Routes of English: No Pigeon (Series 3, Programme 4)

Melvyn visits Brixton to discover the most imitated, influential form of spoken English today. It's a dialect determined not by geography or profession, but by age, fashion and aspiration. Pulsing through music culture, spread by television and radio, it can be found throughout the UK. Sometimes subversive, often secretive, it is arguably the most vibrant and dynamic form of spoken English in Britain today - the talk, essentially, of the young black population. Melvyn Bragg visits Railton Road in Brixton to find the heart of the black linguistic culture that is today so fashionable, yet whose past is so tangled with the painful history of black and white relations, from slavery and colonisation, to the racism which greeted the immigrants who first came to Britain aboard the 'Empire Windrush' in 1948.