Who's Afraid Of The "R" Word?

Large sections of British society want to portray much of the discussion around racism, sexism and other diversity issues as “Political Correctness gone mad” but is that just another way to shut us up?

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last weeks (or are living on a diet of X-Factor and the Apprentice) you will know that racism is once again in the headlines. First there was Tiger Woods’ former caddy wanting to put things inside the golfer’s orifices, then there was England captain John Terry insulting Anton Ferdinand and finally last week Fifa President Sepp Blatter saying racism could be solved with a friendly handshake.

These events have caused some people not to ask if society is becoming more racist but whether we have all become too sensitive about racism and name calling and once again to ask is this all “Political Correctness gone mad”? The BBC topical discussion and phone-in programme “Sunday Morning Live” joined in with the debate with three panellists – Gerry Robinson, Carole Malone and John Amaechi – trying to answer these very questions. The two white panellists Gerry Robinson and Carole Malone both thought society had become too sensitive and ordinary white people now live in fear of saying the wrong thing and being accused of being racist. Carole Malone described an incident where she was too scared to even describe a shop assistant as black just in case this was misconstrued as being racist.

I’m not doubting Carole Malone and Gerry Robinson’s experience in shops but when it comes to working in TV the truth is normally the reverse. Accusing anyone of racism (or much worse of being a racist) takes tremendous guts. Accusing anyone of the ‘R’ word can jeopardise your job, your career, social standing and risk being alienated by your colleagues.

Being accused of being racist almost has the same social opprobrium as being a called a paedophile or wife-beater. While it is a sign of progress that racism is now seen as completely unacceptable in a way it wasn’t thirty years ago the stigma attached to the label can scare people from raising the issue let alone pointing fingers.

Take the simple act of blogging for example. I often have discussions with black colleagues about the issues of prejudice and racism in the television industry but when I suggest they blog about it as I do (or talk to other people in power about it) they regularly tell me that they don’t want to “rock the boat”. They tell me that I have a “safe” staff job at the BBC and I’m senior enough to say the things I say without fear of receiving my P45. They feel that raising any of the points they regularly talk about when amongst colleagues and friends from diverse backgrounds could mark them out as troublemakers. They worry that talking about racism in the television industry is the equivalent of calling people in very powerful positions in the industry (their current and future bosses) “paedophiles”.

We have got to find a way in which colleagues can raise issues of race without fearing that they are committing career suicide. Similarly we need find a way to look at inequality and race related problems in the television industry without those in power becoming overly defensive, fearing that they are being labelled “racist” and pushed in the same corner as wife-beaters, rapists and paedophiles.

The recent incidents involving Sepp Blatter, John Terry and Steve Williams show that racism is still an important problem that needs to be addressed. But just as everyone from David Cameron to David Beckham realise a friendly handshake won’t solve racism neither will being afraid of using the ‘R’ word.

One Is Never Enough

I was recently invited to attend the launch of Powerlist 2011 – an event recognising powerful and influential black people in the UK (I crept on to the list in the “40 and under category”). A lot of the black people at the launch event were truly inspiring having broken glass ceiling after glass ceiling. As I was making small talk over finger food afterwards the one feature that lay behind a lot of their achievements is that they were often the only black person in their field, their office or even their company. From my own experience of often being the only black person in a production team or TV department, I wondered about what effect this has been having on achieving true diversity. Let me give you an example.

Working in current affairs, I regularly come across weird and wonderful crime stories. A few months ago a black man in a car was pulled over by the police. The police discovered that he was driving without insurance, hand-cuffed him and arrested him. However, after he had been arrested the driver got into a dispute with the police officer. It just so happened that the arresting police officer also happened to be black.  The black driver then proceeded to call the black police officer a number of names including “black c---” and “black bastard”.

In England and Wales, under the Crime And Disorder Act 1998, if someone commits a crime and it is proven to have a racial element they are subject to a harsher sentence (similar laws apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland). Hence, when this case came to court the black driver was found guilty of a far more serious racially aggravated offence than he would have been otherwise.

It was a minor case, and as it happened in England we definitely weren’t going to cover it up here in BBC Scotland. However, it nevertheless came up in discussion over lunch one day with my white colleagues and friends.  Nearly all of them thought that the black driver was guilty of racism and deserved to have a stiffer sentence than if he hadn’t called the officer racist names.  Obviously, so did the jury in the case.  On the other hand, nearly all BME colleagues and friends I also raised the story with later thought charging a black man with a racially aggravated crime against a black police officer made a mockery of the very good reasons the additional legislation of racial aggravation was introduced in the first place.

