Are You A TV Type Of Person?

“I’m not a journalist Marcus. I’m not a news and current affairs type person”. That was the response of one producer six years ago when I asked her to come to work with me on “Undercover Supermarkets” for the BBC1 series Whistleblower.

I was shocked. She had previously worked on Watchdog and two primetime BBC1 documentary-soap series for me, and I knew she had the ability. So I went through the list of skills I needed for a current affairs producer:

1. Can you spot a good story?
2. Can you persuade difficult contributors to talk to you?
3. Are you meticulous about the facts of a story?
4. Are you good at people finding?
5. Do you understand how narratives work?

I told her: If you can answer “yes” to all those questions, I can teach you the rest.

She could. So she took the job and eventually made one of the highest rating and best quality programmes in the Whistleblower series.

But I found it disconcerting that she didn’t think she was a journalist. When I pushed her, I realised that it wasn’t the programme making skills that she thought she lacked – but some ill-defined quality that she felt she was missing.  So she ruled herself out.

Employers also rule applicants out.  I’ve seen it time and time again, when people in positions of power feel that the applicant is not “a (fill-in-the-blank) type person”.

The typical outcome if the person applies for the job is that even if they fit all the criteria, they don’t have one mysterious enigmatic hard-to-pin-down skill. 

There are a lot of variations on this theme:

“The person is great but they aren’t really a BBC1 type person.”

“The programmes they’ve made are wonderful but they just aren’t a Channel 4 type person.”

“Do you really think they are a music and arts type person?”

“They just don’t seem like a journalist type to me.”

Or the catchall:

“They just don’t seem right”.

Judging by the people that are employed however, the people who are the amorphous “right type of person” nearly always tend to come from non-diverse backgrounds. Ill defined-touchy-feely qualities never seem to work in the interests of black, Asian, disabled or working class people.

It’s crucial that we challenge employers of inadvertent prejudice when they use these ill-defined criteria to judge an applicant’s suitability. Some of my best Producers, Assistant Producers and Researchers have not only come from diverse backgrounds but they also have incredibly diverse CVs. Employers need to make sure they judge people by the skills that they have and their willingness to learn new skills - not whether they are a certain “type of person”.

But it’s also – if not more – crucial that we challenge our own prejudices. Too many of us buy into the idea that we are not the “right kind of person”.  We rule ourselves out of jobs because we do not think we can fulfil criteria that don’t even objectively exist.  It’s time to let go of the mystique, and start making those applications.

Slavery To Interns - The Joy Of Working For Free

When I was sixteen I spent a summer “working” at Ceddo a film collective responsible for producing black British classics such as Burning An Illusion and We Are The Elephant. My work was unpaid and consisted of making teas, syncing up film rushes and doing anything else that the real film makers couldn’t be bothered to do. I had no money. For lunch I would buy a large fried dumpling and a Supermalt as the dough expands in your stomach if you drink the Supermalt at the same time and kills your hunger. Occasionally I would even work the five miles home as I didn’t always have train fare.

Over twenty years later I now have a decently paid job at the BBC and I am troubled by my experience at Ceddo. The knowledge and skills I gained over that summer definitely helped me get my first job in the BBC it was then only film experience I had when I applied fresh out of university. But in recent years I have witnessed an increasing number of people working for free in television the way I did. The difference is that they are not 16 working for leftwing Rasta leaning film collectives but are working for free at large multi-national media corporations. I’m talking of course about the explosion of “interns” in TV in the last few years.

I realise that internships are vital to helping people getting a foot in the door of the TV industry. An industry where who you know is often more important than what you know. But is expecting people to work for no pay really acceptable? If we found people waiting tables for free or cleaning officers for less than minimum wage we would haul the offending companies in front of a judge. But call the employees “interns” and not only do some TV companies seem to get away with it but we have applicants queuing around the block to be accepted.

Interns seems to disproportionately favour the rich (people who can afford to live without any pay) and the well connected (few internships have the same rigorous recruitment procedures to ensure against discrimination as regular paid jobs). Taken together these two things favour white middle and upper-class people.

My fear is that not only do internships work against people from diverse backgrounds getting their foot in the door the few diverse people who do get internships are being exploited.

It is always questionable when people are asked to work for free regardless of their background (black or white, able bodied or disabled). But it is a questionable practice I might be willing to overlook if it was a short term measure that led to real training and employment. Looking at the diversity figures across television it wouldn’t appear to be increasing the diversity of the workforce. Therefore the few none white middleclass people who are getting internships seem to simply be working for less than minimum wage with little to show for it at the end.

I am not advocating the end of work experience and internships I realise from my own experience that it can give people a valuable leg up. However I believe it is incumbent on larger media companies to show not only how they are recruiting interns from a diverse background but also how they are not exploiting them. If they are expecting people to work for free the least the companies could do is publish the success rates of interns finding work later on and exactly what they expect interns to learn from their experience.

