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.
