Uplands Television’s David Olusoga

The extensive slate BBC Studios unveiled at its annual Showcase this week included several titles from indie production outfit Uplands Television, among them Union and Blackface with David Harewood. The venture—set up by producer Mike Smith and historian, producer and broadcaster David Olusoga to develop editorially and visually distinctive factual series and specials—sealed a three-year first-look deal with BBC Studios last year. TV Real caught up with Olusoga to hear about all the latest developments at Uplands and his work behind and in front of the camera.

TV REAL: Give us the backstory of Uplands Television.
OLUSOGA: We’re five years old now. Mike Smith and I had worked together at the BBC. We wanted to create a company that could do different subjects, work with different people and create a space where people could do their best work. We had lots of ideas and subject areas we were interested in. We looked at our skills, looked at the market and thought, maybe we have a shot.

TV REAL: Tell us about the slate you’re working on now.
OLUSOGA: We’re working on a landmark for the BBC. The working title is Union. It’s about the story of Britain, the union of the four nations and unity and disunity over the centuries. We think Uplands films are distinctive. People know when they see an Uplands film—it has an editorial distinctiveness. We’d like to think that this film will show we’re also visually distinctive. We’re interested in how you tell stories; how you use television as a medium. It’s a very topical subject—these forces of history that have brought us together and separated us are alive and on the move at this moment, so it’s very much history as now. It’s also a project where we want to show that we spend a lot of time thinking about how this medium works and how we can tell complicated stories.

Another complicated story we’re telling is the story of Blackface minstrelsy. It’s a one-off with David Harewood as the presenter. That’s to tell the missing story of the first global form of American entertainment, Blackface minstrelsy, from the 1830s to the 1970s. I always think of minstrelsy as racism literally made into an art form. This program with David will show where it came from, how it evolved and how enormous it was, which explains why echoes live on in society.

TV REAL: Uplands inked a first-look deal with BBC Studios last year. Tell us about the importance of that relationship.
OLUSOGA: The BBC was distributing the work I’d done as a presenter from when I was working for the BBC, so it was a natural progression to want to keep that back catalog together. We were working with the BBC from our inception. The first-look deal is a very different relationship, and it’s immensely beneficial. The one thing we’re not short of as a company is ideas. It’s very easy to drown in your own ideas. The market information and the sense of opportunities from our colleagues at BBC Studios allow us to prioritize. I have more programs on bits of paper with half-written proposals or things I’m going to try again that I could make in my lifetime. The discipline and prioritization come from that relationship. Our second production was a co-production with the BBC and PBS. Even when we were just starting, we were a company that had a foot in the U.S. market. That’s always been something we wanted to do. We just made a big series on slavery for the Smithsonian. The global intel and reach of BBC Studios fit with our ambitions. We always wanted to make programs not just for the U.K. market. The American market is of huge significance to us.

TV REAL: I know there are many more potential homes for projects than there used to be, but history has long been the domain of pubcasters. That funding model is under pressure. Are you concerned about the ability of pubcasters to continue to invest in high-end history content?
OLUSOGA: I worry about public-service broadcasting, the same as I worry about the health of rule by law or by democracy. It’s one of those pillars of many societies that is enormously valuable. And you can see it under pressure. So in the big, political, almost philosophical way, I worry about that. In terms of the health of blue-chip history, I see loads of great stuff. In some ways, there’s a mismatch, and I hope it stays this way, between the sort of hand-wringing about the future of public-service broadcasting and what public broadcasting is achieving. We use this phrase too glibly, but it does feel like a golden age. There are astonishing programs—history and natural history and arts and drama—coming from the different public-service broadcasters and commercial broadcasters. One thing that feels notable about this period, which has as much to do with the podcast revolution as with the expansion of channels, is that people love stories. There’s a recognition that quality stories are what audiences want. It seems to me that we’re struggling to grasp all the opportunities rather than trying to scan the horizon and see opportunities.

TV REAL: Tell me about your process. Do you scribble ideas down on pieces of paper?
OLUSOGA: I never scribble ideas down. I work at them. I travel a lot. I’m on trains all the time. I’ve never done anything but work on a train for the past 20 years. I write proposals. I fine-tune them. What I present to my colleagues is something where I’ve worked out all the angles. Of course, there’s another process where other people’s ideas are just as important.

