult to separate a sense of ethnicity and identity from the musical life narratives of those at Colourful Radio; when they talked of their background it was often located in their choices of career as DJs, musicians and performers. For those that had grown up during the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a strong sense of parental pressure for academic achievement commonly felt by many first generation interviewees regardless of their particular ethnicity. Some members of staff had had to make their career choices in the face of opposition; parents were ‘very, very clear that they wanted me to be, you know, something like a doctor or a lawyer standard, you know, immigrant professions’ (News Manager, 2009). Many voiced their appreciation that their parents were behind them ‘which is very unusual for African parents but I think they saw how passionate I was in those days’ (Reggae DJ, 2009).
Staff of all backgrounds, but particularly African and Caribbean, talked of the significance of reggae, R&B and soul music as a shared experience in their families.
The latest records from Jamaica were much anticipated; on ‘Sunday afternoon it was sort of part of the whole cultural thing to have the stereo out, you know, you get all the best cutlery out and everything else and mum would buy her records and put them on the little record player where you could put ten records on and they drop down one by one’ (Soul 360 DJ, 2009). The themes, styles and politicised messages of these records and the changing nature of soul and R&B resonated with ‘the black
British born kids so we were…reaching that stage of like being 13, 14…there was this kind of identity thing coming about where we had…a conflict between two different, two different cultures which …seemed like we had to choose one or the other to kind of aspire to’ (ibid).
This narrative, of choices faced by first and second generation children, was commonly heard across the case studies of Colourful, Asian Network, Somali on Air and Asian Fever. The staff at Colourful Radio, Buzz FM and the older staff at Asian Fever came from varied backgrounds where a love and history of growing up with black music meant they shared a close identification. The pursuit of radio and music careers had provided feelings of both enablement and constraint to challenge and change the positions parents had envisaged their children adopting. The sense was of a generation which had grown up together sharing spatially and/or temporally located narratives and identities that was not ethnically bounded, in its ‘traditional’ sense.