I'm Graham Stuart, Executive Chair
and I'm delighted to formally welcome
you to the 45th Edinburgh Television
Festival
the annual gathering of the broadcasting
clans, although this time
in a virtual Caledonia despite the
extraordinary circumstances the world
finds itself in.
We have committed to keeping Edinburgh
in August as the centre of the
broadcasting universe.
Thanks to the vision and dedication of
the Festival team
we can once again join together in our
spiritual home city
to explore and celebrate the television
industry
in a year like no other and instead of
having to brave the street performer
loaded pavements of Festival Edinburgh
this year you can experience the many
sessions, masterclasses and keynote
speeches of our event
by clicking on the keyboard in front of
you now. Not the same I admit
but I can guarantee it won't ever rain.
Every cloud.
Once again this unique broadcasting
showcase, academy
and forum is made possible by the
unflagging support of our headline
sponsors YouTube
and Freeview along with our major
partners the AHRC, BBC, Channel 4, ITV,  Little Dot Studios
Netflix, Screen Scotland, Sky, UKTV and ViacomCBS.
We thank them and everyone else playing
their part this week.
This Television Festival is for and
about you
but it's important to remember that the
Festival is entirely a charitable
venture with all money raised going to the
TV foundation
which houses our remarkable talent
schemes The Network, Ones To Watch and TV PhD which have
helped
thousands of people gain a
foothold and prosper
in the industry. The Foundation is also
committed
to making this industry a fairer and
more diverse place and is running
ongoing initiatives to fulfill that aim.
It takes an entire year to build these
four festival days and I must pay
tribute here
to the brilliant leadership of managing
director Campbell Glennie and to Creative
Director
Stewart Clarke who along with the
dedicated advisory committee members and
patrons
have performed logistic and creative
miracles to put this show
online but my particular thanks now must
go to the person
tasked with defining the theme and
message
of Edinburgh 2020 as advisory chair he
has brilliantly harnessed
the energy and passion of the entire
team and focused those
on delivering a festival and the
MacTaggart Lecture you're about to hear
which is precisely right for this moment.
It's my honour now to introduce the
Controller of BBC2
and this year's Edinburgh Advisory Chair:
Patrick Holland
Thank you Graham. It's been my privilege
to work with Professor David Olusoga
since I took the reins at BBC2
almost four years ago, our preeminent
television historian
who combines BAFTA wins with some of the
biggest audiences for the genre over the
last decade.
David is a unique broadcaster, an
academic
whose work calls for a radical
reappraisal of our shared history
from Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners to
Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files
from a House Through Time to his
magisterial Black and British
A Forgotten History, David's meticulous
evidence-based approach coupled with his
unsurpassed skills as a storyteller
takes his audience into the minds and
lives of our forebears
confronting us with the often terrible
consequences
of their actions. In Unwanted, David
uncovered documents
at the heart of government that revealed
a race-based immigration policy
operating years before the Windrush
deportation scandal.
In Forgotten Slave Owners he revealed
the shocking extent
of slave ownership across the middle
classes of Britain
with the names of Yorkshire widows
listed alongside the compensation
paid to them for their Caribbean
investments,
enslaved human beings. His method
asks us to reappraise events that other
histories have pushed to one side.
He compels us to look again who went
along with the forces of history
and didn't challenge the status quo, who
perpetuated
the structures of power ensuring their
own comfortable existence
even though it was based on gross
inequality,
who stood up and made a difference and
tonight
David brings that same intensity of
focus to bear
on his industry, our industry.
What are the choices we've made about
who we hire,
champion, encourage and promote tell us
about the values of UK television after
30 years of schemes and initiatives?
What does our failure to make lasting
change tell us about ourselves?
This is not a debate about hitting
targets. The questions
about whose stories are told, who gets to
commission them,
who gets to make them are questions
about what our industry stands for
in the face of the massive challenges of
Covid,
threats to PSB's changing audience
behaviour.
