Tara Prem
Family name: Prem
Awards/Honours: The Asian Media Awards - Outstanding Contribution to Media Award (2015)
Work area/Craft/Role: Writer, Script Editor, Producer.
Industry: TV
Company: BBC
Websites: Forgotten TV Drama, The Asian Media Awards, Women's Film and Television History Network, Pebble Mill
Interview date(s): 1 January 1970
Interviewer(s):
Camera: Vanessa Jackson
Production Media: video
Duration (mins): 50
Tara was one of the first Asians to work in mainstream British television.
Her first job was as a trainee script editor at the BBC in London on Play of the Month, a strand of programmes based on theatre classics.
She knew Barry Hanson, who had just gone to work for the BBC in Birmingham with David Rose, and they both wanted to do ‘modern, new, regional work’ so she left her job in London and joined Rose and Hanson. That’s how the story of multicultural TV drama began.
Based in Birmingham in the early seventies Tara said she became aware that there was a substantial immigrant population and felt that if TV should reflect what was going on outside the studios.
She wrote the first drama on British television to have an entirely Asian cast in 1973, ‘A Touch of Eastern Promise.’
Tara went on to produce a variety of TV shows and films for her late husband, the celebrated British actor Brian Glover.
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