The Sesame Street effect. Why UK broadcasters are losing their Black and Asian audiences

UK broadcasters are losing their Black Asian and Minority Ethnic audiences because they are valuing individual characters and actors instead of championing rich diverse communities – a lesson one of the most influential of children’s programmes learnt 50 years ago. - Marcus Ryder explains

There is no doubt that British broadcasting is some of the best in the world. I love a lot of the programmes the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 produce. But the truth is, as a black person, on an emotional level, the BBC and the other broadcasters lost me the year before I was even born. 

The year was 1970. That year Sesame Street launched, with an opening scene of a black male teacher in a suit, walking a young black girl, Sally, down the street and introducing her to a multicultural neighbourhood. They walk to his home and he introduces her to his black wife who gives Sally cookies and milk. 

From the very first frame, Sesame Street put an aspirational, professional black couple at the heart of its programme. And by doing so, it captured my heart.

In contrast, during the 1970s, on a Saturday morning I would flick between Multi-Coloured Swap Shop’ and Tiswas but neither had my undying loyalty. I was neither a Blue Peter nor even a Magpie child, the two flagship children’s programmes of BBC or ITV respectively.

Despite being born and raised in London I looked across the Atlantic and saw myself reflected back at me and in a reality I wanted to be part of. I looked at programmes filmed just down the road from where I lived and failed to find an emotional connection. 

I had no conscious understanding of race but something in Sesame Street resonated with me. It got something right in 1970 which British television still fails to grasp.

Over the last 50 years there has been real progress, with most British drama writers now recognising that there should be positive black characters. Casting directors are now more willing to cast black actors in non-stereotypical positive roles. Things are far from perfect, but there is no denying that progression. We see positive black characters on our screen relatively often – from actors in Dr Who to The Hustle and of course Luther. However, there’s something special about these positive characters.

How communities are portrayed

They are often the only black character, inhabiting functioning white communities, or at the very least majority white communities. Black communities on TV on the other hand are portrayed almost exclusively as dysfunctional. While many of the people portrayed in a drama set in a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic community may be likable, the community they were set in is normally anything but. 

The message that comes across loud and clear on our screens is that while there might be good black individuals, black communities are a problem. It suggests that if you are a good or positive black person you should want to leave the dysfunctional black communities as quickly as possible. 

While some might downplay these unspoken messages, the reality is one comes across these implicit negative views about black communities all the time. There are often similar messages about South Asians on TV, while there might be positive individuals from the Indian sub-continent, the communities are invariably problematic, populated with forced marriages and potential terrorists. And unfortunately, in the UK, East Asian representation is still so thin on the ground it is almost impossible to discuss it sensibly.

Yet the reality is that while dysfunctional black communities certainly do exist, there are also incredibly good positive functional communities. Analysis by Dr Nicola Rollock into the black middle class offers strong examples of functional positive black communities that rarely see our TV screens. I for one am very proud to be part of a black community that includes lawyers, film makers, policemen, civil servants, charity workers – but also unemployed people. It’s mixed, but positively so.

British public service broadcasters (PSBs) are on the edge of a precipice. In 2018 the media regulator Ofcom warned that they were at risk of losing a generation of viewers, as younger audiences under 30 turned away from the traditional broadcasters and opted to watch Netflix, Amazon and other SVODs (subscription video on demand) instead, as well as other online content.

Also, according to another recent report by the UK media regulator, when it comes to diversity British audiences are increasingly finding better representation and authentic portrayal on Netflix and other online video-streaming providers. Every executive I speak to at a PSB is aware of these statistics and recognises the need to address them. 

However, in my experience they do not fully grasp the problem facing them with regards to non-white viewers. They know the non-white viewing figures are worse than their white equivalents but they normally just attribute this to the fact that the Black and Asian community is proportionately younger than the overall white UK population and just see it as part of the wider problem of losing their younger audience.

However, I believe the problem is far deeper than this.

In the 1970s I might not have been in love with the BBC or ITV and I might have wished I lived on Sesame Street but, with only three terrestrial channels, I was stuck in the UK. There was no way I could move to the functional beautiful multicultural neighbourhood populated with black teachers and children that looked just like me.

But now, in 2020, our younger children can move to Sesame Street whenever they want. And our older children can see aspirational black communities on HBO’s Insecure or ABC’s Black-ish. So why aren’t these positive, broader messages about our diverse communities coming out on UK PSBs?

What Netflix is getting right

Why have online providers been able to learn from the lessons of Sesame Street and build upon them while legacy broadcasters like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, still seem to be failing their ethnically diverse audiences?

Are the executives and commissioners at the SVODs and online providers more enlightened and receptive to diversity compared to their counterparts at the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5?

While people are important, I very much doubt that the difference can be attributed to just the different attitudes of a few individuals and commissioners. For one thing many of the commissioners and senior gatekeepers at the SVODs are from the PSBs originally and flip back and forth between the different types of broadcasters.

