Where are you from?
I suspect every non-white person (and quite a few white people as well) will appreciate the
complexity that such a seemingly simple question can pose. In those four words non-white people often have to work out what the person is really asking, and it’s hidden
meaning can range from; “where do you currently live?” to “Were your
forefathers part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and do you have roots in
Africa?”
I was born in London, my mother is Jamaican and my father is
British born to immigrant east European parents. I think of myself as a Londoner,
even though I have lived in Scotland for almost five years and recently I was
lovingly described as an “Afro-wegian” by a Scottish friend acknowledging both
my black identity and the time I’ve spent in Glasgow.
In an increasingly globalised, multicultural world questions
of identity are complex and multifaceted. There are rarely any “right” or
“wrong” answers when it comes to the question "where are you
from?". The answers can change over time and sometimes they come down to
fuzzy feelings of “belonging” and amorphous subjective qualities of values and
tastes.
While the very fuzziness and multiple answers can work for
an individual, and can even be liberating (I love the fact that sometimes I am British and other times I rejoice in my Jamaican heritage), fuzziness works
less well when it comes to the television industry.
The question the British television industry often has to
answer is; where does a TV programme come from? or more precisely; when is a
programme made out of London? The BBC along with other broadcasters have quotas
as to how many programmes they make outside of London. On the face of it that
can seem pretty straight forward but like identity when can you say a programme
is “Scottish” or “Welsh” or “Northern Irish” or just simply made outside of the
M25?
For example what is the “identity” of a programme if it’s
made by a company based in Scotland but the director and most of the team live
in London and it’s filmed in Wales? To answer that question the TV industry has
worked out three criteria to decide a programme’s “identity”:
1. Where is the company based?
2. Where do the majority of the production team normally live,
(“majority” is decided by share of salaries, otherwise you could just pack the
team with cheap runners from a location)?
3. Where is the majority of the money spent (that means costs
such as filming and editing)?
If at least two out of three of these criteria are outside
the M25 then it is an “outside of London” programme. If at least two out of
these three occur in a specific place, Scotland for example, then the programme
is officially Scottish.
As someone who is interested in increasing diversity in the
television industry I wonder if we should learn a lesson from how we currently
decide if a production is officially an out of London programme.
Could we adapt the regional criteria to see if a programme
is officially “diverse”:
1. Is the company (or executive producer) from a diverse
background?
2. Are the majority of the production team from a diverse
background?
3. Is the majority of the money spent with diverse suppliers
(female camera operators, disabled editors for example)?
Regional programmes have to meet two out of three criteria,
for diverse programmes maybe we would only have to meet one, or we might want
to judge the diversity of programmes by different criteria.
Unlike the broadcasting industry’s approach to regionality I
am not suggesting quotas but I am suggesting that we start monitoring. Are
in-house production teams and independents becoming more or less diverse? How
well are BME owned, or disabled owned, independent companies faring? Are we
making more or less diverse programmes? It is only through monitoring that we
will know if we are making progress and the first step in monitoring is working
out what we are measuring.
I might be happy with a multi-hyphenated identity of being a
mixed-race-afrowegian-londoner-living-in-Scotland but we might need to be a
little less woolly when deciding if our programmes should be called “diverse”
or not. As a Scottish executive producer I often go to meetings where we
discuss whether a programme is officially “Scottish enough”, who knows in the
future I might go to meetings to decide if a programme is “diverse enough”.