I’m not sure which group of friends and colleagues are right (and I hope everyone noticed the “nearly all” in both group – not all white people and not all BME people think the same).  But what it does highlight is that people from different racial groups with different life experiences can often view the same events differently.

The problem is that as I talked the story through with my white colleagues over lunch I was acutely aware that I was the only questioning voice.  I was worried that I would either be seen as having bad judgement (an extremely important quality in television and journalism in particular) or worse still thought to have a racial chip on my shoulder. I felt insecure in voicing a dissenting opinion – despite the fact I was the most senior person sitting at the BBC canteen table talking.

If there had been just one other person putting forward an alternative view, or one other BME person sitting at the table, I would have been a lot bolder. I see this all the time with both Scottish issues and with women’s issues. I often see the single Scot in London not voicing a particular view on “English prejudice” as they are worried they will be typecast as the “Angry Scot”.  Yet when he or she is back in Glasgow amongst fellow Scots they are quite the opposite. I know many women who keep their opinions to themselves concerned they will be viewed as “man-hating-feminists”.

Ironically enough, having the odd woman, disabled person or BME member of staff working by themselves can fail to increase diversity.  The sole diverse member of staff striving to fit in will worry about sticking out or being known only by their differences. Far from increasing plurality of views having only one member of staff from a diverse background can sometimes cause even more consensus.

The answer to this problem of course is simple. We need to employ even more diverse staff (easier said than done). Breaking glass ceilings and being the only BME (or woman or disabled person) at a particular level is important, and it is brilliant that there are events like the Powerlist 2011 to recognise these achievements. But until these trailblazers have company I’m not convinced that we will achieve true diversity.

Black Criminals On TV

I recently had my first viewing of a Panorama rough cut on the issue of fuel crime. With petrol and diesel prices at an all time high and the UK having the highest taxed fuel in the E.U. it is a multi-million pound issue involving the Treasury, organised crime and even former terrorists.

At the bottom end of the crime scale are basic forecourt drive-offs: people who fill up their car and simply drive off without paying. But even this can be big business, with some criminals not only filling up their tanks but jerry-cans in the boot and driving off with hundreds of pounds worth of fuel at a time and selling it on. A few weeks ago, my team told me that they had secured an interview with one of these drive-off criminals. Thought to be a “one-man-crime-wave”, this person was responsible for stealing thousands of litres of petrol and is currently serving time in Strangeways prison (now officially HM Prison Manchester).

Being allowed into Strangeways and securing the interview took a lot of hard work and was a bit of a journalistic coup. All the time the producer and reporter were briefing me about the film and the interview I never gave the ethnicity of the criminal a second thought. We were all too busy focusing on the journalism to worry about his skin colour.

However after watching the first rough cut and discovering that the Strangeways’ convict is black I would be lying if I said my heart didn’t sink and my completely emotional and non-professional reaction was: “why does he have to be black?”

When people talk about improving on screen diversity they usually discuss as if it is a simple issue. But the longer I have worked in television the more complicated it seems to become.

I remember giving a lecture to film students in Johannesburg, when the subject of television’s representation of HIV and AIDS came up. HIV is a massive issue in South Africa with one in four people between the ages of 15 – 49 being HIV positive. The predominantly black students complained that South African TV nearly always portrayed HIV as a black issue. “AIDS affects everybody” one of them told me, “but 9 times out of 10, when you see someone with HIV or AIDS on TV they are black”.

The sad reality is that 13.6% of all black South Africans are HIV positive, while only 0.3% of white people are. That means that if there were an even number of blacks and whites for every 1 white person with HIV there would be 45 black people with HIV. However as black people make up approximately 80% of the South African population and whites 10%, the more accurate figure is for every 1 white person with HIV, there are 360 HIV positive black people. All of a sudden 9 times out of 10 sounds like South African TV is actually underestimating the “black problem” and inaccurately reflecting the reality. What the film students were asking for was favourable portrayal.

On the other hand, a few years ago when rising knife crime statistics had gripped the imagination of the UK press, a BBC Panorama programme was broadcast, which showed journalists going into a youth offenders unit and interviewing 5 or 6 perpetrators of knife crime. All but one of the interviewees was black. In London, it is thought that 46% of people arrested of a knife crime are black. So that’s just 1 out of 2, rather than 5 or 6 out of 7. I hasten to add that this is arrests rather than people convicted, so may well reflect more on policing practice than the reality of knife crime. But even if you accept the London figures as being a fair indication of the racial breakdown of knife criminals, the Panorama programme certainly seemed to over-represent the proportion of black people engaged in this particular crime.

