Racially Comfortable Viewing on British Television in the 1980s and 1990s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2026
The final chapter examines the relative success of three Black sitcoms; The Cosby Show, Desmond’s and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, with both white and Black audiences in 1980s and 1990s Britain. The success of these programmes pointed to a potential site of racial consensus among white and Black British audiences; yet the chapter notes that the programmes worked within the parameters of white British colour-blindness by providing what was repeatedly identified by television critics in the press as ‘comfortable’ viewing for white audiences. These shows were praised repeatedly as not being about race, in a period when the Conservative Party was mounting its own claims to colour-blindness. As such, the racial progress that the popularity of these shows seemed to signal was instead tied again to the potential discomforts of colour-blind white audiences.
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