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.