Abstract

This article offers an analysis of The Primary, a television documentary broadcast in the UK in 2008 as part of a BBC series exploring multicultural Britain. The film documents a term at an inner-city primary school. It depicts school leadership, cultural diversity, relationships between the school and the local community, pupils’ friendships, parents and out of school activities. The article discusses The Primary as a product of British television documentary-making in the early twenty-first century and examines the historical context in which it was broadcast. It then analyses the relations between the film’s visual and aural narrative dimensions and the possible disruptions in historical meaning produced by these relations. Discussion focuses on the film’s shifts between “ethnographic” and “editorial” registers; its depiction of a multicultural urban school setting; and the possibilities offered by reading the film as cultural inventory.