Once Upon A Time A Black Man Was Working In TV....

If we want more people from diverse backgrounds working in television we need to start telling better stories.

My earliest memory is being picked up from nursery by someone who was not my mother, being very upset about this and being unsure of this woman (I still don’t know who it was). The woman then took me to a canteen and gave me chips which made me happy. I must have been about three or four at the time.

Cognitive science struggles with why we don’t remember very much before the age of about four. Children younger than four definitely have memories. They can tell you what happened to them a few days previously and they don’t act shocked every time they see their parents, they remember who they are. Also under a brain scan the brain synapsis that seems to form memories for a young child seem to be the same as an adult’s. Therefore the mystery is; why do we really only remember things from four years onwards?

The latest scientific theory is that it is at the age of about four that we learn how to construct stories (or “narratives” to give it the correct term). The fact of the matter is that we find it very hard to retain information unless we can put it into a simple narrative. Even as adults we are twenty times more likely to remember a fact if it’s wrapped up in a story than if we are just told the fact by itself.

It seems as if our brains are hardwired to like stories. We dream in narrative, we make sense of our lives in narrative and we make nearly all important decisions through narrative. Politicians understand the importance of storytelling. More often than not, it is not the best politician that wins the election but the one with the best story. It is thought by most people that Bill Clinton won the first Presidential election due to his “story” of “Coming From A Place Called Hope (Arkansas)” over coming tremendous odds where anything was possible with hope. Sixteen years later Hillary Clinton almost beat Barack Obama through a strong story about an important phone call coming into the White House at 3am asking the electorate who they would rather trust. Just stating the fact that Barack Obama had only been a Senator for less than four years was not enough Hillary knew she had to put that fact into a story.

Over the years, working in television, I have been genuinely puzzled at the lack of progress of achieving better employment figures of people from diverse back grounds working in the industry. I recognise that there are some amazing successes, we have several female channel controllers, the head of BBC News is a woman and every time I see Pat Younge he gives me hope that there isn’t a glass ceiling that can’t be broken eventually. However the facts remain that women, people with disability and BME’s are all underrepresented in TV and become increasingly scarce the higher up the pay scale you go (despite some notable and hopefully growing exceptions). 

At least every couple of months I go to a BBC management meeting where we are presented with the facts about diversity yet little seems to change. The facts don’t seem to translate into effective action. The response by a lot of us interested in increasing diversity when we see this lack of progress is to present even more facts. Instead of realising that this approach is clearly not working.  

If we really want to change the minds and policy of people in power we have to learn what every politician worth their salt already knows and every four year old knows instinctively: Narrative is everything.   

Considering so many of us work in the media it is surprising that we have been so slow to construct a compelling narrative of how and why more people from diverse backgrounds should be employed in television. So let’s stop trying to uncover more and more facts about diversity and spend a little more time in practicing our storytelling.

Who's Afraid Of The "R" Word?

Large sections of British society want to portray much of the discussion around racism, sexism and other diversity issues as “Political Correctness gone mad” but is that just another way to shut us up?

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last weeks (or are living on a diet of X-Factor and the Apprentice) you will know that racism is once again in the headlines. First there was Tiger Woods’ former caddy wanting to put things inside the golfer’s orifices, then there was England captain John Terry insulting Anton Ferdinand and finally last week Fifa President Sepp Blatter saying racism could be solved with a friendly handshake.

These events have caused some people not to ask if society is becoming more racist but whether we have all become too sensitive about racism and name calling and once again to ask is this all “Political Correctness gone mad”? The BBC topical discussion and phone-in programme “Sunday Morning Live” joined in with the debate with three panellists – Gerry Robinson, Carole Malone and John Amaechi – trying to answer these very questions. The two white panellists Gerry Robinson and Carole Malone both thought society had become too sensitive and ordinary white people now live in fear of saying the wrong thing and being accused of being racist. Carole Malone described an incident where she was too scared to even describe a shop assistant as black just in case this was misconstrued as being racist.

I’m not doubting Carole Malone and Gerry Robinson’s experience in shops but when it comes to working in TV the truth is normally the reverse. Accusing anyone of racism (or much worse of being a racist) takes tremendous guts. Accusing anyone of the ‘R’ word can jeopardise your job, your career, social standing and risk being alienated by your colleagues.

Being accused of being racist almost has the same social opprobrium as being a called a paedophile or wife-beater. While it is a sign of progress that racism is now seen as completely unacceptable in a way it wasn’t thirty years ago the stigma attached to the label can scare people from raising the issue let alone pointing fingers.

Take the simple act of blogging for example. I often have discussions with black colleagues about the issues of prejudice and racism in the television industry but when I suggest they blog about it as I do (or talk to other people in power about it) they regularly tell me that they don’t want to “rock the boat”. They tell me that I have a “safe” staff job at the BBC and I’m senior enough to say the things I say without fear of receiving my P45. They feel that raising any of the points they regularly talk about when amongst colleagues and friends from diverse backgrounds could mark them out as troublemakers. They worry that talking about racism in the television industry is the equivalent of calling people in very powerful positions in the industry (their current and future bosses) “paedophiles”.

