This study focuses on the research literature about television and ethnic minorities. It seeks to go behind the scenes and examine from the practioners' perspectives, the production of minority ethnic programmes. It focuses on the roles played by the mass media in maintaining and reproducing racialized discourses, forms of racial inequality and boundaries of ethnic inclusion and exclusion. Rather than being concerned with the level of representations - whether in relation to press and broadcast news, or television, film and other entertainment media and genres - the work is more concerned with the poverty and quality of representations, the narrow band and lack of diversity of character types in comedy and drama, or fetishized within a racialized demonology in factual programming; the negative connotations which such images provoke which lie at the centre of the representation debate in the media mainstream.