And it did. That Panorama programme was made by a London-based production team. Back in 2009, there is no doubt that knife crime was perceived by a lot of Londoners as a “black issue”. But to those of us outside of London, we found it rather strange. Glasgow actually has the highest rate of violent crime in the UK, and knife crime levels are more than 3 times higher in Scotland than the rest of the UK. Having visited several Scottish penal institutions, I am pretty sure almost all those convicted of knife crime are white. If knife crime has a “racial profile” in Scotland, it is most definitely a “white issue”.

On-screen representation of race in current affairs programmes is difficult at the best of times. Good news rarely makes headlines and who wants to be the subject of bad news? I do not believe it should be the role of factual television producers to make programmes that show favourable representations of one diverse group or another. What any factual programme-maker should strive for is accuracy – and on certain sensitive issues that means doing your homework really well.

If there are 360 more HIV positive black South Africans to every white South African, it would be wrong to show a white person with HIV every time you showed a black case study (which is what one of the film students was arguing for). But it is equally wrong for British television to paint a picture that the majority of knife criminals are black when they clearly aren’t (not in London which has the largest black community let alone the rest of the UK). Accuracy and honesty in film-making must be our guiding principle in on-screen representation of diversity and that involves research of knowing what the true figures are.

Unfortunately, there appear to be no figures for the racial breakdown of fuel crime. But taking the rough cut Panorama programme on fuel crime that I saw, as a whole the film identifies over a dozen people breaking the law. The fact that one of the most prolific happens to be black might irritate me emotionally, but journalistically I think my team have probably represented the reality accurately and honestly enough.

Lessons From A Serial Killer

Could a convicted serial killer teach us all a lesson in diversity?

On the 4^th October, possibly the most important programme I have ever overseen was broadcast. But I suspect very few of the people reading this blog will have seen it. It was a programme aired only in Scotland. And it was about a possible miscarriage of justice.

Colin Norris is a convicted serial killer currently serving 30 years. He was a nurse who supposedly poisoned at least five elderly patients with insulin – killing four of them in 2002.

The programme was staffed by a lot of journalists who used to work on the series “Rough Justice” - which specialised in bringing miscarriage of justices to light. Our film on Colin Norris (BBC Scotland Investigates: The Hospital Serial Killer), revealed new scientific evidence that casts doubt on the insulin poisoning that he was convicted for. As well as the new scientific evidence my team also discovered other people that had died of similar low blood sugar symptoms as the 5 “victims”, but these other people died when Colin Norris was not on duty. This meant that either there was someone else murdering these people or, more likely as the new scientific evidence points to, they all died of natural causes. If our investigation is right an innocent man could be serving time for four murders and an attempted murder he did not do.

The programme was covered extensively in the Tartan press (The Herald, Scotsman, Daily Record and Scottish versions of the UK papers) and received an above average audience. The new evidence has now been submitted to the criminal case review commission to decide if a miscarriage of justice has in fact taken place.

For the purpose of this blog post, however, the key fact is that Colin is Scottish. This potential miscarriage of justice was not picked up by network television. In fact, it was only commissioned by me because I have a pot of money to highlight issues that are either of interest to a Scottish audience and / or are about something specific to Scotland.

If Colin Norris had been English, I would have been very unlikely to have been able to commission a programme looking at his case. The implications for people interested in diversity in television is obvious. How many important stories are falling through the cracks because there is not specific ring-fenced money for looking at a specific group of people? Is there a similar miscarriage of justice film about a disabled person that hasn’t had a top BBC team of journalists looking at it because there isn’t ring-fenced disability money or TV programmes? What important black issues are we failing to cover because there isn’t ring-fenced money to make black specific programmes? By their very definition, we will never know the answer to those types of questions.

The truth is all broadcasters and all genre commissioners are far better at commissioning diverse programmes in the mainstream than they were twenty years ago, both in terms of on-screen talent and issues. One only has to look at the recent mixed race season on the BBC as an example. And no one wants to go back to the days when different diverse groups were given their own programmes and ring-fenced money but the films were nearly all broadcast at obscure times when no-one was watching.

