Meet the Grewals: a great British family

Channel 4 tonight aired the first episode of ‘The Family’, introducing the British public to the Grewals. It is the first time that a British Indian family has undergone the rigours – and scrutiny – of reality tv.

The first episode introduced us to the three generations of Grewals who all live in their five-bedroom pebble-dashed house directly under the Heathrow flight path in Windsor. There’s Sarbjit and Arvinder (mum and dad) who have been together for 35 years; eldest son Sunny together with his fiance Shay; pregnant daughter Kaki and her husband Jeet; and youngest son Tindy.

The series begun with the Grewals planning a traditional Indian wedding for Sunny and Shay. But rather than take a fetishistic view that accentuated the family’s otherness, the show focused on the fact that the Grewals are like so many other ‘normal’ families in today’s Britain. And with this, viewers were introduced to the fact that there was a dark cloud hanging over the wedding preparations because of the breakdown in the relationship between Shay and her own mother. It’s strong and emotional but essentially normal: something that everyone that has had family problems or tensions will identify with.

At the same time though, and as with most families, the stress and strains of everyday life are lightened by the banter between Sarbjit and Arvinder, the self-proclaimed “man-of-the-house”. One particularly wonderful image was of Sarbjit playing shoot’em up games on a laptop whilst she and her husband were having their heair dyed.

As The Guide in Saturday’s Guardian put it, the show is filmed with a lot of love. And no doubt as the series unfolds, so a lot of love will be shown to the Grewals, the latest in a long line of great British families.

Everything on this site by Chris Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. www.chris-allen.co.uk.

Landscape of neglect is fertile breeding ground for far right extremism

Following an approach from the freelance journalist Chris Arnot last week, I underwent a telephone interview with him about Muslim communities in the Black Country to support his research into writing an article about Anthony Cartwright’s novel, ‘Heartland’. The article has now been written and published and is reproduced below. The original article can be found on the Guardian website by clicking here.

Landscape of neglect is fertile breeding ground for far right extremism
Fact and fiction blur as Heartland novelist Anthony Cartwright take Chris Arnot on a tour through estates of despair

There is a passage in Anthony Cartwright’s novel, Heartland, currently being serialised on Radio 4, in which veteran Labour councillor Jim Bayliss ponders why his seat in Cinderheath is under threat from the British National party in local elections in 2002. “How could there be a Labour Party when there was no labour left for it to represent?” he muses. “It had become something else. There were jobs now, of course. The big losses had come some 20-odd years ago, but it was hardly the same – jobs for cleaners and security men, shop work and mobile phone sales… Even the call-centre jobs were going to Bangalore. This was the town’s position in the new world order.”

Poppy or Not…???

Every year many people struggle with the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Day campaign: should they or shouldn’t they wear a poppy?

The problem isn’t about remembering the selfless sacrifice made by so many British servicemen and their families in the Second World War, it’s about an unease with what British servicemen and women are being asked to do today.

As a way of remembering the sacrifice made by so many ordinary people in the Second World War and the impact this had on ordinary lives, I re-post below a brief recollection of my Uncle Lennie. I hope that it says enough:

Lennie (Leonard Allen) was the brother of my grandad, Ernie.

I didn’t know Lennie too well as he had moved away from the immediate vicinity of Bermondsey before I was born. He lived in Morden which to me as a child, was a million miles away from the flats. Nowadays I realise that it’s merely the end of the Bakerloo Line of the London Underground (which isn’t, just in case you didn’t know, not a million miles away from Bermondsey).

Lennie was always treated with respect in our family because he had been a prisoner of war, held by the Japanese in Burma. More importantly, this was because Lennie had also been severely tortured by the Japanese army. The story goes that when Lennie came back from fighting in the Far East after the end of the Second World War, no-one in the family recognised him due to the amount of weight that he had lost. Despite the fact that he never spoke openly about the torture that he underwent, from the day he returned from Burma until the day he died, he never took his shirt off (due to the scars that he had on his body), and he refused to watch any films or tv programmes about war: any war. He also never attended or participated in any Remembrance Day events and because of this, I have always struggled as to whether or not I should wear a poppy.

Two things I remember about Lennie and his house in Morden. The first is that I loved the ‘mouse in a brandy glass’ ornament he had and which were popular in the 1970s. And second, he was the only person I knew in that had a real sheepskin rug. When i visited him I must have been no more than about 7 or 8, I remember laying on the rug and falling asleep, so content and warm was the experience.

Lennie died some time in the 1980s with very few of us having seen him in his last years.

Everything on this site by Chris Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. www.chris-allen.co.uk.

Islamophobia and Religious Discrimination: new perspectives, policies and practices

All readers of this blog are invited to the event, “Islamophobia & Religious Discrimination: new perspectives, policies and practices”. Details as follows. If you are intending coming along to the event, please ensure that you register beforehand – scroll down for details:

Wednesday, 09 December 2009
14:00 – 17:00

Location:
G15 (Main Lecture Theatre), Muirhead Tower, Main Campus, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT

More than a decade ago, the Runnymede Trust report Islamophobia: a challenge for us all noted that Islamophobia had reached previously unprecedented levels. Shortly after, a Home Office report suggested that other forms of religiously-based discrimination was also on the increase. Since then, a whole raft of legislation has been introduced in an attempt to address this issue. Most recently, the Equality Act 2006 introduced a ‘religion or belief’ strand of equalities protection that has regularly made the headlines through a number of high profile cases, for example where a Christian registrar asked to be excluded from performing same-sex civil registrations.

“I detest the niqab and the BNP: what does that make me?”

For anyone who has read the post by Gary Younge on Comment is Free entitled, ‘When you watch the BNP on TV, just remember: Jack Straw started all this’, many I’m sure will conclude that he makes some good points. Not least when he notes that:

…there is little doubt that once the BNP is on Question Time, Jack Straw – or indeed anyone in the New Labour hierarchy – is in no position to take the fight to it. The same is true for most of the rest of the British political establishment that will be represented on the panel – they have either actively colluded or passively acquiesced in the political trajectory of the past decade.

But it is no accident that this happened on New Labour’s watch and no small irony that Jack Straw should set himself up as Griffin’s opponent.

In fact I couldn’t agree more. Why put up against the BNP’s Nick Griffin the very man that started the whole niqab furore a few years ago?