This is perhaps the most important issue
of all. It's a debate
about social justice. Ladies and
gentlemen it's my huge honour
to introduce this year's MacTaggart
Lecturer:
Professor David Olusoga
Good evening and thank you. It is such
an enormous honor to be standing
virtually here before you today
and it is truly a daunting prospect to
be giving this James MacTaggart Memorial
Lecture.
I'm humbled to have been given this
platform to talk to you,
members of the British television
industry.
The last time I attended the MacTaggart
lecture was in 1998
when I was part of that year's Edinburgh
Television Festival's
"Ones to Watch" which back then was called TV25.
For me it was an amazing experience to
be at the Festival
so early on in my career seeing the
tribes of television
gathered together and it was only then
that I got a sense
of the scale and the dynamism of this
great creative kingdom
whose walls I had somehow managed to
scale.
I learned a lot and had a lot of fun and
of course
the scheme is still going strong so I'd
like to say a very special welcome to
the Ones to Watch
of the Edinburgh Television Festival 2020
Zeb, Aodh, Abby, Felicity, Tasha
Amber, Alice, Grace, Evelyn, Hanz, Charlie Helena, Sara, Hannah, Roopesh
Frances, Lucy, Michael, Elena, Melody, Laura, Art, Gary, Olivia, Sophia, Kate
Fabian, Amy, Yero and Camilla.
I hope the festival sessions have been
as eye-opening for you
as they were for me in 1998.
looking back at MacTaggart lectures from
the past it is almost
compulsory in the first couple of
minutes to say something along the lines
of
this has been a year of incredible
change or
we stand on the threshold of a new era
for our industry.
But in 2020 I think claims like that
have never
been truer. 2020 has been an historic
year. A year of terrifying and
bewildering events that have affected
all of our lives and the impacts of the
past
six months on our industry have been
serious
and troubling. At ITV profits for the
first half of the year
have halved although most productions
are now back up and running.
Channel 4 in that channel's first year
with its
shiny new regional hubs up and running
has faced lost revenues
and cuts to its programming budget and
now we have
some idea of how the pandemic and the
lockdown
and the suspension of normal life for
all of us
has changed viewing patterns. The day
after lockdown began
Disney+ was launched in the UK. Since
then
it has become the world's third largest
SVOD channel. On top of all these
changes
we can be sure that every broadcaster
and every production company,
indeed everyone who works in our
industry
or aspires to work in it is going to be
buffeted
by the recession that is already upon us
and becoming more severe
by the week but the other
seismic event of 2020 of course
was the brutal murder of George Floyd
and the global movement that has
coalesced under the banner
of Black Lives Matter. These events the
pandemic
and Floyd's murder created a chain
reaction,
a new virus made manifest and obvious
some of the oldest and deepest
inequalities in our society.
We already had the statistics. They were
in reports that only
a few journalists and academics ever
read
but we all knew that people of colour in
our society
have inferior access to housing, worse
health outcomes,
fewer career options and that they
receive inferior treatment
in multiple aspects of daily life.
But in 2020 inequalities of class
as well as race determined not just
who got on in life but who got infected
and even who lived and who died.
Black Lives Matter and the pandemic have
forced our society to have discussions
that for decades we have put off or
we've avoided.
2020 is not therefore the year to avoid
hard truths or pull
punches. In the spirit of Black Lives
Matter,
in the spirit of an age in which
millions of people
have come to recognize that silence on
these issues
is a form of complicity I'm going to say
what I really think about diversity, race
and our industry and I'll discover if
at the end of it I still have a career.
I'm going to talk about my own
experiences and those
of other black people I've known in my
time
in TV. I'm going to speak from my own
perspective: that of
a black person but I'm well aware that
these and similar issues
affect people from other minority
backgrounds and
that race, class, gender, sexuality
and disability all intersect.