Instead, I believe the answer can be found in the different economic models between traditional broadcasters versus online video streamers.

Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at the University of Michigan, analysed Netflix’s economic model in 2017 and argued that traditional broadcasters still think in terms of attracting large audiences for a single programme as advertisers pay for eyeballs. As an American she didn’t look at the BBC but I would argue the same argument applies as the BBC still looks to large audiences to justify its licence fee.

Online streamers like Netflix and Amazon – on the other hand – are not pursuing large audiences for advertisers. Instead, they are trying to maximize subscribers.

Quoted in The Conversation Professor Lotz says: “To succeed, subscriber-funded services must offer enough programming that viewers find the service worthy of their monthly fee. Each show doesn’t need a mass audience – which is the measure of success for advertiser-funded television – but the service does need to provide enough value that subscribers continue to pay.”

Professor Lotz describes the strategy Netflix employs as ‘conglomerated niche’ and says that because it does not broadcast in a linear fashion most subscribers don’t even know most of Netflix’s content and only concentrate on the series that appeal to them. 

She uses the metaphor of a library to describe this phenomenon: “If you were to ask different Netflix subscribers about the service’s brand, you’d likely get different responses. There is no one Netflix; rather, think of it as an expansive library with many small nooks and rooms. Most subscribers never wander floor to floor. Instead, they stay in the corner that matches their tastes.”

The strength of niche audiences

This means channel executives at traditional broadcasters think completely differently when it comes to commissioning content versus commissioners at Netflix. The BBC executive, for example, is thinking: “Will the programme get a large audience?” while the Netflix executive is thinking: “Will this new series be able to get a new different section of the audience to subscribe?”

The Netflix execs are constantly seeking out programmes that will get a different niche audience to subscribe or continue to subscribe.

Take my favourite series at the moment Insecure, which I mentioned earlier. It finally tipped the balance for me to finally take out a subscription for HBO Go and I am sure I am not the only one. ‘Insecure’ is therefore a win for HBO, in a way that commissioning yet another ‘non-diverse’ programme would not be, as it wouldn’t attract new subscribers.

Compare this to ITV or BBC. All things being equal the ITV and BBC commissioners would prefer to commission another series like Call the Midwife as it would bring in a far larger audience, even if it is the same old non-diverse audience that already watches the majority of their programmes, than commission Insecure, which relatively speaking would be a ratings flop.

Television executives could even make Call the Midwife more ethnically diverse by adding a few Caribbean nurses. This is the type of diversity that is often favoured by executives as broadens the programmes appeal without risking the core audience. However, this approach does not address the fundamental Sesame Street strategy of creating a community.  

For this reason, the SVODs approach leads to far deeper diverse programmes being commissioned by broadcasters who are financed by subscribers. The irony is that in targeting niche audiences streaming services often create quality content, which over time has a far wider appeal.

If you talk to executives of traditional broadcasters they all recognise the importance of commissioning for non-linear viewing and targeting certain demographics. But it is still incredibly hard for commissioners to break out of a linear ‘big-audiences-matter’ state of mind.

The truth is as traditional broadcasters worry about big audiences now, they risk having no audiences in the future. Only by recognizing the rich diversity of their audiences, and creating programmes that they want to watch, will broadcasters survive. Sesame Street may have been launched in a time before SVODs but its entire model has been based around this idea.

Just two years after Sesame Street began in America it launched a Brazilian version. Importantly, it did not simply dub the American version into Portuguese or add a few Brazilian characters. It relocated into a new community that reflected Brazil’s diversity.

It has repeated the same trick in at least 34 different countries including South Africa, Russia, Palestine and Israel. Interestingly, the UK broadcasters consistently rejected working with the producers of Sesame Street and so there was never a British version I could identify with. Instead I fell in love with the American one.

I will leave you with one more Sesame Street-related fact.

When the first episode of Sesame Street was aired in 1970 the US was 87.65 per cent white. According to the last census conducted in 2010 it is now 72.40 per cent white.

The year I was born, 1971, was the first time the UK census specifically gathered ethnicity data. That year they found the white population made up roughly 97.7 per cent of the population. Today the non-white population in the UK is 13 per cent, a larger percentage than the non-white population at the time Sally first met all the Sesame Street characters in the first episode.

In 1970 a children’s television show had already worked out the importance of appealing to the country’s non-white population, an appeal that made a small child born in London a year later fall in love with it.

British broadcasters do not have the luxury of waiting another 50 years to finally work out what Sesame Street got right. Because unlike 50 years ago Sesame Street is literally just one channel hop away, as is all the other great diverse content that prioritises community representation over simple diverse representation of individuals. 

Originally published in The Generation Game: Can the BBC Win Over Today's Young Audience? Edited by Michael Wilson and Neil Fowler and now available from Amazon as a Paperback and a Kindle