Do TV Executives Employ The Best People Or Their Best Friends?

Every TV executive I know loves to hear 5 magic words: “Your programme has been green-lit”. After weeks, months and on a few occasions even years of working away in the murky world of development you can become obsessed with those five words, you start hearing them in your sleep and think you can almost see them in cryptic messages  when you are reading a newspaper. For those of you who are less telly-savvy “green-lighting” is when the programme idea you have been pitching to a commissioner or channel controller is finally and officially commissioned.

Yet the  green-lighting comes with some unique problems. According to a new study by Professor Irena Grugulis of Durham University, the time immediately following a green-light is possibly when one of the biggest obstacles to increasing diversity in the media industry comes into play.

According to Prof. Grugulis, the time between a project being green-lit and when it has to go into production has decreased dramatically over the last twenty years. Previously there could be several months between a commission and needing to fully staff it, now that time has been reduced to an average of just two weeks. That means, to TV executives like myself, two weeks to find a director, assistant producer, researcher, runner and any other people that might be needed to bring the programme to our screens. Prof. Grugulis thinks that this pressure to staff up a project in a short period of time is having a devastating effect in BME and disabled people working in television.

I can see why.  When you have a month or more to staff up a project this gives you enough time to advertise for the positions and to hold proper interviews to fill them. When you have two weeks or less it is invariably a case of the TV exec or series producer picking up the phone and just calling their friends or getting word of mouth recommendations.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out how calling up friends to staff up a project will favour people who are from the same social circles as the person making those phone calls. If you are white and/or middleclass you are far more likely to have a social circle filled with white middleclass friends and all of a sudden the staff on your project will look extremely non-diverse.  Of course, it can go the other way too.  If you are black, disabled and/or from a working class background your social circle is likely to reflect that heritage or background. But the fact is that most TV execs at the moment come from white middle-class backgrounds.  The end result is not necessarily determined by racism or prejudice but it can be very problematic despite the best intentions of everyone involved.  Indeed, according to a report by the Government’s  Department for Business Innovation and Skills word of mouth recruitment “limits the number of applicants”, “it discriminates against those not aware of the vacancy” and “narrows the pool employers can chose from” and is “not very 'diversity friendly'”.

So what can we do to try and solve this problem? Here are my three suggestions:

 

The first thing we should do is raise awareness of the issue. I honestly do not think most commissioners are aware of the problem and the effect their actions are having on creating a non-diverse work force. Every commissioner I have spoken to seems genuinely surprised that green-lighting a project late in the day might have the unintended consequence of adversely affecting BME and disabled staff.

Second, we need increased awareness of (and more) online message boards like the TVCollective where job opportunities can be posted at short notice. The TVCollective and online message boards are not a substitute for a fair interview process but they do help alleviate the worst excesses of competent people not even being aware of job opportunities.

And third, we could ask broadcasters and large television companies to record how many positions they filled through advertisements and interviews. It is only by recording this that we can see if the problem is getting better or worse over time. How can we praise best practice unless we know it is actually happening?

So next time a programme maker is pitching their idea I’m sure they will still say a little prayer to hear those 5 magic words, but maybe we could also ask for a little more time before we have to staff it up. Who knows, commissioners might even like it as they will get the best people to work on their programmes rather than just the TV executive’s best friends.