I've spent over 20 years in this
industry and I have
I hope a distinct perspective
I've seen it from both behind and in
front of camera,
from within the BBC but also from out
in the indie sector and I've been given
amazing
opportunities by television but I've
also
been patronized and marginalized. I've
been
in high demand but I've also been on the
scrapheap.
I felt inspired and convinced that our
job
making programmes, telling stories is the
best job
in the world but at other times
I've been so crushed by my experiences
so
isolated and disempowered by a culture
that does exist within our industry
that I've had to seek medical treatment
for clinical depression.
I have come close to leaving this
industry on several occasions
and I know many black and brown people
who have similar
stories to tell. I'm going to talk
about those experiences and later I'm
going to offer my thoughts as to how
our industry might ensure that this
moment, this year
of 2020, is a real and decisive moment
of change. Only those who remember
the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s
can recall the time
when the issues of race and racism were
so passionately debated
and so firmly on the agenda.
Millions of people of this year engaged
with these issues
as never before. In June of this year
five of the top 10 best-selling factual
books
in the UK were on race or black history
and in 2020 industry after industry,
company after company, institution after
institution
examined their policies, scrutinised
their internal cultures and found them
wanting.
Some have acknowledged the existence of
structural racism, others
have faced up to their historic roles in
slavery
or imperialism. Our industry
has been part of this great wave of
introspection
and action. The UK broadcasters have
responded
to Black Lives Matter with new
initiatives.
Vast sums we are assured have been
pledged
or ring-fenced. Improvements are promised
in diversity and inclusion
within senior management and
commissioning and new programmes have been
commissioned.
So much has been promised that there is
reason to hope
that this really can be a moment of
change
for our industry rather than another
false dawn and we've had a number of
those.
Later I'd like to ask what it will take
for the commitments made
by the UK broadcasters to bring about
real change.
But first i want to talk about the
mountain
that we have to climb and here
most of what iIhave to say you will have
heard before.
You may well have heard it from black
and brown colleagues
and in many ways that's the problem: we
have
heard it all before but little has
changed.
For as long as I've been in the industry
we collectively
have been aware that the people who
commission and who make
the UK's television programmes do not look
like the population at large, our
audience.
In 2016 Directors UK reported that just
2.2 percent
of the programmes in the UK were made by
BAME directors
and of the directors on their database
just 3.6 percent
were BAME which means that even though
the industry has
long claimed that it is crying out for
black producers and directors
many of those who were already in the
industry
were not getting work. Then there's the
problem
of retention. In their submission to the
Digital Culture Media and Sports select
committee
Film and TV Charity reported that even
before the current crisis
73% of BAME production talent
had considered leaving the industry.
In the time i've been in television the
vast majority of
senior black industry figures I've come
across working within the UK
broadcasters
have either moved to the indie sector or
left the industry.
Some of this is normal churn but some of
it
is not. That exodus of diverse senior
production talent
has I believe left the industry exposed.
One of the sessions at this year's
Edinburgh Television Festival asks
when will television have its first
Black channel controller.
12 years ago the Festival ran a similar
panel
asking the same question. Will the
festival of 2030
have yet another panel asking that same
question
for a third time? We are also
used to this state of affairs. I believe
that we would struggle
to imagine what proper representation
would look like.
If you were to walk onto a filming
location in London
and 36 percent, more than a third, of the
cast and crew
were people of colour you really would
notice it.
It really would feel unusual and yet
all that would represent for a London
production is a proper reflection
of the ethnic makeup of that city's
workforce.
But of course none of us have had that
experience
because that never happens. Ask Steve
McQueen
who in June said that although the lack
of inclusion of people of colour
in TV is undeniable and undeniably wrong
many people in the industry he said go
along with it
as if it is normal when in reality it's
blatant racism.
It's wonderful that our industry has
figures like Steve McQueen and
others I could mention but there is a
risk that we point
out those exceptions and use their
talents and their achievements
to hide from the wider reality.
I want to be clear that I stand here
today
not as one of the TV industry's success
stories
but as a survivor. I am one of the last
men
standing of TV's lost generation.
