Chapter 6: ‘An Open Forum for Discussion’: Desmond’s and the Representation of the Beauty Industry¹

British comedy Desmond's (Channel 4 1989–1994) portrays the everyday lives of the Ambrose family. Desmond (Norman Beaton) and his wife Shirley (Carmen Munroe) are migrants from Guyana who run a barbershop. Because Desmond, Shirley and their friends Porkpie (Ram John Holder) and Matthew (Gyearbuour Asante) are also migrants, the barbershop functions as a space of negotiation for sociocultural norms. Barbershops in the Black communities of both the US and UK are key cultural spaces and can be read as being an element of the Black public sphere. The series reinforces the barbershop as a space of cultural expression and negotiations through its characters and their discussions as well as through their music which is another form of negotiation and communication with regard to identity. As this chapter will show through close reading of the televised text, the series illustrates both the breadth of representation of the beauty industry and the depth of the barbershop as a cultural anchor for Black communities through representing and entering the public sphere.