Old, Black and Washed Up

I used to be cool. In the words of Aretha Franklin I used to be “young, gifted and black”.

OK I was never that cool but as a young black man I used to at least be part of a cool group. A group that seemed to matter to advertisers, the fashion industry, the music industry and most importantly broadcasters. I used to organise a charity basketball tournament with my brother and we would have to virtually fight off sponsors as they were so eager to appeal to the young black people who came to our event.

 

Now at the age of 41 I feel as if I’m past it. To be honest when it comes to mainstream media I feel I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since I past 30. Let me explain in a bit more detail:

Many broadcasters actively target certain demographic groups. For example at one radio station I once visited a couple of years ago I saw two pictures placed directly in front of the DJ’s eye-line; one of a white middle aged man in his fifties, the other of a white woman in her forties. When I asked the radio presenter who the pictures were of I was told they were of their “ideal listeners”. The presenters were meant to pretend that these were the people they were broadcasting to and tailor their broadcasting accordingly. I’m told it is a practice that many commercial radio stations do.

My problem is that as a 41 year old university educated professional black man I get the sense my picture (or someone like me) is not hanging up in radio stations. I do not feel targeted by any mainstream broadcasters. As a young black person I felt my picture could have hung up at Choice FM and there was a time when 1Xtra seemed to target my demographic.

And it’s not just as an audience member I sense this problem, you get the sense that the same issue applies for older black people working in television and radio as well. We are cool and funky and can give a production a little street cred as researchers and even presenters in our twenties but you see our numbers thin out as we get older.

It is an issue that older women have complained about for some time, and following the ground-breaking legal case of Miriam O’Reilly, one the BBC is actively trying to address.

The twin evils of racism and sexism, both direct and indirect, have long been recognised as holding back many talented women and people from BME backgrounds in broadcasting. However as we now look at more than just getting our foot in the door but actually staying in the industry and building our careers we need to start turning our attention to ageism.

Ageism clearly affects different groups in different ways. The Miriam O’Reilly case clearly shows that while ageism affects men it can hit women harder and earlier. My concern is when it comes to black people ageism can start as early as in our twenties.

We don’t seem to go from “young, gifted and black” to “mature, competent and black”. Instead for all too many of us our careers just come to an abrupt end.

Diversity: A TV Exec's Secret Weapon

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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