Hanif Kureishi, an Anglo-Pakistani writer, is best known to international audiences as the screenwriter of My Beautiful Launderette, one of the greatest international successes of British television's Channel 4.

     Born in London of an English mother and a Pak­istani father, Kureishi documents the population of London's margins: an underclass of disenfranchised youth, immigrants from former British colonies, leftist intellectuals, sexual outlaws (gays, lesbians, and het­erosexuals refusing serial monogamy), and those individuals who cross class, ethnic, and sexual boundaries. His stories are often set in the Notting Hill district, a neighborhood once at the center of the country's most violent racial unrest.

     Notting Hill is also the home of film and television director, Stephen Frears, with whom Kureishi collaborated on two projects for Channel 4's Film on Four, My Beautiful Launderette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Frears is one of many British directors who ha\e worked both on films produced exclusively for television and on films that are theatrically released but have been funded all or in part by television (the two Frears­ Kureishi films are examples of the latter). Frears has repeatedly claimed that television-not the cinema­ is the best site for communicating the quality of daily life in Britain. When he encountered Kureishi's script for My Beautiful Launderette, he was excited by the prospect of bringing the story of the everyday lives of a group of entrepreneurial Pakistanis and disenfranchised white youth to a British television audience of up to 12 million people, 74 percent of whom never attend the cinema.

     The film centers on Omar, a Pakistani caught, like so many of Kureishi's characters, between two worlds-those of his leftist intellectual father, now a bitter alcoholic, and of his Uncle Nasser, a wealthy slumlord who lets his nephew revamp one of his laundromats. Omar first employs and then becomes lovers and partners with a former school chum, Johnny, one of the hundreds of unemployed white youths in London in the 1980s. The racist attacks on Omar by the other white youth are graphically depicted, but Kureishi does not demonize the perpetrators. In the universe of his stories, the once-colonized are sometimes the new exploiters, and left versus right, us versus them dichotomies do not apply. Omar respects his father but imitates his economically successful uncle, keeping his homosexual love affair with Johnny from both.

     In Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Rafi, a Pakistani official and wealthy factory owner, returns to London to rekindle relationships with his son Sammy; his leftist English daughter-in-law, Rosie; and his former mistress Alice. The film condemns Rafi's association with a government that used torture on its citizens, but Kureishi endows the character with lively hedonistic impulses that underscore his affinity with his non­ monogamous son and daughter-in-law, whose leftist beliefs are more in sync with the writers.

     Critics usually point to Kureishi's masterful use of irony in these two films whose characters embody Margaret Thatcher's meritocrats and entrepreneurs, but who still find their identity in some of the sensual excesses of the I960s-most notably sexual experimentation and/or drugs-that were decried by the Thatcher regime. In 1993 the writer adapted his own novel, Buddha of Suburbia, as a four-hour miniseries for BBC 2. This program explores the social climate of 1970s Britain leading to the rise of the conservative government of the 1980s and 1990s. Avowedly autobiographical, the narrative follows Karim, a young Anglo-Pakistani, through the experiments of the I960s that mutated into a "series of scary, delirious little moments of cocksure revolt" in the 1970s. Because of its heavy use of obscene language and explicit sexual situations, the BBC moved the time for airing the series a half-hour later than originally scheduled, and it was never picked up for U.S. television distribution (although it was screened in its entirety at the 1994 San Francisco Film Festival). Kureishi has written in his "Film Diary," that "openness and choice in sexual behavior is liberating," while "ambition and competitiveness are stifling narrowers of personality." By that prescription, his major characters-ambitious, competitive, but risk-takers in sensuality-are complex studies in the contradictions of Britain from the 1970s through the 1990s.