Television Review

IT'S MORE than 30 years since Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura had the first interracial clinch on US television. But judging by the experience of Bill Sims, Karen Wilson and their two daughters, things haven't changed much.

Bill and Karen are the couple at the heart of An American Love Story (BBC2), Jennifer Fox's painstaking documentary which is being broadcast every night this week under the Storyville label. Bill is black, a blues musician and by his own account, something of a ne'er-do-well ("I would rather be dead than have done some of the things I have done"); Karen is white, a corporate manager, shyer than Bill but readier to smile. Fox spent two years at their apartment in Queens, New York, filming their everyday doings and hearing their stories.

It comes as no shock to hear about the trouble Bill and Karen had when they first started seeing each other, in a small Midwestern town in the mid-1960s: when Bill came to visit the police would regularly find an excuse to throw him in jail, while Karen heard people talking about stringing her up from a lamp-post.

What does take you aback is finding how little things have moved on since then. Even in New York, both felt the weight of prejudice. Bill said that to be black in modern America is to feel tension every time you walk out of the door. His elder daughter, Cicily, in a fit of drunken eloquence, put it more subtly: "The colour of my skin is like a card, like a deck of cards, people are like `I know what your cards are like. You're black, that's it'."

Coming from an "interracial" family, though, Cicily had it doubly hard. She was a student at Colgate University, an institution almost as whiter- than-white as the name implies. She felt isolated by her colour, but also at odds with African-American students - one friend saw a picture of her parents and said, "That's not natural, something's wrong with your dad because he wants to marry a white woman."

The second programme, on Sunday night, followed her on a college trip to Nigeria, which rapidly split along racial lines - black students at the back of the bus, white students at the front, Cicily feeling like piggy in the middle.

It's not surprising, then, that Bill's motto should be: "Family is the most important thing. Everybody else is just acquaintance. You can't trust anybody but your family." You get a strong sense of a family driven together, strong bonds created by a sense of apartness. That's emphasised by the cramped style of Fox's filming - I wondered whether this was dictated by the size of their apartment, but even a trip to Africa didn't quite shake off the claustrophobia.

The rushed scheduling doesn't help. Presumably the point of having it all in one week is to create a sense of event. A bad idea, in my view, because it isn't quite the masterpiece it needs to be to carry that off, and because in any case it isn't that sort of film. Fox allows the narrative to unfold with patience and deliberate, verite messiness, with patches of tedium and incomprehensibility. It doesn't feel like a love story at all, in fact, but something richer: it feels like a marriage.