We have got to find a way in which colleagues can raise issues of race without fearing that they are committing career suicide. Similarly we need find a way to look at inequality and race related problems in the television industry without those in power becoming overly defensive, fearing that they are being labelled “racist” and pushed in the same corner as wife-beaters, rapists and paedophiles.

The recent incidents involving Sepp Blatter, John Terry and Steve Williams show that racism is still an important problem that needs to be addressed. But just as everyone from David Cameron to David Beckham realise a friendly handshake won’t solve racism neither will being afraid of using the ‘R’ word.

One Is Never Enough

I was recently invited to attend the launch of Powerlist 2011 – an event recognising powerful and influential black people in the UK (I crept on to the list in the “40 and under category”). A lot of the black people at the launch event were truly inspiring having broken glass ceiling after glass ceiling. As I was making small talk over finger food afterwards the one feature that lay behind a lot of their achievements is that they were often the only black person in their field, their office or even their company. From my own experience of often being the only black person in a production team or TV department, I wondered about what effect this has been having on achieving true diversity. Let me give you an example.

Working in current affairs, I regularly come across weird and wonderful crime stories. A few months ago a black man in a car was pulled over by the police. The police discovered that he was driving without insurance, hand-cuffed him and arrested him. However, after he had been arrested the driver got into a dispute with the police officer. It just so happened that the arresting police officer also happened to be black.  The black driver then proceeded to call the black police officer a number of names including “black c---” and “black bastard”.

In England and Wales, under the Crime And Disorder Act 1998, if someone commits a crime and it is proven to have a racial element they are subject to a harsher sentence (similar laws apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland). Hence, when this case came to court the black driver was found guilty of a far more serious racially aggravated offence than he would have been otherwise.

It was a minor case, and as it happened in England we definitely weren’t going to cover it up here in BBC Scotland. However, it nevertheless came up in discussion over lunch one day with my white colleagues and friends.  Nearly all of them thought that the black driver was guilty of racism and deserved to have a stiffer sentence than if he hadn’t called the officer racist names.  Obviously, so did the jury in the case.  On the other hand, nearly all BME colleagues and friends I also raised the story with later thought charging a black man with a racially aggravated crime against a black police officer made a mockery of the very good reasons the additional legislation of racial aggravation was introduced in the first place.

I’m not sure which group of friends and colleagues are right (and I hope everyone noticed the “nearly all” in both group – not all white people and not all BME people think the same).  But what it does highlight is that people from different racial groups with different life experiences can often view the same events differently.

The problem is that as I talked the story through with my white colleagues over lunch I was acutely aware that I was the only questioning voice.  I was worried that I would either be seen as having bad judgement (an extremely important quality in television and journalism in particular) or worse still thought to have a racial chip on my shoulder. I felt insecure in voicing a dissenting opinion – despite the fact I was the most senior person sitting at the BBC canteen table talking.

If there had been just one other person putting forward an alternative view, or one other BME person sitting at the table, I would have been a lot bolder. I see this all the time with both Scottish issues and with women’s issues. I often see the single Scot in London not voicing a particular view on “English prejudice” as they are worried they will be typecast as the “Angry Scot”.  Yet when he or she is back in Glasgow amongst fellow Scots they are quite the opposite. I know many women who keep their opinions to themselves concerned they will be viewed as “man-hating-feminists”.

Ironically enough, having the odd woman, disabled person or BME member of staff working by themselves can fail to increase diversity.  The sole diverse member of staff striving to fit in will worry about sticking out or being known only by their differences. Far from increasing plurality of views having only one member of staff from a diverse background can sometimes cause even more consensus.

The answer to this problem of course is simple. We need to employ even more diverse staff (easier said than done). Breaking glass ceilings and being the only BME (or woman or disabled person) at a particular level is important, and it is brilliant that there are events like the Powerlist 2011 to recognise these achievements. But until these trailblazers have company I’m not convinced that we will achieve true diversity.

Black Criminals On TV

I recently had my first viewing of a Panorama rough cut on the issue of fuel crime. With petrol and diesel prices at an all time high and the UK having the highest taxed fuel in the E.U. it is a multi-million pound issue involving the Treasury, organised crime and even former terrorists.

At the bottom end of the crime scale are basic forecourt drive-offs: people who fill up their car and simply drive off without paying. But even this can be big business, with some criminals not only filling up their tanks but jerry-cans in the boot and driving off with hundreds of pounds worth of fuel at a time and selling it on. A few weeks ago, my team told me that they had secured an interview with one of these drive-off criminals. Thought to be a “one-man-crime-wave”, this person was responsible for stealing thousands of litres of petrol and is currently serving time in Strangeways prison (now officially HM Prison Manchester).

Being allowed into Strangeways and securing the interview took a lot of hard work and was a bit of a journalistic coup. All the time the producer and reporter were briefing me about the film and the interview I never gave the ethnicity of the criminal a second thought. We were all too busy focusing on the journalism to worry about his skin colour.

However after watching the first rough cut and discovering that the Strangeways’ convict is black I would be lying if I said my heart didn’t sink and my completely emotional and non-professional reaction was: “why does he have to be black?”

