The show will follow the Sharma family from Solihull as they recreate life in the city for previous generations of South Asian Britons.
Back In Time For Birmingham was commissioned to coincide with the city’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games this summer. Noreen Khan of the BBC Asian Network and social historian Dr Yasmin Khan co-host the series. It examines the impact of South Asian arrivals over the last 75 years. Today, nearly 250,000 Brummies have Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, or Sri Lankan ancestry, accounting for more than a quarter of the city’s population.
Beginning in the 1950s, when significant immigration from the Indian subcontinent began, the Sharma family – father Vishal, mother Manisha, and children Alisha and Akash – will journey through five decades of rapid change, exploring every aspect of British Asian family life. They’ll take over their predecessors’ jobs, living where they lived, cooking what they ate, and dealing with the same challenges (how do you produce authentic home cooking when you only have baked beans in the cupboard and no one sells chilli?)
The Sharmas will also devote their spare time to the same leisure activities that families have enjoyed throughout the decades – from trips to the region’s first Asian cinema in the 1950s to entertain the aunties at home in the 1960s, a bhangra evening with musical legend Balbir Singh in the 1970s, a picnic to commemorate the anniversary of partition and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and bunking school for a 90s daytime bhangra rave complete with
Starting Monday, June 20th, at 20.00, the series will air on BBC Two every day until Thursday, June 23rd.