The generation of black and brown people
who entered this industry
15, 20, 25 years ago with high hopes
and ambitions. I'm a survivor of cultures
within TV that failed that generation
and I'm here because a handful of people
used their power
and their privilege to help me.
One of the defining features of our
profoundly divided age
is the phenomena that psychologists call
self-attribution fallacy or
self-attribution bias: the belief held by
some of those who've enjoyed
a degree of success that everything they
have achieved is solely down
to their own talents and their own hard
work.
My journey through this industry makes
it impossible for me to nurse
any such delusion. I have been
extraordinarily lucky because when I
watched the MacTaggart Lecture of 1998
the chances of a black person from my
socioeconomic background
with no industry contacts and no
financial support
getting anywhere in the industry were
not good.
While I was trying to build a career in
television thousands of other men and women of colour were giving up on
the industry
as I came close to
doing more than once.
Between 2006 and 2012 BAME employment in
UK television
declined by 30.9 percent.
that means more black people left the
industry
than joined at a time when the overall
number of jobs in the industry as a
whole
was expanding and black people are still
leaving the tv industry
at higher rates than their white
colleagues showing again
the industry's failure has been not
solely one of access
but also and critically one of retention
there is a brutal answer to the question
why are there no black controllers and
so few black company owners and black
commissioners
the people we need right now to bring
their experience
their stories their viewpoints and those
of their communities
into the tv industry the answer is
we had them and we lost them
some are in the independence sector but
many have left television altogether
they left because tv failed to support
their careers and nurture their talents
they left
because they never got that big next job
because no one championed them or helped
plan their careers
they left because even when they got
work their voices
too often will not listen to their
stories too often
not of interest to the taste makers and
program pickers who over the same period
grew ever more powerful within the
structure of television
they are not here now because we did not
have the will
to keep them and worn out by it all they
gave up
on our industry in the summer
of 2020 one member of tv's lost
generation was at the center
of the black lives matter moment when
the statue
of the slave trader edward colston was
toppled in bristol at the beginning of
june
very close to where i'm talking to you
from today every major news outlet
rushed to secure an interview with
marvin reese
the elected mayor of bristol everybody
wanted a piece of marvin not just
because he's mayor but also
because of his amazing backstory a
descendant of enslaved black people from
jamaica
and of working-class white bristolians
he was brought up
on council estates and yet rose to
become mayor of a city
that for 125 years had lionized and
validated
a slave trader it was a great story with
a a leading man
who was straight out of central casting
an articulate figure
who saw events from a unique perspective
and to the utter delight of both print
journalists
and tv news crews from across the world
marvin also turned out to be a brilliant
interviewee he knew how to deliver
perfect sentences and neat sound bites
how to tell a story with an economy of
words
and yet still land the big ideas he was
every producer's dream interviewee
but there is a reason why marvin is so
good
in front of camera and that's because he
spent years
working behind camera at the bbc in
bristol
but the talents of the black guy who now
runs a city were
seemingly invisible to the people who
then ran the newsroom
there were some who recognized his
talents skills and integrity
but not enough for him to have anything
like the sort of investment
in his career and career planning that i
have seen lavished
upon other people in my time in this
industry
and recipients of that sort of career
investment
are those who managers and indie bosses
can envisage
one day doing their jobs and i have to
say
in my experience those selected for such
elevation
tend to be carbon copies of the managers
whose champ who championed their careers
thwarted and marginalized marvin had the
nerve
to do what i was too timorous to do he
left television
to look for other avenues for his
talents and he was lost
to the industry he could be running a
production company
or be commissioning the very programs we
need right now
to respond to the challenge thrown down
by black lives matter
perhaps if marvin's talents have been
recognized
there might be no need to have a session
asking when uk television
will have its first black controller as
an historian i can tell you
that if you can run bristol a city so
proudly political and radical
that we had a mini riot over the
unwanted opening
of a small branch of tescos if you can
run bristol
you can run a television channel
what are the consequences of this
