Channel 4 will be tearing down the myths and misunderstandings of colonial history in a new commission that examines the way that the Empire has shaped modern Britain. A 2x60 series from Sandpaper Films, Empire & Me (w/t) will see writer and broadcaster Sathnam Sanghera go on a very personal journey to unearth the roots that bind his country to its colonial past. Travelling across Britain and speaking to people from a variety of walks of life with his distinctive candour and wit, Sathnam will look at the ways in which the Empire is remembered and how this has created Britain’s culture and its politics.
Sathnam’s journey across the series isn’t just intellectual. His starting point is his own family’s experiences, their memories of racist signs in shops and of the anti-immigrant local MP Enoch Powell in Wolverhampton when they arrived in 1968. Sathnam will explore what it means, as a child of immigrants, to live in the shadow of the Empire. He also will ask how Britain, at a moment of enormous cultural and political division, might be able to come to terms with its past without hiding from its most troubling episodes.
