I’ll never forget the first time I saw Milly on This Life. I had grown up with no one who looked like me on television beyond paper-thin background characters who might run corner shops. Suddenly, in the mid-90s, here was a British Asian character in an edgy, late-night BBC show – a three-dimensional, aspirational, likable woman (well, likable until she cheated on Egg; no one liked that, Milly). But what made her all the more remarkable was that her ethnicity or background was basically never referred to. Milly was followed by the pioneering Goodness Gracious Me, a British Asian sketch show that subverted stereotypes, got the word chuddies into common parlance and created stars of its cast. I rubbed my hands in glee. Finally, people who looked like me were on the telly. Surely this was the start of British Asians and other minorities becoming “visible” and normalised.

Someone with the relevant ’ology could tell you why it’s important to see reflections of yourself; why that validation is key. From personal experience, I can tell you it matters profoundly. If I fancied myself as anything like a cool, confident Milly, that was shot down on my first day at work, when my manager, a white, middle-aged man, asked me if I had ever “summered in the Himalayas”. He found me – a young Asian woman, born and bred in West Yorkshire (hardly a mindbending combination) – so alien that he reached for the only “foreign” thing he could think of, which was to share his gap-year experience. I couldn’t tell him I had only ever seen the Himalayas on a packet of Tilda rice and that the only place I had ever “summered” was Blackpool.

We need more ‘Milly moments’ …Amita Dhiri (second from left) in This Life. Photograph: BBC

This othering can have a direct impact on your career. If you are seen only as a studio’s exotic forbidden fruit, or the suppressed woman, you have yet another barrier to traverse. In my work as a radio presenter, one of the funnier examples of questions I have been asked along the way is: “Gosh, how come you know about Britpop?” At the other end of the scale, you unwittingly become the sole representative of your whole community; I was once asked by a room full of white men in suits: “Yasmeen, why are young Asian men becoming radicalised?” when I had gone in there to outline a press campaign.

But othering is more than just frustrating; it’s dangerous. The aftermath of Goodness Gracious Me didn’t play out as I hoped. For years, little or no on-screen representation followed, and worse still, the aftermath of 9/11 led to a deluge of dramas with a narrative of brown people – specifically Muslims – as terrorists; suddenly we had become “issues”. Undeniably, an issue can form the foundation of any TV drama, but it becomes a problem when that becomes the only representation; the prevailing narrative. This is only strengthened when the people telling and making stories from and about those communities are not from within them.

Ironically, where there seemed to be room for some nuance was in soap. I got my first taste of working in television as a cultural advisor to EastEnders. One day on set helping with a prayer scene, I met a shy, polite teenager, Himesh Patel, playing the character of Tamwar Masood. The Masood family had some “issue”-based storylines, just like any other family on Albert Square, but they had warmth and love and humour alongside their failings and, in the regular rough and tumble of Walford life, they didn’t feel “other”.

The past few years have seen a huge conversation around onscreen diversity and representation, led by the likes of Riz Ahmed and Lenny Henry. Alongside this we have a whole new generation of onscreen and writing and production talent, and it is heartening to see some recent breakthrough examples, such as the Guz Khan-fronted BBC series Man Like Mobeen.

Despite all the conversations, campaigns and occasional commissions, surprising decisions are still made: CBBC recently found itself criticised for a lack of east-Asian writers working on a show about a Chinese family.

My love for romcoms led me to start making a documentary two years ago for the BBC following the screenwriter Richard Curtis as he wrote his new film. I had no expectations around representation (romcoms have rarely been diverse, after all); this was to be a programme about the nitty-gritty of the writing process. It was a happy coincidence, then, that not only did the lead end up being a British Asian, but that it was Himesh Patel.

Sitting in a cinema last week, I watched Patel play Jack Malik in the Curtis-penned and Danny Boyle-directed romcom Yesterday. My heart soared as I had a “Milly moment”. Here was a British Asian playing the lead in a big mainstream film that wasn’t about an issue and where his ethnicity was incidental. And, to add to it, he was singing Beatles songs and playing guitar.

Himesh Patel with Ed Sheeran in Yesterday. Photograph: Jonathan Prime/AP

I am not saying let’s never have representation where our background isn’t incidental, but those productions need to be created by people from those communities. With a whole new generation of ethnic-minority talent on and off-screen, there is no longer an excuse for a myopic, white-decision-led narrative. At the very least, in the fight for audience, it is no longer commercially savvy to have so few stories drawn from what is a richly diverse pool.

That Milly moment was short-lived. Just this week, ITV was criticised for its new series Honour, which tells the story of the investigation into the real-life “honour killing” of Banaz Mahmod, but focuses on a white protagonist investigator. An important story to tell, perhaps, but told through a white gaze when we are still so short on more complex narratives.

I guess what I am saying is, I am just a (brown) girl standing in front of (mostly white) men, asking them to think about how to include people like me.



Download Yasmeen Khan’s documentary, In The Studio: Richard Curtis, from the BBC World Service, is available on BBC Sounds now