Small Axe is great: now let's have some films about black life outside London

Small Axe is a giant leap forward for black British film-making: five films made by the most celebrated British director of his generation going out at primetime on BBC One. I, along with many others, have appreciated every second, partly because I know a camera has never been allowed to linger on the black British experience like this.

Related: Small Axe review – Steve McQueen triumphs with tales of Britain's Caribbean history

The whole project is rooted firmly in Steve McQueen’s London, but when I interviewed him he said there was a plan for another series with stories from black communities outside of the capital. “There are amazing stories that haven’t been told,” he said.

I can’t wait to see them, because frankly, we’ve waited long enough.

Black Londoners can reach for a slim but established canon of films: from Burning an Illusion via Babylon and Babymother all the way to Bullet Boy and Blue Story. But what about those of us who are black British and from outside of the M25? My own experiences are rooted in the black Yorkshire experience, and if I went to look for that representation on screen, particularly in fictional stories, I’d find a pretty bare cupboard. As would a black person from Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham.

Part of the explanation lies in demographics. More than 70% of the film industry is based in London and the south-east, and just under 60% of the UK’s black population lives in the capital. It makes sense that there would be a focus on London-based stories. But you’d still expect there to be a noticeable sub-strand of black British cinema that had developed in other cities with large established black populations. In cities like Birmingham, the film-makers are there but they struggle to get their films properly backed and distributed – especially if they fall outside the “urban” categorisation.

Hanging over all of this is the simple scarcity of black British films. Since Horace Ové’s Pressure in 1975, considered by many as the first black British feature film, there has been just a slow drip of productions rather than a steady stream. To give an example of the institutional brick wall, look to the BBC’s Play for Today: between 1970 and 1984, in more than 300 dramas of the anthology series, just three productions were even partly scripted by black writers. And black northern film-makers have never fared well in the industry: Welcome II the Terrordome, Ngozi Onwurah’s debut in 1995, was critically mauled because she presented a futuristic vision of a racially fraught Britain. As a Geordie, she is still one of only a handful of black film-makers from outside of the capital to ever make a widely distributed feature.

‘Since Horace Ové’s Pressure in 1975, considered by many as the first black British feature film, there has been just a slow drip of productions rather than a steady stream.’ Photograph: Ronald Grant

The Black Lives Matter movement prompted a pledge from the BBC to spend £100m on diverse programming and ITV’s efforts to invest in black talent and creativity. It all sounds impressive, but there remains a London-centric commissioning system that can’t seem to comprehend black life in a regional setting.

For many in the media, “authentic” black British life begins and ends in the capital. The black people who choose to live outside it should be pitied or asked, as Benjamin Zephaniah was of his life in rural Lincolnshire, “Why do it to yourself?” His answer probably came as a revelation to many. “Because it’s great, and we’re British and we can live anywhere we want to,” he said. “This is our country, and if we keep living in inner cities people will stereotype us as inner-city people.”

Recently there has been a surge in Yorkshire-centric commissioning by Channel 5, with viewers flocking to several programmes offering a comforting, pastoral and almost exclusively white vision of the county I grew up in. When asked why his programming is so pale, Ben Frow, Channel 5’s controller, said “Sometimes when I’m talking to producers they say that Yorkshire is very white. I say, find them, you’ve got to make the extra effort.”

Having grown up in Bradford, a city where more than 20% of the population is of Pakistani heritage, I consider the idea of someone struggling to “find them” in Yorkshire as insulting as it is hilarious. Perhaps the real issue is that more racially diverse places like West Bowling, Chapeltown and Burngreave don’t fit with the idealised Yorkshire “identity” Channel 5 is wedded to?

More damaging is that a lack of representation on-screen comes alongside a lack of understanding in the real world. “We don’t know in terms of drama what it’s like to be Caribbean, or a Nigerian or Ghanaian-British person living in Moss Side, Liverpool or Bristol, beyond what we think historically around questions of riots or the odd character in Brookside,” says Dr Clive Nwonka, author of the forthcoming book Black Boys: the Aesthetics of British Urban Cinema.

Representation in drama matters. One of the most powerful scenes in McQueen’s Mangrove happens when the police randomly pick up a young black man walking home with his shopping. They beat him and dump him in a police cell, where he is later found by his mother and others. Her reaction, taking one look at her son’s battered face then attacking the officers, tells you more in a few seconds about the impact of police brutality than any news story. It’s visceral, you can feel it. It changes you once you’ve seen it. The Anthony Walker drama did something similar, so did Shola Amoo’s The Last Tree.

You’d think by now a country that has produced dozens of state-of-the-nation dramas would have seen the worth in one about Liverpool’s black population, the oldest such community in Britain, in the wake of the 1981 uprising in Toxteth?

Lovers Rock, the second film in the Small Axe collection, was a celebration of culture, so why can’t there be projects that look at the black dancers of the northern soul scene or the electro-funk scene in Huddersfield? Steven Knight’s forthcoming drama series looks at Coventry’s 70s/80s 2-Tone music scene – but there could be much more.

McQueen has hacked down one door with Small Axe and I can’t wait to see what he does next. But can more commissioners and producers see the value in black stories that aren’t set in London or will McQueen be left to do the heavy lifting for them? Our impact has been huge, now we need a film and TV industry that finally sees us.

• Lanre Bakare is the Guardian’s arts and culture correspondent