However what “BBC Scotland Investigates: The Hospital Serial Killer” did reveal is that ring-fenced money for specific communities, regions or nations can sometimes uncover important stories that would otherwise be overlooked. Ring-fenced programme money is not appropriate for all diversity issues and communities but there is no doubt that it does have a role to play in television. Just ask all the Scottish people who watched the programme.

Gay People Are Different

Last Sunday I made one of my very rare appearances in front of the camera as a guest on the programme “Shoot The Messenger”, a round up of the weeks current affairs big stories on the cable channel VoxAfrica, the easiest way to describe it to anyone who hasn’t seen it before is a black version of the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. I was on to do the paper review.

Whenever you do a paper review you end up knowing the papers far better than you would normally and noticing stories that any other lazy Sunday morning would pass you by. So it was that a story came to my attention that made me question my whole approach to diversity issues and how we should tackle stories in news and current affairs.

According to a YouGov survey commissioned by Stonewall, gay men and women in Britain are far more likely to end up living alone and have less contact with family in later life than heterosexual people. Unsurprisingly gay people over 50 have far fewer children than their heterosexual counterparts, (approximately a quarter for gay and bisexual men and half for lesbians compared to whopping 90% for their heterosexual counterparts). Older gay people are also far more likely to live alone (40% compared to about a quarter for heterosexuals). This has massive consequences for an aging population and how we look after our elderly in the coming years. Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, is quoted in the Observer saying; "We're facing a care time bomb of institutional ignorance about what a community that makes a £40bn a year contribution to public services will soon – quite properly – be demanding."

The reason why this story struck me is that working in current affairs I have covered the issue of Britain’s aging population several times. It’s what we call a current affairs “hardy perennial”, like the military, the unemployment rate and the NHS it’s an issue we keep on coming back to. However in all the years I have covered the story of an aging population I have never once thought; what does an aging population mean to gay people?  I had never thought of it as a “gay issue”. It might seems a bit naive to say on a blog dedicated to looking at issues about diversity but all people are not the same and that obviously applies to elderly people as well.

Nearly all large current affairs issues affect the whole population but how it impacts on individuals’ lives will nearly always differ depending on your class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, age etc. All too often in television we treat all people the same and don’t delve deeper into how diversity changes the issues. The YouGov survey of the gay elderly provided a new insight into an old problem. Covering diversity makes for better journalism and in my world better journalism means better television. And that is something we should all be trying to achieve. 


After all that however I ran out of time to discuss the gay elderly on the paper review on "Shoot The Messenger". Another guest had spotted a story about plans to prosecute absentee fathers for their children's crimes. Depressingly that seemed too relevant a story to pass up for an African and Carribean British focused programme.

A Problem Of Trust

I have worked in television for over 20 years. During that time, I have never met a racist person in my professional life. Neither have I met anyone with a pathological hatred of disabled people. And while I’ve heard a few questionable jokes, I’d be hard pressed to label anyone sexist.

For the most part I like the people I work with. They are liberal and open-minded. There are some whose views I don’t agree with, but heated arguments are part of the currency of working in news and current affairs.


My colleagues invite me to their homes for dinner parties. They ask me to join them for drinks and trips to the theatre just as much as anyone else.

They know that I went to the local comprehensive and an ordinary redbrick university. They don’t seem to look down on me or treat me any differently from the people who went to private schools and graduated from Oxbridge.  This is why writing the next statement is so difficult and puzzling: the broadcast industry is prejudiced. 

The broadcast industry seems to dislike women, clearly has an aversion to ethnic minorities (especially blacks and Pakistanis) and positively hates disabled people.

How do I know that I – and people like me – are hated?  Despite all my nice colleagues, every time I go to a management meeting in London or Glasgow, I realise I am consistently the only non-white person sitting at the table.

And it’s the only logical conclusion I can draw from reading the latest and final annual report published by the Broadcast Equality & Training Regulator (BETR).

According to the BETR report in 2010 women are struggling in broadcasting despite the fact that 44% of people who work in broadcasting are women.

When it comes to senior management, men outnumber women two to one. If you look at executive and non-executive board members men outnumber their female colleagues three to one.

As for ethnic minorities it seems, surprisingly, as if the industry likes them a lot more than women. Ten per cent of people working in broadcasting are non-white.

At first sight this doesn't look too bad considering that approximately 12.5% of the UK working age population is non-white. However, do a bit of digging and it’s clear this figure reflects the obvious - that most of broadcasting is based in London, where 24% of the population is non-white.

