The first interracial kiss broadcast on British television has been uncovered by the British Film Institute.

It featured on You in Your Small Corner, a Granada Play of the Week, broadcast in June 1962.

The drama, which featured an explicit post-coital scene, was an adaptation of a play by Jamaican-born Barry Reckord that had been performed at the Royal Court and explored issues of mixed race and class.

Marcus Prince, the BFI's TV programmer who discovered the historic kiss while researching an event, said: "I was astounded … it was so explicit really.

“I looked at the date and realised its significance.”

The accolade of the first interracial kiss has often been wrongly attributed to an episode of Emergency Ward 10 broadcast in 1964, between characters Joan Hooley and John White.

'You in Your Small Corner' on ITV in June 1962 Credit: BFI/Granada/PA

A kiss between Lieutenant Uhura and Captain James T Kirk in a 1968 episode of Star Trek was the first shown in the US and is also often cited as the first shown British television.

In the playwright's brother, Lloyd Reckord, played a young Intellectual who travelled to England from Jamaica to study.

He fell for a white working class woman, played by Elizabeth MacLennan, but later became ashamed that she could not compete with his bright new friends at Cambridge University.

The play subverted expectations of the time about both race and class. In a review, the Daily Telegraph referred to it's "barriers of class and intellect”.

BFI creative director Heather Stewart described the archive as an "important rediscovery" of a "ground-breaking" television play.

'You in Your Small Corner' on ITV in June 1962 Credit: BFI/Granada/PA

"It demonstrates the role of progressive television drama as a reflection of our society and underlines the vital work of the BFI National Archive as the guardian of our national memory," she said.

"50 years on, diverse on-screen representation is still an urgent issue and we must continue as an industry to affect much-needed change."

The kiss will be shown to a Race and Romance on TV panel at the BFI on 24 November.