The research, led by Trevor Philips, chief of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was conducted after the alleged racist abuse of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty on the reality show Big brother in 2007.

It found that Black and Asian viewers felt that despite the growing number of ethnic minorities living in UK, they are still under-represented on hit television shows. Phillips said that all evidences prove that television is still "hideously white where it matters".

"Most ethnic minority participants felt that the media has a responsibility to reflect Britain's diversity across all genres and was failing to do so in three main ways: by relying on tokenistic and stereotyped representation of characters; by representing extreme and exaggerated characters; and by failing to reflect the realities of contemporary ethnic minority culture," he said.

All these shortcomings were attributed to some extent to the perceived lack of a representative power base within UK media.

The study’s findings, reported in the Daily Telegraph on Thursday, finds that when non-whites did appear in dramas and soaps, they are often "token" characters stereotyped as Asian shopkeepers.

Black and Asian viewers said they were concerned that white viewers are getting a wrong impression of the ethnic minority groups because they were often inaccurately portrayed on screen.

An Indian woman said, "We would like to see a more realistic view of Asians. A lot of Asians are professionals and educated and we don't just work in corner shops."

Another black Caribbean man complained, "They don't portray black people doing different roles and in every aspect of every field, like doctors, lawyers and architects”. The research comes only weeks after Samir Shah, a non-executive director at the BBC, accused broadcasters of rampant tokenism in their programming.