hemorrhaging of diverse talent well
it was the same newsroom in bristol that
last month decided
that it was acceptable for a white
reporter
to use the n-word in a news report
leading to almost 20 000 complaints and
an official apology from the director
general
if however in an alternative existence
marvin
might have been there or on the end of a
phone line
as a senior colleague to give advice
that incident that has genuinely damaged
faith in the bbc
in the eyes of many black people might
have been avoided
or perhaps in this alternative reality
marvin might have gone into
documentaries perhaps into the history
department
that decided that it was reasonable for
a white production team
making a program dealing with slavery to
write a script
for a white presenter that also used the
n-word
these damaging missteps i believe
are a consequence of tv having lost a
generation of people
just like marvin reese people who should
now be among
the leaders of our industry
i stayed in television because i lacked
marvin's courage but also because making
tv documentaries particularly in my case
history
and art documentaries was what i really
really wanted to do i'm a product
of that incredible culture of public
service broadcasting
that emerged in this country almost a
century ago
documentaries particularly those on the
bbc
changed my life they broadened my
horizons
they fired in the passions that i still
have today
and they inspired me to want to study
history
although as i later discovered when he
drafted the high-minded principles
of public service broadcasting lord
reith didn't exactly
have people like me and my family at the
forefront of his mind
i was in my mid-twenties when i made the
decision
to try to break into television
but that decision was founded not just
on a love of documentary but also
on naivety because in
all honesty if i had known how lonely it
was going to be
being black and working class in this
industry
how much the deck was stacked against me
in terms of both race and class i am
sad to say i would never have attempted
to build a career
in television yet looking back
the clues were there from the start
if decades ago this industry had set out
to intentionally design mechanisms by
which people like me
from council estates with no contacts or
family wealth
to fall back on could have been kept out
of the industry
it would have struggled to come up with
anything more effective
than the culture that existed when i
joined the industry
first there's the tradition of unpaid
internships and work experience
opportunities
acquired often through contacts and only
open
to those with the financial resources to
survive months of unpaid
work often in london one of the most
expensive cities
in the world one of the few
real positives of recent years is the
increase in the number
of paid internships those who get over
that hurdle
then have to navigate the casual
informal forms of recruitment
that favor those with soft skills and
with backgrounds and interests
similar to those doing the recruiting
on top of all that there is our casual
freelance culture
of short-term contracts that makes work
in our industry
just too risky for many people from
lower
socioeconomic backgrounds less talked
about
but still present is the invisible nexus
of old school ties
and oxbridge networks what i learned in
my early years in tv
is that there were parts of this
industry in which diversity meant
making sure there was a fair balance of
people from oxford and cambridge
in my career i've seen senior producers
use the system of unpaid internships
as a mechanism through which to bring
young people who had attended
their private schools into the industry
and then mentor them
and nurture their careers i have seen
the children
of the influential and the famous given
opportunities
to get a foot in the door and launch
careers i have seen the privileged
lifted over the barriers to entry that
so effectively
keep others out even when black people
overcome these barriers and scale the
high walls of television
they are all too often caught in a trap
they fall victim to a way of thinking
that contains within it
the same twisted logic as a witch trial
they are said to be lacking the
experience needed
to land the big career advancing
reputation enhancing jobs which means
they rarely get those jobs which in turn
means they never get the experience
to dispel that portrayal i know this
because
so many of the black people i've met in
this industry have recounted being
caught
in that trap i know this because i spent
much of my career
in exactly that state of limbo
yet from the outside from the
perspective of our audiences
tv appears to be doing much better at
representing the nation
tv's lack of diversity and lack of
career paths
for black and brown people is often most
pronounced in the parts
of the industry that are least visible
in
drama bame representation is far lower
behind the camera than in front of it
on-screen contributions
by bame talent are more than three times
higher
than off-screen involvement in
children's television
and in comedy there are almost twice as
many people from bama backgrounds