When people talk about improving on screen diversity they usually discuss as if it is a simple issue. But the longer I have worked in television the more complicated it seems to become.

I remember giving a lecture to film students in Johannesburg, when the subject of television’s representation of HIV and AIDS came up. HIV is a massive issue in South Africa with one in four people between the ages of 15 – 49 being HIV positive. The predominantly black students complained that South African TV nearly always portrayed HIV as a black issue. “AIDS affects everybody” one of them told me, “but 9 times out of 10, when you see someone with HIV or AIDS on TV they are black”.

The sad reality is that 13.6% of all black South Africans are HIV positive, while only 0.3% of white people are. That means that if there were an even number of blacks and whites for every 1 white person with HIV there would be 45 black people with HIV. However as black people make up approximately 80% of the South African population and whites 10%, the more accurate figure is for every 1 white person with HIV, there are 360 HIV positive black people. All of a sudden 9 times out of 10 sounds like South African TV is actually underestimating the “black problem” and inaccurately reflecting the reality. What the film students were asking for was favourable portrayal.

On the other hand, a few years ago when rising knife crime statistics had gripped the imagination of the UK press, a BBC Panorama programme was broadcast, which showed journalists going into a youth offenders unit and interviewing 5 or 6 perpetrators of knife crime. All but one of the interviewees was black. In London, it is thought that 46% of people arrested of a knife crime are black. So that’s just 1 out of 2, rather than 5 or 6 out of 7. I hasten to add that this is arrests rather than people convicted, so may well reflect more on policing practice than the reality of knife crime. But even if you accept the London figures as being a fair indication of the racial breakdown of knife criminals, the Panorama programme certainly seemed to over-represent the proportion of black people engaged in this particular crime.

And it did. That Panorama programme was made by a London-based production team. Back in 2009, there is no doubt that knife crime was perceived by a lot of Londoners as a “black issue”. But to those of us outside of London, we found it rather strange. Glasgow actually has the highest rate of violent crime in the UK, and knife crime levels are more than 3 times higher in Scotland than the rest of the UK. Having visited several Scottish penal institutions, I am pretty sure almost all those convicted of knife crime are white. If knife crime has a “racial profile” in Scotland, it is most definitely a “white issue”.

On-screen representation of race in current affairs programmes is difficult at the best of times. Good news rarely makes headlines and who wants to be the subject of bad news? I do not believe it should be the role of factual television producers to make programmes that show favourable representations of one diverse group or another. What any factual programme-maker should strive for is accuracy – and on certain sensitive issues that means doing your homework really well.

If there are 360 more HIV positive black South Africans to every white South African, it would be wrong to show a white person with HIV every time you showed a black case study (which is what one of the film students was arguing for). But it is equally wrong for British television to paint a picture that the majority of knife criminals are black when they clearly aren’t (not in London which has the largest black community let alone the rest of the UK). Accuracy and honesty in film-making must be our guiding principle in on-screen representation of diversity and that involves research of knowing what the true figures are.

Unfortunately, there appear to be no figures for the racial breakdown of fuel crime. But taking the rough cut Panorama programme on fuel crime that I saw, as a whole the film identifies over a dozen people breaking the law. The fact that one of the most prolific happens to be black might irritate me emotionally, but journalistically I think my team have probably represented the reality accurately and honestly enough.

Lessons From A Serial Killer

Could a convicted serial killer teach us all a lesson in diversity?

On the 4^th October, possibly the most important programme I have ever overseen was broadcast. But I suspect very few of the people reading this blog will have seen it. It was a programme aired only in Scotland. And it was about a possible miscarriage of justice.

Colin Norris is a convicted serial killer currently serving 30 years. He was a nurse who supposedly poisoned at least five elderly patients with insulin – killing four of them in 2002.

The programme was staffed by a lot of journalists who used to work on the series “Rough Justice” - which specialised in bringing miscarriage of justices to light. Our film on Colin Norris (BBC Scotland Investigates: The Hospital Serial Killer), revealed new scientific evidence that casts doubt on the insulin poisoning that he was convicted for. As well as the new scientific evidence my team also discovered other people that had died of similar low blood sugar symptoms as the 5 “victims”, but these other people died when Colin Norris was not on duty. This meant that either there was someone else murdering these people or, more likely as the new scientific evidence points to, they all died of natural causes. If our investigation is right an innocent man could be serving time for four murders and an attempted murder he did not do.

The programme was covered extensively in the Tartan press (The Herald, Scotsman, Daily Record and Scottish versions of the UK papers) and received an above average audience. The new evidence has now been submitted to the criminal case review commission to decide if a miscarriage of justice has in fact taken place.

For the purpose of this blog post, however, the key fact is that Colin is Scottish. This potential miscarriage of justice was not picked up by network television. In fact, it was only commissioned by me because I have a pot of money to highlight issues that are either of interest to a Scottish audience and / or are about something specific to Scotland.

