Television executives are always obsessed with giving
audiences what they really want rather than just what we think
they want, and when it comes to journalism we want to identify the issues that
really affect people’s lives. Increasing diversity in the production team might
be the simplest way of achieving these aims and last week’s Panorama programme
might be the perfect example of this.
Let me start by giving you a quick task - put this list of
issues in order of importance to your daily life:
·
Your career
·
Being called a name
·
Your health
Now, think about whether the order you originally came up
with would change significantly if a) you had/didn’t have a disability; b) you were
a different gender; c) you were/were not from a BME background.
I think for most of us, whatever diverse background we have,
as a concern on a daily basis, “name calling” would probably be at the bottom
of the list by a long way.
In the last five years since moving up to Scotland, I have
been on the receiving end of overt racist abuse two and a half times. The first
time, a kid threw a biscuit at me from a moving car yelling N*****. The second
time was another case of a drive-by abuse by some young guys, and the half was
when a drunk guy yelled something to do with Michael Jackson at me when I was
jogging in the park – and frankly I’m still not sure if he was insulting my
running style or my race... Nevertheless, on all three occasions it was more a
sense of bemusement and a new anecdote to tell my friends than anything more.
The
reason I bring this up is because I think people working in TV often think name
calling is a really dramatic issue and the one our viewers want to watch. Yet,
the conundrum is that it is at the bottom of our daily life concerns. It puzzles me why this mistake is so common.
I recently executive produced a Panorama programme on
disability unemployment called “The Great Disability Scam” which took a
completely different approach.
While disability abuse, just as racist abuse or overt sexist
abuse, might seem appealing to a TV executive, I worked hard with one of the
producers - Kate Ansell – who has a disability – to avoid that kind of focus. Both
of us were determined to properly reflect people’s real concerns. And we did.
Instead of a programme focused on disability abuse, we created a
programme about an issue that directly affects half of all people with a
disability in Britain every day and indirectly affects even more – the
government’s attempts to try and address disability unemployment.
The response was overwhelming. We got an audience of over
four million and the social media reaction was enormous. By directly focusing on the career aspirations
of people with disabilities, and how government policies can affect those
aspirations or otherwise, our programme resonated with more people. It brought disability and diversity to life,
rather than putting it in a box.
I found it much easier to take this perspective because I
had Kate in our team. Having people from diverse communities working on these
programmes makes it much easier to tease out issues that really affect peoples’
daily lives, and make their struggles much more relevant to everyone else in
the UK. It helps bring out similarities rather than create schisms. And, in the end, it also helps create better
programmes, which is, of course, top of every TV exec’s list of concerns.
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