in front of camera than behind there is
a willingness to accept black people
as performers in front of camera but an
unwillingness
on the part of the industry to make
space for them behind the scenes
in the rooms where the decisions are
made and where the real
creativity happens when i became a
presenter
i could not help but notice that the
industry
was far more comfortable with me in that
capacity
than it ever had been with me as a
producer
i set up my own production company with
my business partner
as it seemed to be the only way i could
remain a producer
while also presenting
in this year's baftas i think you could
see
exactly this pattern at play the
television awards for 2020
recognized many of our successful
diverse actors
and presenters mo gilligan naomi akiya
idris elba and romesh ranganatham all
won awards
other bafta winning shows had diverse
casts and writers
in that most glamorous showcase our
industry's record
on diversity looked good but it was
a completely different story at the
bafta craft awards
those that recognize the skills and
talents of the people who make programs
camera operators sound engineers
directors
graphic designers at this year's craft
awards
there was not a single black or asian
winner
black and brown people in this industry
talk among ourselves about stalled
careers impossible barriers to progress
the other thing black people in tv talk
about is of not being listened to
two years ago michaela cole talked from
this platform
about what she called her slave ship
incident
in which she'd witnessed how black
actors on one of her own productions
had been expected to accept inferior
treatment
like many black people in the industry
that experience
struck home but in my case it did say
because i had one just like it the irony
is that mine took place actually on
a reconstructed slave plantation we had
built in jamaica
for a drama documentary as
we were filming in a remote part of the
island we set up our own catering
and on the first day cast and crew and
extras
queued up for lunch but without
informing me it had been decided that
the actors and crew
were to eat first the extras would get
their lunch
afterwards standard procedure perhaps
but the unintended effect was that white
people ate first
and black people only after they had
finished
so beside a reconstructed 18th century
slave village
on the actual site of a former slave
plantation
up in the hills of a former slave colony
the extras themselves the descendants of
enslaved people
queued up in the sun and waited for the
white folk
to finish their lunch what was most
shocking about this to me
was that my white colleagues good decent
creative people
genuinely couldn't see the problem but
it was a problem
that the black actors and the black
extras had no difficulty seeing
when i challenged my colleagues i was
met with a wall of hostility
and resistance this i was assured had
nothing to do with race but then
in our industry nothing ever has
anything to do with race because our
industry
is full of people who have convinced
themselves
that they are colorblind that's a
laudable ambition
but here's the problem being blind to
race
is being blind to the way race operates
within our society
and that means being blind to the lived
experiences
of people of color one of my
overwhelming
memories looking back at 20 years in
television
is of loneliness because being the
only black person in the room or on
location is not
just about skin color it's about
differences
of experience being the only black
person on a production
means being the only person asking
certain questions
the only person uncomfortable often with
an image or a sequence that reinforces
or
risks reinforcing certain stereotypes
like other black people i know in this
industry
i've spent my career complaining that
scripts or rough cuts
contain interviews with white experts
but all the black contributors are
victims of the phenomena in question
or they're speaking about their personal
experiences
their feelings not their expertise
i've fought against directors who
subconsciously believe
that educated black people are somehow
inauthentic
as if being uneducated and unlettered
is the natural authentic condition of
people
with darker skins these tropes
this sort of unexamined thinking when
left unchallenged
can reinforce the stereotypes and
inequalities
that we should be challenging i'm not
saying that the viewpoints
of black or asian people are better or
more deserving
of consideration than those of our white
colleagues
it's just that they are different the
different because
our lives and our experiences are
different and here
different does not mean any more or less
impartial
or journalistic we can have a different
perspective
and still be just as impartial and as
objective as anyone else
no industry training scheme and no
amount of monitoring
will lead to real change unless we
accept
that just having people of color in the
room
is not enough the industry also
needs to listen to us to value our
perspectives
and our stories to understand that we
come from a different place we consume
different culture read different books