If Colin Norris had been English, I would have been very unlikely to have been able to commission a programme looking at his case. The implications for people interested in diversity in television is obvious. How many important stories are falling through the cracks because there is not specific ring-fenced money for looking at a specific group of people? Is there a similar miscarriage of justice film about a disabled person that hasn’t had a top BBC team of journalists looking at it because there isn’t ring-fenced disability money or TV programmes? What important black issues are we failing to cover because there isn’t ring-fenced money to make black specific programmes? By their very definition, we will never know the answer to those types of questions.

The truth is all broadcasters and all genre commissioners are far better at commissioning diverse programmes in the mainstream than they were twenty years ago, both in terms of on-screen talent and issues. One only has to look at the recent mixed race season on the BBC as an example. And no one wants to go back to the days when different diverse groups were given their own programmes and ring-fenced money but the films were nearly all broadcast at obscure times when no-one was watching.

However what “BBC Scotland Investigates: The Hospital Serial Killer” did reveal is that ring-fenced money for specific communities, regions or nations can sometimes uncover important stories that would otherwise be overlooked. Ring-fenced programme money is not appropriate for all diversity issues and communities but there is no doubt that it does have a role to play in television. Just ask all the Scottish people who watched the programme.

Gay People Are Different

Last Sunday I made one of my very rare appearances in front of the camera as a guest on the programme “Shoot The Messenger”, a round up of the weeks current affairs big stories on the cable channel VoxAfrica, the easiest way to describe it to anyone who hasn’t seen it before is a black version of the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. I was on to do the paper review.

Whenever you do a paper review you end up knowing the papers far better than you would normally and noticing stories that any other lazy Sunday morning would pass you by. So it was that a story came to my attention that made me question my whole approach to diversity issues and how we should tackle stories in news and current affairs.

According to a YouGov survey commissioned by Stonewall, gay men and women in Britain are far more likely to end up living alone and have less contact with family in later life than heterosexual people. Unsurprisingly gay people over 50 have far fewer children than their heterosexual counterparts, (approximately a quarter for gay and bisexual men and half for lesbians compared to whopping 90% for their heterosexual counterparts). Older gay people are also far more likely to live alone (40% compared to about a quarter for heterosexuals). This has massive consequences for an aging population and how we look after our elderly in the coming years. Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, is quoted in the Observer saying; "We're facing a care time bomb of institutional ignorance about what a community that makes a £40bn a year contribution to public services will soon – quite properly – be demanding."

The reason why this story struck me is that working in current affairs I have covered the issue of Britain’s aging population several times. It’s what we call a current affairs “hardy perennial”, like the military, the unemployment rate and the NHS it’s an issue we keep on coming back to. However in all the years I have covered the story of an aging population I have never once thought; what does an aging population mean to gay people?  I had never thought of it as a “gay issue”. It might seems a bit naive to say on a blog dedicated to looking at issues about diversity but all people are not the same and that obviously applies to elderly people as well.

Nearly all large current affairs issues affect the whole population but how it impacts on individuals’ lives will nearly always differ depending on your class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, age etc. All too often in television we treat all people the same and don’t delve deeper into how diversity changes the issues. The YouGov survey of the gay elderly provided a new insight into an old problem. Covering diversity makes for better journalism and in my world better journalism means better television. And that is something we should all be trying to achieve. 


After all that however I ran out of time to discuss the gay elderly on the paper review on "Shoot The Messenger". Another guest had spotted a story about plans to prosecute absentee fathers for their children's crimes. Depressingly that seemed too relevant a story to pass up for an African and Carribean British focused programme.

A Problem Of Trust

I have worked in television for over 20 years. During that time, I have never met a racist person in my professional life. Neither have I met anyone with a pathological hatred of disabled people. And while I’ve heard a few questionable jokes, I’d be hard pressed to label anyone sexist.

For the most part I like the people I work with. They are liberal and open-minded. There are some whose views I don’t agree with, but heated arguments are part of the currency of working in news and current affairs.


My colleagues invite me to their homes for dinner parties. They ask me to join them for drinks and trips to the theatre just as much as anyone else.

They know that I went to the local comprehensive and an ordinary redbrick university. They don’t seem to look down on me or treat me any differently from the people who went to private schools and graduated from Oxbridge.  This is why writing the next statement is so difficult and puzzling: the broadcast industry is prejudiced. 

The broadcast industry seems to dislike women, clearly has an aversion to ethnic minorities (especially blacks and Pakistanis) and positively hates disabled people.

How do I know that I – and people like me – are hated?  Despite all my nice colleagues, every time I go to a management meeting in London or Glasgow, I realise I am consistently the only non-white person sitting at the table.

And it’s the only logical conclusion I can draw from reading the latest and final annual report published by the Broadcast Equality & Training Regulator (BETR).

According to the BETR report in 2010 women are struggling in broadcasting despite the fact that 44% of people who work in broadcasting are women.

When it comes to senior management, men outnumber women two to one. If you look at executive and non-executive board members men outnumber their female colleagues three to one.

As for ethnic minorities it seems, surprisingly, as if the industry likes them a lot more than women. Ten per cent of people working in broadcasting are non-white.

At first sight this doesn't look too bad considering that approximately 12.5% of the UK working age population is non-white. However, do a bit of digging and it’s clear this figure reflects the obvious - that most of broadcasting is based in London, where 24% of the population is non-white.