I have hundreds of one-liners, but they exist in a file on my computer. What I care about is the dozens of worked-through ideas. I’m interested in how programs are made. I’m interested in formatting, and by formatting, I mean everything from a rigid system you can send to somebody in a program bible to how you might use film grammar or tonality within the more traditional documentary. I’ve never stopped being a producer. I’ve never stopped thinking visually. I get the chance to work in other media which aren’t visual. In some ways, that makes me respect the visual nature of television even more. We work on things that are pretty well developed. I write a concept, I tend to write one sample episode, and then I work with our colleagues in development; I ask them to populate ideas with examples, with stories that can help us fine-tune the format. Blue-sky thinking should happen in the head rather than in meetings. I don’t want to waste people’s time with half-developed ideas. I come with developed ideas and want them to be expanded by my colleagues.

TV REAL: Talk about your journey in television, that transition from going from behind the camera to being a presenter.
OLUSOGA: Television was always what I wanted to do. I’m from a council estate in the Northeast. I didn’t spend my youth imagining future careers because it didn’t seem possible. But when I was in my mid-20s, it was either do a Ph.D. or don’t do a Ph.D. And when I thought about three more years at university, I decided what I wanted to do was the thing that made me care about history in the first place, which was television. I came to TV instead of doing a Ph.D. But I still wanted to do history. I always wanted to do it in as many mediums as possible. I’ve still written academic papers while I’ve been in television. I was a radio producer for a couple of years. I’ve written books. I’ve written with my sister, who is an educationalist, lesson plans. I’ve now written two children’s books, five adult books and made lots of history programs. And I’ve sat on the boards of museums. It’s all about being multilingual, as it were, in delivering history. Transition is not the right word. I’m not someone who has gone from being a producer to a presenter. I’m someone who is still a producer. I learned to self-shoot, and then I learned to do sound so that I could spend budgets on other things. It’s about having more production skills. On the Union project, the producers are writing their parts of the script, we’re fine-tuning, I’m writing my parts. And then we’ll meet as a production team. The only time I’m not a producer is when I’m on location. You can’t be a back-seat director. But I’m producing right until I stand in front of the camera. I’m only a presenter for the time I’m standing in front of the camera. After that, and in between shots even, I’m still walking around, talking to the cameraman, talking to the producer, trying to work out how we’re going to do the next thing. I’m presenting on one project that I’m producing and I’m exec-producing on another project.

The Uplands program I’m most proud of is The Unremembered, a documentary about the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Imperial War Graves Commission and their history and inexcusable failure to equally commemorate the lives and deaths of African, Indian and Middle Eastern soldiers who served in the First World War. I think it’s one of the greatest scandals in 20th-century British history. I knew about that scandal from doing primary research for one of my books. When we formed Uplands, we sold it to Channel 4. And I didn’t want to present it. That was never discussed. We got David Lammy to present it. I exec-produced that program. That’s actually the program that is as much about me and my interest in television as anything else. That program went on to force the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to acknowledge the biggest failure, the biggest moral lapse, in its history. It led to an apology from the Commission, the Secretary of State for Defense, the government and the Prime Minister. Our company and I were named in Parliament. So that, in some ways, is the thing I am most proud of that has come from Uplands. And the people who only know me as a presenter would not notice that my name is at the end of the program.