At Ceddo they made me to work in the morning, in the afternoon they would give me simple artistic video editing tasks and film making challenges. If well meaning film makers could do that for a black boy who walked off the street we should expect no less from large media organisations with budgets that run into the millions.

Celtic Versus Rangers An Example To Us All

“…we took pride in knowing we were BBC Scotland’s first all-black news crew” text message.

I received that text on Thursday 21^st April while on a train going from Glasgow to London. It was one of the proudest and saddest moments of my career in television.

First of all let me give you a little background to the text. It was sent by one of my best Broadcast Journalists after he had just finished filming a piece on sectarian violence in Scotland (not traditionally seen as a “black subject”). It was filmed in the wake of three parcel bombs being sent to prominent public figures associated with Celtic football club. Celtic is a club which, along with Rangers, symbolises the sectarian tensions in the west of Scotland.

I was proud because in many ways this was the culmination of what I think I’ve been striving towards for years: A truly colour-blind employment policy. The sectarian story was not a side story or an “…and finally”, nor was it what TV bosses euphemistically call an “urban” or “community” story (really meaning “black”). This was a big story with national and international significance. The footage the crew filmed was used on various BBC news outlets and even the odd sports programmes. It was a moment that proved the point that BBC Scotland News & Current Affairs had a diverse enough workforce that when a big story breaks and we put our best people on it they could be all white, all non-white or a mixture. It is the story that comes first.

Now “BBC Scotland’s first all-black news crew” isn’t exactly on par with Jackie Robinson breaking the Major League Baseball colour barrier in 1947 or Nelson Mandela walking free from Robben Island in 1990 but it was the ordinariness of the event that made it so special to me. We sent out a crew and they happened to be black. The truth is I hadn’t actually realised we had sent out an all-black crew until I received the text. I had just sent out the best people available to cover the story.

(Incidentally between them the crew have around ten Dispatches and Panorama credits to their names so a simple news and current affairs piece on sectarianism was not the biggest stretch of their abilities)

But while “BBC Scotland’s first all-black news crew” made me proud it was also tinged with sadness.

It was tinged with sadness because it was so easy to achieve. There was no affirmative action, we haven’t had a non-white training programme, none of the crew were part of a special BBC mentor scheme (I think one of them used to be part of a Channel 4 mentor scheme) and there was definitely no positive discrimination. Instead since being made Editor of Scotland Current Affairs all I have done is try and identify and employ the best people – three years later we are sending out all black news crews.

Scotland has a far smaller BME population than London and other places in the UK and yet we’ve been able to increase the diversity of our staff. With it being this easy my sadness comes from the fact it seems so difficult to achieve similar results elsewhere in television.

I have lost count of how many meetings I have gone to about increasing diversity in television. I have seen numerous diversity programmes developed, implemented and then ended with limited results. From my own experience I can’t help but feel that diversity in the media could be solved incredibly easily; people in positions of responsibility simply need to employ the best people regardless of their backgrounds. This might sound naive but I do believe the talent is already out there and it can be done.

The fact the problem continues to exist when it seems so deceptively easy to solve makes me sad.

The fact we are making incremental progress though does make me happy and when it has something to do with Scotland Current Affairs it actually fills me with a little pride.

(First published on TheTVCollective.org on 3rd May 2011)

Census Form - Filled Yours In Yet?

Back in 1991 as a student I had a part time job of a census enumerator. The job involved going door to door, handing out the national census form, helping people to fill it out and then collecting them all back. I was responsible for eight streets in Kilburn and a tower block. It was one of the hardest jobs I ever had. 1991 was also the time of the dreaded poll tax and so a lot of people thought I was trying to do the work of the tax-man collecting information on them. I had a lot of doors slammed in my face, heard a lot of words that I don’t think are appropriate to commit to a blog post and was even threatened with a dog.

It turned out I wasn’t the only enumerator that had problems getting people to fill out their census that year because of the poll tax. 1991 is now viewed as one of the least reliable British census ever with an estimated million people just not accounted for. If my experience was representative of census takers up and down the country I would guess it was predominantly poorer people who fell off the census radar that year fearing that the poll tax would catch up with them. The census is used to decide how public finances should be allocated, which groups the government should focuses its services towards and how to form public policy. The irony was the very people who needed to be counted by the census the most were running away from it.

20 years later I have hung up my census enumerator clip board but now as a BBC television producer interested in diversity I find myself grappling with the same issues? Only this time I am not directly worried about government policy but the policy of broadcasters. And it is the census figures that once again that are all important.

