RACISM IN FOOTBALL ONLY SCRATCHES THE SURFACE

Six years ago I used to be the series producer of “Whistleblower” a BBC investigative series where we used to go undercover to expose serious wrong doing. Our different reporters went undercover in high profile estate agents, high street banks, supermarkets, and airports. They would often be undercover for months on end secretly filming whenever they saw something that needed to be exposed.

Anyone who has ever done secret filming will tell you that it is less of a science and more of an art, you can often miss the very crucial thing you are trying to film; you end up turning on the secret camera too late, or you are pointing it in the wrong direction, or the camera’s battery runs out at the most crucial time. The fact of the matter is that any number of things can go wrong.

However when it goes right there is nothing better than secret filming: The confession caught on tape, the bad meat being put through the mincer so it can be resold to an unsuspecting public, the estate agent faking documents. It was capturing these incidents on film that gave the series its power and ensured the people secretly filmed were “caught red handed”. It even led to us having a phrase printed on the office wall: “If it didn’t happen on film it doesn’t exist”. We knew capturing wrong doing on film meant everything.

I was reminded of “Whistleblower” and the power of capturing wrong doing on film as the Euro 2012 football tournament starts today already embroiled in rows over racism.

A BBC Panorama programme recently revealed the racism of some football supporters in Poland and Ukraine, where the tournament is being held. The investigation filmed fans making Nazi salutes, singing racist chants and even beating up Asian fans. Racism in the football stadiums is a major concern for England (and other European countries playing in the competition) who’s number of non-white players and fans have grown substantially over the last twenty years.

And England is not free of its own home grown racism issues that it brings to Euro 2012; black player Rio Ferdinand hasn’t been selected for the England squad and the suspicion is that he was dropped due to the inclusion of the white player John Terry.  John Terry is currently charged of racially abusing Rio’s brother and the case will go to trial after the tournament.

All of these alleged racist incidents were brought to light because they were caught on film (John Terry’s alleged racist incident was caught by television cameras covering the match). Television is very good at capturing and exposing these types of racial issues; overt and crude. The weakness of television however is sometimes it is less good at capturing subtleties.

While “Whistleblower” went undercover in high street banks filming the mis-selling of financial products by clerks we weren’t able to capture the far bigger problems that led to the banking crash that would happen just a year after broadcast. While we filmed in Tesco and Sainsbury’s exposing employees breaking their own “sell by date” rules and tricking customers we were unable to cover the controversial, and most would say more important, issue of whether large supermarkets are contributing to the demise of Britain’s high streets.

So it is with issues regarding racism in football and wider society in general. Capturing the football fan making Nazi salutes makes for dramatic television but how do we capture the fact that there is clearly a glass ceiling when it comes to black people entering management position for football teams in the English Premiership League? How do we capture the glass ceiling in most large TV companies and broadcasters?

Secret filming can capture the ignorant, stupid and obvious but the challenge for all of us working in television interested in addressing issues of diversity is how we take our skills and capture the real issues that affect our lives. The issues that result in people with a disability, black people, Asians and other ethnic minorities being seriously under-represented working in TV and the media generally. And these things happen without a single racist word being uttered and definitely no one making any Nazi salutes.

The fact is six years on the printed words on the “Whistleblower” production office’s walls now haunt me; “If it didn’t happen on film it doesn’t exist”.

The problem is some of the biggest issues that affect people from diverse backgrounds will never happen on film but that definitely doesn’t mean they don’t exist.