London Hughes speaks out about racism in British TV

The British TV industry thinks anyone black is a ‘risk’, comedian London Hughes has claimed.

She says that she was always seen as ‘black first and a talent afterwards’ – with producers assuming white audiences would not accept her.

The comic, who has found career success in Hollywood, said she ‘killed it’ at several auditions for 8 Out Of 10 Cats, but producers then told her agent: ‘We love London but we don’t think our audience will get her.’

‘Meanwhile, I saw all my white male and female friends get the slots. Am I going to scare the audience? I’m cure as hell and funny as fuck – why wouldn’t they get me? No one in the US has ever told me the audience wouldn’t get me.

‘Commissioners see black skin as such a big risk, and it’s not.’

She said she grew up loving Sex And The City and could relate to it, even though there were no black characters in it. But she said if an equivalent was made with a black cast it would be pigeonholed as a ‘black show’.

‘They [TV producers] saw non-white people as a tick box,’ she added.

Delivering the Alternative MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International TV Festival yesterday, Hughes also said that being a woman in comedy was a drawback, saying that when she won Funny Women in 2009 at the age of 19, just three months into her stand-up career she expected it to be a fast-track to primetime TV and book and movie deals.

‘The UK industry has a good way of making you feel shit about yourself after you think all of that,’ she said. ‘I got a rude awakening, slapped down to reality.’

Hughes quoted Irish comic Gráinne McGuire’s belief that TX executives book young male comedians because they have potential, but only book women only when they have experience.

She said ‘I don’t want to have to wait till I’m Ruby Wax’s age, Jo Brand’s age’ to get her break. ‘If I was a white man with all the talent I had at 19 I would be a Michel McIntyre, a Jack Whitehall. I would be a huge star,’ she said.

‘Let’s just take the fact that I’m black out of it. Because I have a vagina, the people in charge, the powers that be, do not look at me and think, "Yes"’.

‘The black female equivalent of Lenny Henry doesn’t exist. For male comics we’ve had Richard Blackwood; we’ve had Mo Gilligan… we don’t celebrate black women in the same way.’

Hughes moved to the US just before the pandemic hit, where Kevin Hart took her under his wing, and produced the  Netflix version of her stand-up special To Catch A Dick.

She revealed she is planning a sequel, To Catch A Husband – but hoped she could actually find a possible long-term partner before making the show.

She is also starring in the forthcoming movie  Hot Mess, loosely based on her own life, and has been woking on a sitcom pilot. ‘When you’ve got talent, ambition, drive, dedication in the US things happen. Doors open,’ she said.

But she says regrets that she had  to move to Los Angeles to get the breaks. ‘I wish I would have had the opportunities in the UK that I’m getting now,’ she said.

‘Michaela Coel is the only black British woman with her own show. It’s disgusting. It’s shocking how far behind America the UK is on diversity.’

‘Black girls should never have to leave their home towns to make it. It hurts.’

Published: 27 Aug 2021