and see the world
from a different perspective and that
those perspectives are valuable
when tv accepts this and listens to the
creative visions
of people like michaela cole and steve
mcqueen audiences
are enthralled marginalizing the voices
of non-white producers and directors is
i believe
inhibiting our industry's ability to
tell a wider range
of stories but it's also damaging
non-white people themselves there are
consequences
of always being in a minority of one
always seeing
what others don't see this takes a toll
my own history of depression testifies
to that
when i asked marvin reese why he had
finally
given up and left the industry this is
what he said
the truth is the bbc just wore me down
with hopelessness of course black people
are not alone in being affected by what
variety magazine has called tv's
mental health crisis but seeking to
escape
from a work culture that is emotionally
damaging
is one of the reasons they often give
for having decided
to leave our industry
the culture of television is at times
not only devastating to black people's
mental and emotional health it is also
reputationally catastrophic many of the
black people i've known in my years in
tv
have at some point or other in their
careers
been labeled difficult
one colleague i worked with complained
endlessly that i was especially
difficult
i was difficult whenever i talked about
the sensitivities
of black history or warned of the
dangers of racial tropes or
unintentionally reinforcing racial
stereotypes
i was they told me too political too
sensitive
too assertive but my colleague
had a solution what i needed to do was
to be more like
another black person that they knew this
other black guy
was far more relaxed he was less caught
up in all of this
history stuff he didn't feel the need to
discuss
race racism stereotypes or any of that
annoying stuff
if only i could be more like him
because then we would all just get along
this ideal black guy was someone my
colleague would hang out with he'd
come round their house and listen to
music in
perfect racial harmony
as this piece of advice went on and i
learned more biographical details
of this ideal black person i began to
wonder if perhaps
the reason they were so unthreatening so
relaxed and so laid back
might have been because the black person
i was being urged to emulate
was my colleague's cannabis dealer
don't know stuff don't have opinions
that clash with mine don't challenge me
or my presumptions
be the sort of black person i'm
comfortable with
be more like a drug dealer that is what
i was told by a colleague
in our industry it often feels
as if our diversity is cherished only so
long
as it doesn't upset or challenge the
values and beliefs
of those with power
once stamped with a label difficult with
all its implied threats to career
and career advancement black people face
an impossible choice they can either
stay silent about their views and their
perspectives
or they can speak out and risk being
rendered
unemployable these sorts of experiences
are i'm afraid
common among black and brown people in
our industry
the failure to get the jobs needed to
build careers the
failure to be listened to the ease with
which they are labeled
difficult television's
lost generation spent their careers in a
strange
orwellian world of doublethink they
listened
to announcement after announcement they
saw initiatives launched
and they watched training schemes come
and go
yet at the same time their own careers
and those of people of color around them
withered on the vine official
pronouncements
and lived experiences bore little
relationship
to one another
the initiatives and training schemes of
the past 30 years
were largely focused on bringing black
people into the industry
and the fundamental philosophy
underlying them
was that people of color needed to be
better trained and better instructed
in how to fit in and get on within the
industry
not that the culture of the industry
itself
needed to undergo any significant
structural change
black lives matter has transformed
debates about race more profoundly than
any phenomena i have known
in my lifetime among the ideas the
movement
has forced into public consciousness is
that the work
of confronting racism and racial
injustice is not the task
of people of color alone if true
diversity
is our aim the mechanism to achieve it
is proactive inclusion which entails not
merely bringing black people
into an industry but also recognizing
the ways in which the internal cultures
of that industry
can exclude marginalize and damage them
when we identify structural inequality
we need to make
structural change not merely seek to
bring
a new generation of people of color into
a system
that has historically failed them
but 30 years of failed initiatives and
ineffective training schemes
and the constant hemorrhaging of bame
talent
has left behind another legacy
a lack of trust so deep that the
announcements and the initiatives of
2020
have been met by many people of color
not with
enthusiasm and excitement but with a
skepticism
born of repeated disappointment
proving that this time such skepticism
is not warranted