The diversity targets that the BBC (and other broadcasters set) for staffing are based on the percentage of BME or disabled people in the general population for example. And where do these statistics usually come from? You’ve guessed it – the census. It is very hard to argue for more diversity in front of or behind the camera if the figures don’t back you up. Conversely when the figures are on your side the argument literally makes itself.

A number of Scottish politicians have consistently used the census to argue that the amount of the BBC’s licence fee spent in Scotland should directly correspond to the percentage of the UK’s population that live in Scotland (roughly just under a tenth). It’s an argument that the BBC seem to be listening to more and more as the BBC increasingly moves productions out of London.

As I filled out the census last week I started thinking which census figures will be useful for The TVCollective. Should we be arguing, like Scottish politicians, that there should be a direct correlation between licence fee spend and productions staffed by diverse talent? If the census shows that the there is an increase in disability should TheCollective argue for bringing back the Disability Programme Unit? And if the middleclass black population has grown how should broadcasters reflect this? (The popularity of Colourful Radio seems to indicate that the black middleclass are an underserviced audience).

So now I have posted back my completed census form I realise my census work has only just started. The raw data will determine how I focus my energies around the subject of diversity and which arguments I might be able to win and which I won’t even bother having. My days as a census enumerator may now be a distant memory and I haven’t been chased by a dog since but it’s only now that I realise just how important that little form really is.

(First published on TheTVCollective.org on 08/04/2011)

I Am Not A Victim

I have just signed off the final cut of “Born To Lead” a film about guide dogs that will be broadcast on Monday the 28^th March on 19.30 BBC1 Scotland. It is a very straight forward documentary; Ian Hamilton is a much loved blind reporter for BBC Scotland, his old guide dog is being retired and he needs to find a new dog.

The challenge for Ian and the producer when making the film is how we should represent visually impaired people. At the beginning of the film Ian was adamant about one thing,he did not want blind and partially sighted people to be portrayed as victims.

Yes the film needs to expose how difficult it is for visually impaired people to lead independent lives, (we’ve uncovered new and alarming stats as to how many visually impaired people never leave their homes).

Yes the film needs to give an accurate picture of how a ten minute walk down the street for most people can turn into a marathon for visually impaired people due to the increase in “street furniture”.

And yes the documentary has to show how emotionally distressing it is when a person loses their friend and partner (their guide dog) who they have relied on for years and needs to find a new dog.

But the message Ian Hamilton wanted to get across loud and clear is, “blind people are not victims”. I think most people from diverse backgrounds want to tell television decision makers a similar message. It is important for TV producers not to portray large sections of the population as victims with white middleclass people being the norm.

People from diverse backgrounds want stories that reflect the reality of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia and disability prejudice but these are simply aspects of their lives, these things don’t define their lives.

With this thought at the forefront of the production team’s minds the team started production on “Born To Lead” knowing that they didn’t want to make a simple story on guide dogs reminiscent of a Blue Peter Special, they wanted to produce something with a more current affairs grittier edge. But they didn’t want to produce a film just about the problems the visually impaired face.

As the executive producer I think the team succeeded in going beyond victimhood journalism, and the reality is it’s difficult to portray the people who appear in the film as victims. Ian Hamilton (BBC reporter), David Blunket (ex-cabinet minister), Peter White (Radio 4 presenter) and Scottish DJ Mikey Hughes (Big Brother contestant) may face challenges but “victim” isn’t the first noun I’d reach for when discussing them.

The challenge I face however as a regular blogger for the TVCollective is how can I write about the issue of diversity in the media without coming across as a victim? Yes we face challenges as programme makers and yes there is prejudice in the world of television but I don’t wake up every morning thinking “Life as a black producer is terrible”, far from it. Like my reporter Ian Hamilton diversity is an issue in my life – it doesn’t define my life.

(First published on TheTVCollective.org on 28/03/2011)

The Curse Of Potential

In recent months I have become a massive fan of Twitter. I’m not so much into the celebrity Twitterers so I don’t follow Lady Gaga or Stephen Fry, nor do I care that much about friends twittering about what they ate for breakfast or what film they are about to see.

Instead I love Twitter because it tells me about things larger media organisations don’t, my favourite Twitterers point me to web sites I didn’t even know exist and increasingly I often get breaking news before it’s officially reported by traditional broadcasters.

It is for this last reason that I turned to Twitter to find out the winners of the RTS journalism awards last week. As each award was announced @TVNewsroom let his 1,244 followers know who the winners were. And so it was at exactly 22.17pm on Wednesday 23^rd February that I learnt that Rohit Kachroo had won Young Journalist Of The Year.

This is the second year in a row that a BME reporter has been awarded the Young Journalist Of The Year, the year before it was Tamanna Rahman. Anyone who has seen Rohit’s work on Channel 4 or Tamanna on the BBC will know they are both worthy winners. My concern is that their achievements point to a pattern that seems to be common in the television industry.

