Baroness Floella Benjamin: The Fellowship 2024

The following interview appeared in the BAFTA Television Awards with
P&O Cruises official 2024 Show Notes.

This year’s Fellowship recipient is the first Black woman to hold the BAFTA honour. But Floella Benjamin, a bastion of British entertainment for five decades, has an impressive catalogue of firsts on her resume.

Speaking to me from a hotel in Northampton, where Benjamin is due to do a talk at a school the next morning, she says she’s motivated by her work making a difference but the plaudits are a nice “cherry on top”. “They just seem to come to me like a magnet,” she laughs.

Her public notoriety came from soothing the nation’s children with her plummy voice and instantly recognisable kilowatt smile on BBC’s Play School. However, along the way the first Black woman in Britain’s children’s TV also became the first actress to become a life peer in the House of Lords thanks to the Liberal Democrats.

She was also the first Afro-Caribbean woman to be a Chancellor in the UK at the University of Exeter, where a bust of her now stands that also made her the first living Black woman in the UK to have a public statue. “I’m the only person in the country that has started as an actress, and singer. Then become a writer, then an independent producer with my own production company. Then a regulator with Ofcom, and now a legislator in Parliament. I don’t think anybody has had that career path,” says Benjamin, who is not coy about her knack for pioneering.

According to her biography, What Are You Doing Here?, she may have even been the only woman resistant to David Bowie’s charms. He said “I want to offer you the world”, but, apparently, she declined to take him up on the offer.

In truth, the world is not something Benjamin waits to be given to her. It’s something she’s bravely taken for herself: crafting it the way she wanted to see it when she arrived here as a a Windrush child from Trinidad and Tobago. With a rocky start – facing physical and racial abuse as a child – Benjamin developed a tough skin. But rather than becoming a hardened and cold character, she wears her unfaltering cheer as armour and passionately works to make children’s lives more joyful. “Nothing can defeat me because my smile helps me through life,” she explains. Floella has also found it a hugely influential tool to avoid tension and defensiveness while advocating for her vision.

Her father, a jazz musician, once brought 15-month-old Floella to a Christmas party where she performed. She got on stage and told everybody: “‘Stop dancing. You’ve got it all wrong! This is how you dance.’ And from 15 months to now, I’m still telling people what they should do.”

Benjamin’s love of entertaining was palpable from the get go. By 20, she was performing in the West End in productions before segueing into television. There, she had to blaze her own trail. “One time a producer wanted me to be in an advert, and the client said, ‘We don’t want a Black person touching our products,'” she recalls.

Rather than internalise her frustrations, she would push back. “In one of my first acting roles on television, I said to one of the producers over lunch, ‘Why do Black people always have to play thieves, criminals, prostitutes? Why can’t we play professional roles, like lawyers?’ He said, ‘That’s not realistic, is it?'” Eventually producers would be a little more reflective at her observations, admitting they hadn’t noticed their blind spots. Thus began a career of gently moving the dial of representation in the industry.

Today her Play School viewers, whom she refers to as her “babies”, are grown up and include senior politicians, “I call a lot of the ministers my ‘political babies’, and I get them to change the world for me,” she says. Benjamin has influenced legislation, like her push to stimulate the home-grown children’s TV sector by giving Ofcom the power to make public service broadcasters invest in shows targeting young audiences.

She even made a lasting impression on the late Queen Elizabeth. The pair had a soul-bearing conversation during a Diamond Jubilee visit to the University of Exeter. “I told her how when I was a little girl in Trinidad, I stood in the playground and sang God Save the Queen. I was told I was British, but when I came I had to break down so many barriers. People had done wicked things to me and I had to forgive them all because if you don’t forgive you become a victim. Suddenly, something changed in her and she sat back in her chair with her beautiful, sparkling deep blue yes, and said: ‘Speaking to you like this reminds me of my conversations with Nelson Mandela, he had that same philosophy of forgiveness.'” Based on this conversation, the Queen gave Benjamin an Order of Merit two days before she died.

Glittery shoes that lit up her dance moves, bright charity shop finds inspired by her mother’s love of jumble sales, ornamental earrings – Benjamin’s distinctive style brightened our screens.

A discussion of her signature look leads to another Floella first that is near-impossible to fact-check. “I was the first Black person in this country to wear their hair in plaits and beads,” she says.

Benjamin says sporting the look on TV influenced viewer’s style, and remembers how when she debuted her braids at Cannes while there as a star of the 1977 film, Black Joy, they drew admiration from Playboy who offered her lots of money promising to make her an international star.

“I wouldn’t be doing all the things with kings, queens and presidents across the world had I done that,” she laughs.

This fellowship from her industry peers is one of her most treasured vanguard moments. Firstly, because it leaves her thankful for the late Sydney Samuelson, former BAFTA chairman, who she describes as one of her “guardian angels” for his guidance. And chiefly, because it’s a rare moment for Benjamin to reflect on everything she has achieved.

• See who else received awards at the BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises in 2024.

Awarded every year by the Academy, the BAFTA Fellowship is the highest accolade given to an individual in recognition of an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film, games or TV. Previous Fellows include Elizabeth Taylor, Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier and Judi Dench.

For more inspiring stories from the world of film, games and TV explore our BAFTA Award Stories.

See a full list of previous BAFTA Fellows.