Writer and broadcaster Bonnie Greer goes in search of the black image as portrayed by white European artists in this provocative and revealing film.

She tells us what triggered her interest in this subject and some of the surprising aspects of her journey.

BBC Four: What was the spark that led you to make this programme?
Bonnie Greer: I was walking down Charing Cross Road one rainy day and popped into Foyles bookshop. I saw a series of books called The Image of the Black in Western Art that went from Egyptian times to the beginning of the 20th century.

It was fascinating. For instance, I didn't know that so many Masters had painted black images before. As I was looking through the books it seemed to me that these images changed in very interesting ways. They made me ask myself whether they were in fact some kind of mirror of the Western psyche - that they were being used to make statements about various and sundry things from fear, all the way to liberty and god.

I wanted to make a film that on one level began to explore that psyche and secondly to look at how the black image has been central in European culture for thousands of years - that we are not strangers. We didn't just come to Britain 50 years ago - we are central to British culture. The black madonnas in Walsingham and Willesden for instance were patron saints of all the kings of Europe until Henry VIII burned both of them during the dissolution at Chelsea in the 16th century.

BBC Four: It's very personal journey you make in the film. What were the most surprising aspects of your travels?
BC: I think to see St Maurice at Madgeburg and to find out that this particular church had 20 different images of this black saint. He was the patron saint of Otto the Great, who formed the Holy Roman Empire, so he was the patron saint of Western Europe itself for a thousand years. And he survived all these different phases of German history, including Hitler's race laws, which is astounding. It has to be that St Maurice meant so much to those people that to touch him would have brought Nazism down. Hitler knew it.

BBC Four: Jean-Paul Gaultier is very effusive in the film about the black influences in his work. Was this something you were aware of beforehand?
BC: I knew that he'd done a collection in 1997 where he sent out the whole catwalk with black females, which is very unusual, so I wanted to see him because of that. But I didn't know that black images and black women are always in his mind whether he is making anything pertaining to black women or not. I had no idea that we were so central to his métier. So that was extremely surprising and probably known in the fashion world but not more widely.

BBC Four: Finally, what's happened to the portrait that Maud Sulter paints of you in the film? Do you now have it?
BC: Hopefully the National Portrait Gallery will take it. They're negotiating about it at the moment. I hope so!