TV REAL: I’m curious about your thoughts on this insane “critical race theory” debate in the U.S., as books are being banned from schools.
OLUSOGA: As a historian, I would say what’s happening is entirely in keeping with the past two centuries. Every form of Black scholarship has been misrepresented, dismissed, distorted and weaponized against Black people. Every Black organization has been claimed to be illegitimate. Every slogan Black people invented in their fight for equality has been misrepresented or deemed aggressive or inappropriate. Every gesture, from the Black power salute to taking the knee, is deemed inappropriate. There is no right way for Black people on either side of the Atlantic to protest. It’s not because Black people are doing it the wrong way. It’s because people don’t want Black people to protest, and they don’t want to listen to Black voices. As a historian, this feels entirely in keeping with recent history and history going even further back. If there’s anything new about this era, it is the weaponization of previous generations of Black people’s struggles against Black people today. In particular, Black leaders from the 1960s and a narrow understanding of Dr. King are being weaponized against Black people. Our leaders are being used against us. They are being selectively quoted to try to claim that the modern struggles are a discontinuation and a distortion of those struggles rather than a continuation of those struggles. Critical race theory is merely the latest form of Black scholarship to be weaponized. And once you’ve created it into a weapon, you have to see it everywhere. In the U.K., the right has adopted the same debate. The academic David Abulafia said I was influenced by critical race theory. His job is sources. He needs to be able to point to a single reference in any book I’ve ever written, any paper I’ve ever written, in which I quote a critical race theorist. And you won’t find them because they don’t exist. I’m a historian. Critical race theory is a very specific form of African-American legal studies. But because it’s a powerful weapon to use against Black people, a Cambridge academic feels perfectly able, with no research and no evidence, to say that I’m a critical race theorist. As people buy into this idea, in this binary of culture wars, us and them, wokeness, all of these ridiculous terms, then it’s just another weapon in a struggle that is about making people who disagree with you into the other. People on both sides of this debate are so determined to “other” people they disagree with. It’s fascinating how people are ready to deploy this weapon, even Cambridge academics, with absolutely no evidence. I’ve been accused by Charles Moore at The Spectator of being an ideological historian. Most historians who are theoretical, their great criticism of me is a lack of theory in my writing. I’m a rather old-fashioned, empirical historian. And fundamentally, I’m a storyteller. That’s why I chose to work in television rather than do a Ph.D. If I wanted to immerse myself in the philosophies of Foucault and Derrida and critical studies, I would have done a Ph.D. rather than gone to work for the BBC. But this is normal, though. Black intellectualism is deliberately misrepresented.

TV REAL: Where this is headed all feels quite dire.
OLUSOGA: TV history can play an amazing role in this. TV history can reveal forgotten history. It can reveal them full of remarkable people. It can tell stories. These are our histories; these are shared histories. All we do, those of us who use history to tell stories on television, is try to do it well and not be drawn into these childish debates. I make programs about a range of subjects. I’ve written books about a range of subjects. The only things deemed political, for which I am attacked, have to do with race and empire. [They want] Black people to stop talking about things that make some white people uncomfortable. But the good news is, it doesn’t make millions of people uncomfortable. There is a generation of young people who want to know these histories. I get stopped on the streets by young people who recognize me from my programs. They don’t feel threatened by these histories; they don’t feel these histories are divisive. They feel these histories are revelatory. I’d rather listen to the young people who come to my talks or who I meet on the streets than people writing in tabloids, who, of course, have not only weaponized these ideas and these debates; they’ve monetized them.

TV REAL: Is there anything else about what’s happening at Uplands that you’d like to share?
OLUSOGA: We’re very much looking forward to traveling again! We have two projects we can’t finish because of the pandemic. We’re hoping and planning we’ll be able to, toward the end of this year and into next. We have The Forgotten Empire, which is about 60 percent filmed. Just like Union, it feels extremely timely and important. We’re looking forward to finishing that. As a historian, being interrupted by a historic event, I don’t feel in a strong position to criticize! I keep saying that our lives are subject to historic events. It’s beholden on me not to whine when my life is subject to historic events!

TV REAL: Tell me more about The Forgotten Empire.
OLUSOGA: We wanted to look at the British empire and the aspect of it that we don’t talk about. Our understanding of the empire is fundamentally a Victorian story. When you ask someone to think of a British imperialist, they’ll think of a man with a mustache, pith helmet and rifle. They won’t think of a Tudor explorer. They won’t think of a 17th-century sugar planter in Barbados. To understand the empire, you have to go back to the age of the Tudors and recognize that the empire exists well into the 20th century. We tend to allow the 19th century to telescope out and take over the whole story. [The Forgotten Empire] is four hours. One hour is on the 19th century. We’re focusing on the broader empire. We’re also talking about Britain’s relationship with countries that were never part of the formal empire. Britain was the greatest trading nation on Earth and the greatest industrial nation at the same time it was the center of the biggest empire in the world. More than a quarter of all the countries on Earth are former British colonies. Britain’s history is global history; it’s everybody’s history. So many of us have been affected by it. I’m British Nigerian. I exist because of decisions made in the 16th century about where British explorers would go and decisions made in the 19th century about where British palm oil would come from and where British anti-slavery power would be projected into Africa. I’m one of the millions of people around the world who are the product of Britain’s imperial relationships and trading relationships. Our aim is to tell those unknown stories of the empire in some really surprising places and talk about how old the empire is and how recent the empire is. We need to get away from this Victorian trap.

TV REAL: My parents were displaced as India gained its independence, and I was in Hong Kong for its handover back to China, so…
OLUSOGA: We are the flotsam and jetsam of the empire!