All of a sudden 10% vs. 24% doesn’t look too good. Dig a bit further and go up the pay scale and BME numbers keep dropping; only 8% of managers and less than 6% of senior managers are non-white; by the time you get to board members, it drops to a paltry 4%.

But if BME people thought they weren’t liked, then disabled people are positively loathed by the industry.
According to the BETR report, 16% of working age people in Britain is disabled, yet they comprise only 2.3% of the broadcasting workforce. Again, the numbers keep falling the further up the hierarchy you go; less than 1% of executive board members are disabled.

As a black man working in television these kinds of reports can start to make you feel paranoid. Everyone in broadcasting is nice to your face. But take one look at the statistics and you can’t help but feel that, at best, they like you because you are “not like the rest of them,” or, at worst, television is full of closet racists.
However, I doubt very much that the people who invite me to join them at picnics and concerts after work are really closet neo-Nazis performing a massive charade. I also realise that if my paranoid fears are well-founded, then as a BBC executive producer I too am responsible for employing other black people, women and disabled people.  Am I doing my job properly or am I being discriminatory?  Surely not.
Assuming that other broadcasting executives are like me, and the industry is not full of secret two-faced bigots, what is happening?

Why are the figures so bad for BMEs, women and disabled people?

I believe the answer to the apparent contradiction of a profession loaded with nice liberal people who at the same time seems to pathologically hate anyone who is not white, able bodied and male men can be found in the same BETR report. It’s all about trust.

Throughout television and broadcasting we have to trust the people we employ. We don’t just need to trust their technical proficiency.

We need to trust their taste as to what makes a good programme and their editorial judgement. Almost every week I give a director a large sum of money and tell them to come back with a great programme. Yes, s/he has to pitch the idea to me, yes I read treatments, yes I have meetings during the course of the production process. All of this is designed to mitigate risk and increase the possibility of success.

But essentially any media executive has to eventually trust the person they employ – irrespective of how much micro-managing they can and may want to do.

Trust is such a difficult beast to pin down. What makes you trust someone? Salesmen know from experience that trust can be decided by the way a person walks, talks or just the cut of their suit.

Other industries have tried to certify trust by implementing professional qualifications. In broadcasting, there are few academic and professional qualifications.

So while all the nice people I come across try and be as fair as possible when employing people, I believe it all comes down to whether you trust the person.

And that’s where all manner of subconscious fears, prejudices and feelings come into play.

Now, according to the BETR, companies that invest in training and developing their staff invariably do well on measures regarding Equal Opportunities. In other words, they employ more BMEs, women and disabled staff.

What this tells me is that if you believe in your staff and believe they can be professionally trained, you are less likely to rely on gut instinct when it comes to trust.

In short; you can train people to do a good job regardless of their background, race, gender or disabilities. You don't have to only have faith and blind trust.

That trust also pays dividends. According to Lucy P. Marcus of the Harvard Business Review the more diverse a boardroom is the more profitable it is.

Diverse boards are more flexible, draw on the widest pool of talent and are better at solving difficult business problems. And if diversity is good for the boardrooms I am sure it is beneficial for the rest of a company.
So from now on I am no longer going to be paranoid as to whether people really like me or not, or whether the industry is really full of two faced closet sexist-disability-hating-racists.

Instead, I'm going to be more concerned about their training budgets and how much they invest in their staff.
The big question will never be whether you like me enough to invite me round for dinner, but whether you trust me enough to put me in charge of your next multiple-million pound project.

If you believe you can invest in people and train them to get that trust, you are more likely to employ a diverse work force.

If you are still going on vague gut instincts then we’re unlikely to see any progress in diversity in broadcasting anytime soon, and that would be a real shame.

First Published In Television Magazine RTS September 2011

TV Audiences & The Secrets Of Twitter

When I was 12, I met my first “girlfriend” – Angela. I met her at a basketball camp. She had Gerri-Curl and a better jump shot than I and, crucially, she was the only girl that would talk to me.  I thought she was amazing.  I say she was a “girlfriend” but in reality the totality of the “relationship” consisted of watching the American Sci-Fi television series V about an alien invasion in our respective homes and talking about it on the phone as we watched it “together”.

But while young men and the occasional 12 year-old boys might have been the target audience for the Sci-Fi series, I doubt the programme makers were thinking that young black British girls might be interested in watching their alien invasion saga. As a programme maker, discovering who your audience really are can be a surprise.

I have started to discover some surprises about my audience recently through the power of the Twitter hash-tag. Hash-tags allow you to pull together people who are tweeting about the same subject to see what other people are saying about the same issue.  Increasingly, programmes are using twitter hash-tags to enable online / twitter group conversations about a programme as it is being broadcast. Want to know whether other people are thinking the same thing as you when you hear that awful / great intervention on BBC Question Time? Then follow the Twitter hash-tag #BBCQT and you’ll find out.

Broadcasters are turning to hash-tags for a number of reasons:

1. It means that people watch the programmes as they go out (great for advertisers).

2. Hash-tags turn a simple television into a social event.

3.Over 40% of people do other things like play with their phones while watching TV. This keeps their attention on your film even if they are doing something else.

