Floella

Did you know Floella was the first to appear fully pregnant on British TV? (In Play School).

For a woman whose ambition was to be Britain’s first black bank manager, her life took a totally different course. There just weren’t black bank managers back then, but black people were accepted into the theatre, so that’s the career she ’settled’ on.

Similarly there weren’t many black people on TV during the 70s and 80s. The TV channels were becoming more sensitive to the fact, especially in representing children, firstly in the 60s and later on with Derek Griffiths, but the main allure of her lies, I’m sure, in the impression she genuinely loved being around children and that she wasn’t just adorning the shop floor for the career bump-up. Sourcing pics for this post, there were hundreds of her and not one without her beaming.

Floella starred in two of the upper echelons of Play for Todays from one of its golden eras (the late 70s). She starred in ‘a hole in Babylon’ in 1979, about a siege in an Italian restaurant that goes wrong and ‘waterloo sunset’ (also 1979, the year that brought us the dazzling performance of Jonathan Pryce in Trevor Griffiths’ ‘the comedians’) a play about racial disharmony in a poky London flat. A young man and his elderly relative live on a mostly West Indian London housing estate. (The pivotal and most memorable scene from this play involves the naive old woman dusting her aging face with cocoa in order to clumsily show she wants to belong, but they take this gesture the wrong way and she has to leave).

A few years prior, too, in 1975, she starred in the Play for Today ‘the floater’ – where she was lucky enough to appear alongside Richard Beckinsale (who played a solicitor’s clerk acting for his sick wife).

She also appeared in many films (mainly playing a nurse) but ‘black joy’ is a film of note about a naive African immigrant arriving in Brixton, with Norman Beaton as the wise-arse, no-good rude boy she falls in with. Floella plays Beaton’s assertive, no-nonsense wife. Vivian Stanshall’s in it too, weirdly, as a pervy vicar.

In more recent years she was cast in Doctor Who and there’s the Floella Benjamin Awards in Exeter University (which gave her an honoury doctorate) where up to £1,000 is given to promising students to help improve their future job prospects.

Predictably but admirably she runs a lot for charity these days.

Floella Benjamin OBE (born in Trinidad, 1949)

~ by Suzy Norman on 11/06/2009.