Desmond's is a British television sitcom broadcast by Channel 4 from 5 January 1989 to 19 December 1994. Conceived and co-written by Trix Worrell, and produced by Charlie Hanson and Humphrey Barclay, Desmond's stars Norman Beaton as barber Desmond Ambrose, whose shop is a gathering place for an assortment of local characters. The show is set in Peckham, London, and features a predominantly black British Guyanese cast. With 71 episodes, Desmond's became Channel 4's longest running sitcom in terms of episodes.
Norman Lugard Beaton was a Guyanese actor long resident in the United Kingdom. He became best known for his role as Desmond Ambrose in the Channel Four television comedy series Desmond's. The writer Stephen Bourne has called him "the most influential and highly regarded black British actor of his time".
Compact is a British television soap opera shown by BBC Television from January 1962 to July 1965, created by Hazel Adair and Peter Ling.
Empire Road is a British television series, made by the BBC in 1978 and 1979. Written by Michael Abbensetts, the programme ran for two series.
Sheila Susan White was an English film, television and stage actress.
Earlston Jewett Cameron, CBE, known as Earl Cameron, was a Bermudian actor who lived and worked in the United Kingdom. After appearing on London's West End stage, he became one of the first black stars in the British film industry.
Paulette Randall, MBE is a British theatre director of Jamaican descent. She was chair of the board of Clean Break Theatre Company in 2006–07, and is former artistic director of Talawa Theatre Company. She was the associate director for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.
Mona Hammond was a Jamaican-British actress and co-founder of the Talawa Theatre Company. Born in Tweedside, Jamaica, Hammond immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1959, where she lived for the rest of her life. Hammond had a long and distinguished stage career. She was best known for her work on British television and played Blossom Jackson in the BBC soap opera EastEnders.
Yvonne Jones Brewster is a Jamaican actress, theatre director and businesswoman, known for her role as Ruth Harding in the BBC television soap opera Doctors. She co-founded the theatre companies Talawa in the UK and The Barn in Jamaica.
Michael John Abbensetts was a Guyana-born British writer who settled in England in the 1960s. He had been described as "the best Black playwright to emerge from his generation, and as having given "Caribbeans a real voice in Britain". He was the first black British playwright commissioned to write a television drama series, Empire Road, which the BBC aired from 1978 to 1979.
Julia Foster is an English stage, screen, and television actress.
John Wesley Holder, known professionally as Ram John Holder, is a Guyanese-British actor and musician, who began his professional career as a singer in New York City, before moving to England in 1962. He has performed on stage, in both film and television and, is best known for playing Augustus "Porkpie" Grant in the Channel 4 sitcom Desmond's, and its spin-off series Porkpie.
Lisa Davina Phillip is a British actress and singer.
"Fable" is a British television play, shown on 27 January 1965 as an episode of The Wednesday Play series on BBC 1. Written by John Hopkins, the play is set in a parallel totalitarian Britain where those in authority are black people, and white people are their social underdogs – a reversal of the situation in contemporary apartheid South Africa.
Andrée Melly was an English actress.
The Fosters is a British television show, produced by London Weekend Television, which aired on ITV from 9 April 1976 until 9 July 1977.
Pearl Connor-Mogotsi, née Nunez, was a Trinidadian-born theatrical and literary agent, actress and cultural activist, who was a pioneering campaigner for the recognition and promotion of African Caribbean arts. In the UK, in the 1950s, she was the first agent to represent black and other minority ethnic actors, writers and film-makers, and during the early 1960s was instrumental in setting up one of Britain's first black theatre companies, the Negro Theatre Workshop. In the words of John La Rose, who delivered a eulogy at her funeral on 26 February 2005: "Pearl Connor-Mogotsi was pivotal in the effort to remake the landscape for innovation and for the inclusion of African, Caribbean and Asian artists in shaping a new vision of consciousness for art and society."
Joan Kemp-Welch was a British stage and film actress, who later went on to become a television director. After making her stage debut in 1926 at the Q Theatre, Kemp-Welch made her film debut in 1933 and appeared in fifteen films over the next decade largely in supporting or minor roles. Occasionally she played more substantial parts as in Hard Steel and They Flew Alone.
Michaela Ewuraba Boakye-Collinson, known professionally as Michaela Coel, is a British actress, filmmaker and poet. She is best known for creating and starring in the E4 sitcom Chewing Gum (2015–2017), for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Female Comedy Performance; and the BBC One/HBO comedy-drama series I May Destroy You (2020) for which she won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress in 2021. For her work on I May Destroy You, Coel was the first black woman to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special at the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards.
Daphne Steele was a Guyanese nurse, who in 1964 became the first Black Matron in the National Health Service.