4. Hash-tags help to generate a buzz about a programme.

For people interested in diversity issues on television, what the hash-tags also do is give a great insight into who is watching your programmes and what they think about them. It also causes you to confront your own prejudices as to whom you think is watching your output.

Like Angela, my black “ex-girlfriend” obsessed with Sci-Fi, I’ve found that my audiences rarely fit my target expectations and are a lot more diverse than I expect. For example, earlier this year I exec’ed a 60 minute film called “Portillo On Salmond”. It featured Michael Portillo following Alec Salmond on the election trail as he won an historic second term. With a hash-tag of #PortilloOnSalmond, I was able to see who was watching and what interested the audience. What amazed me was the level of tweeting that occurred when the film showed Alec Salmond campaigning in an Asian neighbourhood.  Knowing what I know now, if we were to cut the film again, I would definitely want the director to feature more of how Alec Salmond won the Asian vote.  It has also made me think about whether to commission a radio programme looking at the rise of the importance of the BME vote in Scotland.

It goes without saying that one has to be careful when looking at your audiences through Twitter hash-tags. There is no doubt that Twitter is not completely representative of the general viewing public – it skews towards the young and web savvy. But the hash-tags are still useful to execs and producers because when a programme goes out no longer is our audience an amorphous blob represented by large ratings figures the next day. We can now see the modern equivalent of the 12 year old Angela’s and myself in the audience and “eavesdrop” on what they are saying about our programmes.  Once other execs and producers realise the diversity of their audiences, I’m hoping, like me, they will be more willing to reflect the audience’s own diversity and cast diverse talent on screen, as well as cover issues that reflect their diverse interests.  Now that will make TV far more personal, interesting and something worth tweeting about.

National Pride On The Small Screen

Al Jazeera is hiring in Kenya and all I can think about are Boeings 747s.

A few years ago I went to visit my family in Jamaica for the Christmas holidays. I try and go roughly every two years or so but this particular year I had left it very late to book my ticket and I couldn't find any direct flights. That was when I discovered Cubana Airlines - Cuba's national airline - and was able to finally spend the festive period with my relatives after a short stop over in Havana. For anyone who has not had the pleasure of flying Cubana Airlines it is a slightly ramshackle affair, the planes are old Aeroflot planes and the service makes RyanAir look positively luxurious. However the feelings of national pride of the cabin crew and my Cuban passengers was positively tangible and that is the point of most national airlines; national pride.

In the 1950's and 60's as different countries achieved independence nationalised airlines proliferated. It was a way for countries to assert their presence on the world stage and demonstrate their economic importance. It was a form of global shorthand saying "we are a country to be reckoned with".

However as the global financial realities took hold throughout the '80's and '90's the vast majority of these airlines were sold off, closed down or were subsumed into larger private airlines. The national names occasionally remaining but effectively they are just shells for other carriers (the Jamaican governments owns less than 17% of Air Jamaica now).  

But while countries have now abandoned this aerial national posturing recently a new form has crept onto the world stage that should concern people from diverse backgrounds working in the media: The nationalised international news channel.

Like the airlines before them the nationalised news channels do not make a profit and they normally rely on the largess of the state. But unlike the national airlines this is not a game that small states can play as they did previously with airlines. Television news is so expensive and the returns are so small it is a game only for the emerging new world powers; Russia, the Middle East and China to name three.

If one needed an example of how these news channels are vying for national pride and global influence one should look no further than East Africa. Qatar’s Al Jazeera announced on the 8th August that it will launch Al Jazeera Kiswahili in 2012 broadcasting to Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. This comes just a month after China Central Television (CCTV) went on a recruitment drive for East African electronic media journalists. The cold war might be over, the space race may be won (and lost), and national airlines might have flown away but clearly news and us journalists are the latest tool in global power struggles.

In many ways this is a great opportunity for all television journalists across the world. Greater competition between channels means more demand for our talents and that obviously translates into better jobs and careers. 

However these new developments are not without their concerns. While Al Jazeera English regularly displays high editorial standards the journalistic integrity of other channels can be more questionable as they put patriotism before objective reporting. It may be idealistic but while I positively welcome news from different global agendas I think striving for truth should be every journalists' objective, not bringing glory to whichever nation is paying your salary. 

At its best news fosters democracy, civil society and our understanding of the world. The news is far too important to become propaganda for the glory of nations to assert their power on a world stage. If the nationalised airlines of old were bad then normally worse that could happen is they would lose your luggage. Bad nationalised news channels can keep corrupt governments in power or even justify unjust wars. But like the airlines hopefully the bad ones will just go away with time.

Why The Riots Need More Black People

OK a slightly provocative title I admit but hopefully it got your attention. To be precise the riots need more black and BME journalists reporting it.

Over the last few days I have received twitter comments, corresponded with people through emails and spoken to friends about the racial nature of the recent riots. A lot of people have told me that I am wrong to draw any conclusions about race relations from the riots. They have told me that it is not a “black and white thing” but an “underclass thing”, they point out white kids and Asian youths are rioting right alongside their black friends. “This isn’t like the Brixton riots in 1981, they aren’t protesting against police racism or anything like that - they are just mindless looters, it’s wrong to ‘racialise’ these events” is what one person told me.

