Perri Kiely hopes Diversity's BAFTA nomination keeps the conversation about racism "alive".
Perri Kiely
The dance troupe - who won 'Britain's Got Talent' several years ago - returned to the ITV talent show's stage last year to perform a routine inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, which received 24,500 complaints to Ofcom, but Perri stands by the group's performance.
Speaking to The Sun newspaper, he said: "Touching on subjects as big as what we talked about, we were always going to get a lot of complaints. It would have been weirder to not talk about it so we did our job, we stood up for what’s right. Every single person on that stage is proud of that performance... and now we’re up for a Bafta, how crazy is that? It happened, it needs to be spoken about not glossed over. Hopefully this gets everyone talking about it more – because we need to talk about it and we need to change. People can do it however they want, but we’re performers, that’s how we express ourselves."
Meanwhile, Perri previously branded the routine as "common sense".
He said: "We’d never been those types of people to be 'controversial' or put ourselves out there like that, but this was more than important, this was actually happening in the world, and we were given a platform of that scale – to us it was common sense ... With any performance you do, not everyone’s going to like it, and when you bring in a subject like that to TV, of course you’re going to expect people to say things ... but I think it was like 24,000 complaints to Ofcom, which is insane, it’s unheard of. Especially when you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re just saying it how it is."
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