THE SPECIAL AWARD : DAVID OLUSOGA OBE

The broadcaster, writer and historian David Olusoga receives one of BAFTA’s highest honours in recognition of his groundbreaking career.

Behind the scenes of a portrait for The Times, in the run up to the 2021 Television Awards

BAFTA/Iona Wolff

“It feels very moving to be recognised by the industry in which I’ve spent most of my adult life,” says Professor David Olusoga, reflecting on his BAFTA Special Award.

That a boy born in Lagos and raised on a Gateshead council estate has become one of the UK’s leading television historians, broadcasters and filmmakers is testament to Olusoga’s brilliance. Television, though, took a back seat to education early on. By the age of 25, Olusoga had collected a history degree from the University of Liverpool and a master’s from Leicester. A career in academia beckoned. Fortunately for millions of sofa historians, Olusoga decided to take a postgraduate broadcast journalism course in Leeds and then worked in BBC radio for a few years.

“I didn’t come from a background with ambitions of working in elitist areas like TV,” he says. “I had no contacts, friends or family in television, but the one thing I did have was lots and lots of ideas.”

“I had no contacts, friends or family in television, but the one thing I did have was lots and lots of ideas.”

Eventually, a BBC commissioner gave one of them the green light, Ebony Towers: The Black Intelligentsia (2003), followed by Namibia: Genocide & the Second Reich (2005), which Olusoga produced and directed. The story of a forgotten genocide in the then German South West African colony, it was, he says, “the most inspiring moment of the first half of my career”.

Television has truly embraced history over the past few decades, which Olusoga describes as “one of the great passions of the British people”. This includes such popular viewing as Who Do You Think You Are?, Olusoga’s own A House Through Time (20182021) and his hard-hitting BAFTA-winning film Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners (2015).

In the latter, Olusoga turned complex, forensic academic history into two hours of gripping television. “You can write an academic paper, and I’ve written many, but you won’t reach millions of people,” he explains.

Unremembered – Britain’s Forgotten War Heroes (2019) equally left its own indelible mark. Olusoga executive produced this documentary about African soldiers who served and died for Britain in World War I but were denied the honour of an individual grave. “It led to a formal apology by the British Government for one of the biggest historical scandals that I, as a historian, had ever encountered – that’s the power of television,” argues Olusoga.

Taking part in an online BAFTA Q&A for Our NHS: A Hidden History in 2021

BAFTA

Looking back over two decades on the box, he says: “I became a historian, not because of my history classes at school but because of seeing it on television... It never occurred to me that I might be able to do for others what television did for me, which was life changing. It’s a humbling thought.

“Whenever people stop me in the street and say how much my programmes have meant to them, I think about myself on a council estate in the 80s. I feel blessed to have been able to play a part in a medium that has that power.” The professor is far from finished with television either.

“I can’t imagine sitting on the sidelines and watching television and not being involved in it,” Olusoga concludes. “I’m afraid I will be bothering commissioners for quite a long time.”

WORDS: Matthew Bell

Read the full interview: bafta.org/about/awards-brochures