However if you look at any old footage of the original Brixton riots there were white people rioting alongside black people. When it comes to police stop and search, in total numbers more white people are stopped than black people. But there is no denying that there was a strong racial element to the 1981 riots and stop search is an issue that preoccupies the black community.

In the same way black youth are disproportionately involved in these recent riots. Not all rioters are black and not all black youth are rioters (that is obvious) but it is an issue that disproportionately affects the black community and has its roots in a black grievance (the police killing of Mark Duggan). Whether we like it or not these riots are a black issue.

If plastic bullets are used in mainland Britain for the first time, as recent reports have indicated, the targets of those bullets will more than likely be black youth.

That is why recent events have proven the need for good quality black journalists reporting the riots. While I have not been able to kick the habit of listening to the BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme when I get up in the morning I have increasingly been turning to independent black radio to supplement the predominantly white mainstream coverage of the riots. In much the same way as my usual diet of BBC and SKY News was complimented by Al Jazeera during the Arab Spring one radio station has now been added to my DAB radio pre-sets to compliment my understanding of the riots: Colourful Radio.

Colourful Radio was set up by Henry Bonsu three years ago, an old BBC journalist himself Henry he has paid his dues; first as a reporter on the BBC’s Today Programme and he finally left the BBC as the presenter of Radio London’s Drive-time show under newspaper headlines of being “too intelligent”.  The station was set up to try and meet the needs of a slightly older, more educated multicultural audience that just isn’t serviced by other “black” radio stations who are normally more youth focused. In the last few days this approach has proved vital to anyone wanting a different black perspective on the riots.

In the last few days they have interviewed Cindy Butts (from the Metropolitan Police Authority) Chuka Umunna (Member of Parliament), Onyi Onyando (Gang member turned writer) and even Olympic black power legend Tommie Smith – “to inspire our youth”. Through their quality journalism they have also been able to get scoops no one else come close to. For example this morning Met Assistant Commissioner Steve Kavanagh said the police were responsible for the "murder of Mr. Duggan". A statement he quickly retracted when further pushed on the issue by the presenter.

While the scoops and the quality of the guests have far surpassed anything you would normally get on a pirate station more importantly the presenters have asked the the questions I would have wanted to ask. Questions that sometimes differ from the questions the BBC, ITV or other mainstream media would ask.

Equally interesting are the phone-calls from the listeners. After listening for an hour each day I feel I get the real temperature of what Black communities in the UK are feeling about this massive news event (the biggest civil disorder in living memory). And like the black community itself  its not one view I'm hearing but a myriad of opinions. I feel I don’t get this when I listen to other phone-ins as by their very nature they normally have a predominantly white audience and so I will only hear one or two black voices at most.

While I will continue to listen to BBC Radio 4, watch Channel 4 News and read every newspaper I can lay my hands on from the Daily Mail to the Guardian recent events have proven the need for black journalists to cover the major news issues and how that can enrich our understanding of the big stories.

Could better TV have stopped the London riots?

Two days before the London riots kicked off Professor Peter King of Imperial College London appeared on a Radio 4 programme called Voices From The Old Bailey. The series looks at old court transcripts and examines what they say about the history of the time. I know hardly sounds like the most riveting radio. However as coincidence would have it last Wednesday they were discussing old court transcripts involving riots. It was on this programme that Professor King defined riots “as an argument continued by other means” (an obvious re-working of the famous quote “War is the continuation of politics by other means”). This is echoed by the fact that the recent London riots only started after the police at Tottenham refused to meet the people protesting over the police killing of Mark Duggan – the peaceful argument became violent – the police have subsequently apologised for not meeting the Duggan “family's needs more effectively”.

But what lessons does this teach people working in the media? If Professor King’s definition is correct then I think the recent riots point to a massive failure by those of us working in television, radio, print and online.

Successful media should act as a platform for Professor King’s pre-riotous “arguments” to take place. Remove that platform, deny people the ability to have that argument and one result according to Professor King’s definition could be riots.

Twelve years ago (a life time ago) I used to provide on such media platform for the black British community; I produced the Schumann Shuffle. Broadcasting every Saturday morning it was a current affairs radio phone-in on Choice FM, tackling the big issue of the week affecting the listenership. For a station that was 99% music based, broadcasting to an audience we were told weren’t interested in politics, it surprised everyone except me and the presenter (Geoff Schumann) that we quickly became the highest rating programme on the station.

We discussed everything including deaths in police custody, legalisation of drugs, and failing schools. My personal favourite however was when Geoff tackled the crisis in Zimbabwe and the 1992 Land Acquisition Act (although we did give it the catchier title of “Can white people ever be African?”). What the experience of producing the show taught me however is that black people are crying out for a serious platform to discuss politics on their own terms. The callers spanned the whole spectrum of the black community; from the suburbs to the inner-cities, from pensioners to school children, and from right wing “hangers and floggers” to the most liberal minded. But most importantly we tried to get studio guests of standing; Trevor Phillips was a regular fixture, Members of Parliament made appearances and high ranking police frequently popped in. When our listeners called in they felt they were the ones being listened to and were being taken seriously. To paraphrase Prof. King; for large sections of the black community there was no need for the argument to be continued by other means.