is among the biggest challenges facing
the uk broadcasters
and the indie sector
but there is i honestly believe real
reason to be hopeful
this time it does feel different
the response of the uk broadcasters to
black lives matter are in some respects
distinct
from those of the past there is a new
determination among the broadcasters
to drive diversity into senior
management at board level
and critically into commissioning but is
there a willingness
for real structural and cultural change
and if there is where will
accountability come from
who will determine if the money pledged
is actually spent and if recruitment
targets
are actually met when our industry has
made big structural changes in the past
its success
or failure has been measured and
assessed by our industry regulator
ofcom but when it comes to diversity
ofcom has a history of giving the
broadcasters
a clean bill of health or at worst a
cursory note
that they could do better but with no
consequences attached or even
suggestions as to what better would look
like
just as there is an historic lack of
trust towards the broadcasters
ofcom i am sad to say lacks credibility
and trust
among many black and asian program
makers
if ofcam is not able or willing to hold
the industry accountable
on diversity and inclusion or able to
use its power to set minimum standards
then the dcms should set up a new body
who is willing to do so
this moment in 2020 with so much money
on the table and so many promises made
is the perfect time
to bring such a body into existence
this is not asking for a revolution it's
merely asking for accountability
and it's not just the broadcasters who
need to be held
accountable the part of our industry in
which most people are employed
is the independent production sector the
indies
need to do better and they need to want
to do better
all companies but particularly the
larger ones
need to champion careers and spot talent
they need to recognize
that many of the young black and brown
people who have got a foot
into the door of our industry have
already climbed
mountains of disadvantage that their
privileged peers
have never encountered and know little
about
in the years me and my business partner
have been running our small production
company
what has made us most proud are not just
the programs we've made
but the diverse teams we've assembled to
make them both behind and in front of
camera
at the beginning of every production we
ask ourselves
what will the team photograph look like
will it resemble
the country we actually live in the
audiences
we actually serve like every company
we've got much more to do when we've
seen
real upheaval in our industry in the
past they have been about
restructuring the industry with regards
to who has power
in my time in television the
broadcasters and the independent sector
have made enormous progress in
addressing tv's long-standing
london bias look at the energy
inventiveness and decisiveness
that went into that new production bases
wheeled into existence
in salford leeds glasgow and here in
bristol
with the indies rushing to set up
offices in those cities
and to cultivate local production talent
both indies and broadcasters need to
find the same energy
and apply it to diversity and inclusion
we have to fully own this problem and
find
the will to affect change and we need
to do it now because 2020 hasn't
just been one of those dramatic years in
politics
it's been a moment of generational
change
the pandemic the reason we're not
together in edinburgh today
took the older generations off the
streets and handed those streets over
to the young who use that space to make
demands
about the issues that matter to them
there is one thing about this generation
that i
have learnt while lecturing and while
talking to the young people who read my
books or watch the programs
i present and it's something that i
don't think
we in this industry yet fully appreciate
this generation's attitude to race and
discrimination
is profoundly different from that of
previous generations
they don't just oppose racism they are
repelled by it
they are disgusted by it young people in
this country both black and white simply
do not want to live in a society
disfigured
by racism and racial inequality and they
are willing
to have the difficult conversations that
the generations before them
chose to avoid at its core
black lives matter is a global movement
with a simple message
silence inaction or ineffective action
is not neutrality it's complicity
the generation that is leading this
global shift in consciousness
and for whom these principles are sacred
is also a generation that our industry
is at risk
of losing they are a generation we have
yet to convince
of the lessons i learned in my childhood
of the magical
transformative educative power of public
service broadcasting this is a
generation to whom
we have yet to demonstrate our relevance
we can do that by listening to them
on this and other issues
so in the end it comes down to this does
our industry
have the will to genuinely share power
with those who have for so very long
been marginalized and silenced
thank you
you
