“New Times” Television? Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette

Abstract

The 1985 British film My Beautiful Laundrette marked the first collaboration between writer Hanif Kureishi and director Stephen Frears, two progressive voices that have become well known for their engagement with subject matter that does not always conform to prevailing political orthodoxies. It tells the story of an entrepreneurial second-generation Pakistani immigrant, Omar, who at the film’s outset shares a shabby flat with his father Papa, a self-pitying, alcoholic socialist. Papa finds Omar washing cars at his Thatcherite uncle Nasser’s garage, but Omar is not content with this menial work and, in an attempt to rise above the racism and poverty of south London, offers to take control of one of Nasser’s decrepit laundrette and turn it into a profitable business. He employs Johnny, a white former school friend who has since fallen in with a group of National Front thugs, to help him renovate and run the laundrette, and the two embark on a love affair that must be keep secret from their friends and family. Fractures appear in their relationship as the competing claims of their respective communities—whether middle-class Muslims or far-right lumpenproletariat—bear down upon them, but through their common endeavor they create in the laundrette a space that, while never utopian, can accommodate the full plurality of the film’s identities without establishing any one as hegemonic.