While there is no doubt that I look back at my time on the Schumann Shuffle through rose tinted glasses, the fact of the matter is that back then there were far more media platforms for arguments reflecting the concerns of African and Caribbean people. Black Britain was a current affairs programme on the BBC and the newspapers The Voice and New Nation both had quality journalism with decent circulations. I doubt anyone could seriously argue that BBC 1Xtra plays the same function now (although it does have some great documentaries targeted at a youth audience).

When it comes to the riots it is often all too easy to blame the politicians put it all down to vague socio-economic factors or demonise the lawless looters themselves. As black people working in the media however I think it is incumbent on us to ask what responsibility we should bare, or at the very least how we can make things better. Giving rioters and “potential rioters” a forum to air their grievances peaceably would be a good first step.

Looting For An Identity

I’m sitting in my office in BBC Scotland with my fellow news colleagues watching images of London burning as rioting and looting takes place in Hackney, Tottenham and Brixton. As one of the few Londoners in the office and definitely the only Black person in the office, the question my fellow journalists keep asking is why? They point out that deprivation in parts of Scotland is far worse than anything in London, pockets of youth unemployment in Glasgow is far worse than any black youth unemployment rate, and even life expectancy is worse in Scotland. Yet no one is rioting in Glasgow. Simple liberal explanations of blaming the riots on racism and socio-economic deprivation just don’t seem to explain the full story.

As the apparent sole representation of all things black and London, my answer is “identity”. Specifically, the need for “role-communities” not “role-models”. Let me explain:

I’ve been working in Scotland now for over three years. What I love about Scotland is just how broad Scottish identity is. You can be an intellectual, read ancient Gaelic poetry and love long country hikes and feel very Scottish. At the same time you can enjoy eating deep-fried mars bars, drink buckfast (a potent mix of caffeine and alcohol popular on Glasgow’s streets), and regularly get into fights on a Saturday night and still be 100% Scottish.  It’s equally Scottish to wake up listening to BBC Scotland Radio’s Good Morning Scotland (the Scottish equivalent of Radio 4’s Today programme) or listening to something a little lighter on Radio Clyde. And whether you support Scottish independence or think Scotland should always be part of the United Kingdom, it doesn’t matter to your identity - no one can use that to tell you you’re not a proud Scot.

Scottish identity is a broad church.

So what has this got to do with rioting by black youth in London?  The fact is that black British identity, and more importantly the black British community, is the complete opposite.

Since the 1980s, there has been a great deal of effort to increase representation of black people on TV, Radio, online and in print.  That effort has been crucial.  However, what it has not managed to do is to challenge and broaden the black British identity.

Whether on TV, Radio, online or in print, the Black community is invariably very narrowly defined. It is generally portrayed as a dysfunctional community that is dominated by youth culture, the underclass and constant undertones of criminality.

However as a result of efforts since the 1980s, we now see some successful elements – those great black individuals on screen who have “made it”. The problem is that these black people are not seen as being part of a functioning black community.  They are nearly always portrayed as being fully integrated into the broader white community; islands of success divorced from the gangster laced black community which they managed to escape from, and now might visit occasionally.

The message this sends out to young black kids is dangerously clear, as the riots have demonstrated. They have to make a choice: either be part of a narrowly defined dysfunctional black community (populated with hoodies, grime and undertones of criminality); or leave that community behind and become fully integrated into a functioning wider white community. Choose between a culture of crime or a lifetime of community self-loathing. In TV terms a choice between MTV gangsta rappers or the single black character in a Mike Leigh film. This is a choice that media representations by well meaning liberals of “positive black role models” does not address and can sometimes inadvertently reinforce.

Is it any wonder then, that when someone from the black community is killed, the outcome is a riot? According to the media the dysfunctional black community is populated with potential rioters, all the black youth have done is internalise this identity and reacted accordingly.

That, I believe, is why youth are rioting in London and not in the most deprived areas of Glasgow. It’s a lack of a broader, functional community identity.

In this context, the media has an (if not the) most important role to play in addressing identity, and therefore these riots. Yes, the police need to take action, and re-connect with the black community. That’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient. It is only the media that can really start to widen the definition of black British identity. The havoc being wreaked in Tottenham and other black communities throughout London demonstrates that we need to go well beyond finding a few “positive role models” or teaching our children about individual, one-of-a-kind black heroes from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama. We need to present a black community that these youth want to be part of that is as broad as the Scottish identity – one where Goths and nerds can co-exist with rappers and all feel an equal claim to the term “black”. One where a suburban middleclass black family can feel their community is as “legitimately” black as any inner city black family.  One where black people can do PhD’s without the feeling that they are “acting white”.

These broad black communities already exist; I suspect that a lot of black people in the BBC and other media offices actually do come from these communities. Our job is to stop shining the spotlighting on just a few individual role models from these communities, and broaden our focus to “role-communities”. Only then will we give our children a true choice of what it means to be black, without the need to resort to riots.