Is It Better To Be Mixed Race? C4, 8pm

MIXED race people are Britain's fastest growing ethnic group.

Currently making up less than 2 per cent of the population, they seem to be having an impact way beyond their numbers.

Lewis Hamilton and Leona Lewis, for example, are highly visible in the worlds of sport and entertainment.

Over in America, meanwhile, there's Tiger Woods and Barack Obama.

Yet right-wing groups continue to claim the mixing of races is destructive and against some kind of natural order.

This documentary sees Aarathi Prasad, geneticist and mother of a mixed-race child, set out to challenge the science of racial purity and examine claims that there are, in fact, biological advantages to being mixed race.

She meets Professor Bill Amos, from Cambridge University's zoology department, who believes mixed-race individuals have a higher tolerance to disease.

But, if so, why is it that when Europe has such a wide gene pool, its populations are more subject to diseases such as dementia and multiple sclerosis than other populations.

Dr Jim Wilson, population geneticist, says: "We can actually see that lots of people who wouldn't normally consider themselves inbred, urban Europeans for instance, are actually rather inbred because they share a lot of ancestors.

"When we looked at this biologically, it's better not to be pure bred. You'd rather be mixed to decrease the chances of recessive genes having an effect."