BME talent often seem to tick the “has potential” box. Ever since I have worked in television when it comes to BME staff the focus is invariably on the “young” and “potential”. Until recently nearly all initiatives to increase BME representation behind the camera have focused on young entry level positions. This strategy has been going on for over twenty years. For over twenty years we have had our “great potential” praised and are told we are about to be the “next big thing”.

However for staff from diverse backgrounds being the “next big thing” has rarely translated into being the “actual big thing” ten / twenty years down the line. Something is clearly happening from our youth being lauded to it translating into long-term careers.

While prizes are very nice and going to black tie events are great for our egos we need to make sure we don’t lose sight of the bigger goal. The goal of more people from diverse backgrounds having long, fulfilling, meaningful careers in television. A glittering career that ends at thirty followed by short-term contracts and long periods of unemployment is a pattern I have seen too often among my BME and disabled colleagues.

We need to identify the career obstacles and stumbling blocks that mean that we invariably have problems fulfilling our amazing “potential”. The success of Rohit and Tamanna once again confirm that given a level playing field diverse talent have the skills and determination to succeed in one of the most competitive industries in the world. The challenge for the TVCollective is to make sure that we can help the likes of the two recent young journalist of the year translate their recent success into even bigger and brighter awards in the future. The test for the television industry is to recognise that our talent doesn’t end when we stop being young.

The RTS Programme Awards is on 15th March read full shortlist  here.

(First published on TheTVCollective.org on 11/03/2011)

Just Say Yes

Working in BBC Glasgow I spend a lot of my time travelling back and forth to London to see genre commissioners, series editors and other key BBC figures based in London. The BBC might be pushing programmes out to the regions but most of the big money decisions are still made in our glorious capital. All of which means I spend a lot of time on the train.

The other day I was sat beside a young couple with a very noisy small toddler. Working away I was studiously trying to ignore the toddler but could see the young child was definitely not happy…his favourite word seemed to be “no” and his parents were struggling to figure out what their “little bundle of joy” wanted.

It was during this time that I received an email on my work blackberry inviting me to the launch of the BBC’s Chairmanship of the Cultural Diversity Network (CDN). When it comes to the question of diversity in TV one of my biggest worries is that I am like that young toddler: I know exactly what I don’t want but have trouble articulating exactly what I do want.

I know I don’t want business as normal. I don’t want BME and disabled people to be under-represented both in front of and behind the camera. I don’t want pledges that are easy to sign up to but require no action to be taken. And I don’t want a lack of accountability when no action is taken to improve diversity.

As you can see, like the toddler, I am very good at saying “no”. But unless we can state clearly what we are saying “yes” to, people working in the TV industry from diverse backgrounds will be forever passive recipients of initiatives that large media organisations role out “on our behalf”. With the BBC preparing to take over the Chair of the CDN we have a rare opportunity to influence diversity initiatives and make our “Yeses” heard – not just our “No’s”.

So for the rest of the train ride to Euston I decided to try and make a “Yes List” – things I want the television industry to adopt in regards to diversity…

My Yes List

1. More transparency. All companies who receive more than £250,000 worth of work from broadcasters signed up to the CDN pledge (BBC, ITV, Sky, Channel 4, 5 et al) should be made to publish their employment diversity statistics, disaggregated by grade. These statistics should be easily accessible to everyone.

2. Sharper Diversity Measurement: Diversity should cover six broad areas: race, class, gender, disability, religion and sexuality. Progress in these areas should be quantifiable and therefore measurable This will avoid “Diversity” meaning all things to all people and essentially becoming meaningless. The hardest one of these six areas to measure would be class – I’d suggest we measure it in terms of employment of non-private school educated people. A rough measure, but better than none at all.

3. Clearly Defined Terms: There should be an industry-wide definition of BME as visible non-white minority. The idea that employing white Americans and Australians should count towards combating prejudice and racism in the industry makes a mockery of our statistics (NB: Don’t get me wrong – I think there is a need to look at culturally excluded white groups – but simply broadening the definition of BME only confuses matters.)

4. Real Penalties: As previously suggested by Pat Younge, there should be real penalties for managers who do not meet set diversity targets in large media organisations.

It’s not a definitive list and I’m not expecting everyone (or anyone) to agree with all of it. I should also add that this “Yes list” is just my personal opinion, having worked in the TV industry for almost twenty years. It’s not the opinion of the BBC.

But I think everyone should have their own personal “Yes List”. In fact, I hope that people will reply to this blog with their own “Yes Lists” so we can all start influencing the BBC and its Chairmanship of the Cultural Diversity Network. It is only by saying “Yes” that we will get what we want… As my train pulled into Euston the toddler was still saying “No” and neither he nor his parents were looking any happier.

(First published on TheTVCollective.org on 07/03/2011)