Am I Black Enough For You?

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”.