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Hello, this is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4, I'm Tina Dehealy. Today, a conversation with a Today a

conversation with Johnny Picks.

A theme we keep coming back to on Beyond Today is identity, trying to work out what makes

us who we are. And that's one of the reasons we wanted to speak to Johnny Pitts. He is a writer, photographer, TV presenter.

You may have also seen him on CD UK, Blue Peter or MTV and he's also the author of a book where he thinks a lot about his identity.

It's called Afropian, a portmanteau of African and European that's helped him understand his heritage, a boy from Sheffield

with a white English mother and African American father. Johnny came into the

Beyond Today's studio a few weeks ago.

I grew up in Sheffield, an area called Firth Park.

What I guess really routes me in Firth Park

is not this history of connected to Steelworks.

And my family, it's actually that it's a really

multicultural area. I grew up with Yemeni neighbors on either side of our Terrace Row,

Jamaican family opposite and then later Somalian families came in and so it was a very multicultural area.

My area's claim to fame is that it was directly where the Fulmonte was filmed.

And so it's amazing for me to have, I've always felt like nobody ever documented my area and

every my school's been demolished now my my first club that I went to the club where

my mom and dad met all my childhood landscape's been demolished but Firth Park has been preserved by the full Monte

so for me it's like amazing to. Brilliant. Your mum white British from Sheffield?

Yeah from Sheffield through and through yeah. What about your dad?

My dad's from Brooklyn.

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