All of a sudden 10% vs. 24% doesn’t look too good. Dig a bit further and go up the pay scale and BME numbers keep dropping; only 8% of managers and less than 6% of senior managers are non-white; by the time you get to board members, it drops to a paltry 4%.

But if BME people thought they weren’t liked, then disabled people are positively loathed by the industry.
According to the BETR report, 16% of working age people in Britain is disabled, yet they comprise only 2.3% of the broadcasting workforce. Again, the numbers keep falling the further up the hierarchy you go; less than 1% of executive board members are disabled.

As a black man working in television these kinds of reports can start to make you feel paranoid. Everyone in broadcasting is nice to your face. But take one look at the statistics and you can’t help but feel that, at best, they like you because you are “not like the rest of them,” or, at worst, television is full of closet racists.
However, I doubt very much that the people who invite me to join them at picnics and concerts after work are really closet neo-Nazis performing a massive charade. I also realise that if my paranoid fears are well-founded, then as a BBC executive producer I too am responsible for employing other black people, women and disabled people.  Am I doing my job properly or am I being discriminatory?  Surely not.
Assuming that other broadcasting executives are like me, and the industry is not full of secret two-faced bigots, what is happening?

Why are the figures so bad for BMEs, women and disabled people?

I believe the answer to the apparent contradiction of a profession loaded with nice liberal people who at the same time seems to pathologically hate anyone who is not white, able bodied and male men can be found in the same BETR report. It’s all about trust.

Throughout television and broadcasting we have to trust the people we employ. We don’t just need to trust their technical proficiency.

We need to trust their taste as to what makes a good programme and their editorial judgement. Almost every week I give a director a large sum of money and tell them to come back with a great programme. Yes, s/he has to pitch the idea to me, yes I read treatments, yes I have meetings during the course of the production process. All of this is designed to mitigate risk and increase the possibility of success.

But essentially any media executive has to eventually trust the person they employ – irrespective of how much micro-managing they can and may want to do.

Trust is such a difficult beast to pin down. What makes you trust someone? Salesmen know from experience that trust can be decided by the way a person walks, talks or just the cut of their suit.

Other industries have tried to certify trust by implementing professional qualifications. In broadcasting, there are few academic and professional qualifications.

So while all the nice people I come across try and be as fair as possible when employing people, I believe it all comes down to whether you trust the person.

And that’s where all manner of subconscious fears, prejudices and feelings come into play.

Now, according to the BETR, companies that invest in training and developing their staff invariably do well on measures regarding Equal Opportunities. In other words, they employ more BMEs, women and disabled staff.

What this tells me is that if you believe in your staff and believe they can be professionally trained, you are less likely to rely on gut instinct when it comes to trust.

In short; you can train people to do a good job regardless of their background, race, gender or disabilities. You don't have to only have faith and blind trust.

That trust also pays dividends. According to Lucy P. Marcus of the Harvard Business Review the more diverse a boardroom is the more profitable it is.

Diverse boards are more flexible, draw on the widest pool of talent and are better at solving difficult business problems. And if diversity is good for the boardrooms I am sure it is beneficial for the rest of a company.
So from now on I am no longer going to be paranoid as to whether people really like me or not, or whether the industry is really full of two faced closet sexist-disability-hating-racists.

Instead, I'm going to be more concerned about their training budgets and how much they invest in their staff.
The big question will never be whether you like me enough to invite me round for dinner, but whether you trust me enough to put me in charge of your next multiple-million pound project.

If you believe you can invest in people and train them to get that trust, you are more likely to employ a diverse work force.

If you are still going on vague gut instincts then we’re unlikely to see any progress in diversity in broadcasting anytime soon, and that would be a real shame.

First Published In Television Magazine RTS September 2011

TV Audiences & The Secrets Of Twitter

When I was 12, I met my first “girlfriend” – Angela. I met her at a basketball camp. She had Gerri-Curl and a better jump shot than I and, crucially, she was the only girl that would talk to me.  I thought she was amazing.  I say she was a “girlfriend” but in reality the totality of the “relationship” consisted of watching the American Sci-Fi television series V about an alien invasion in our respective homes and talking about it on the phone as we watched it “together”.

But while young men and the occasional 12 year-old boys might have been the target audience for the Sci-Fi series, I doubt the programme makers were thinking that young black British girls might be interested in watching their alien invasion saga. As a programme maker, discovering who your audience really are can be a surprise.

I have started to discover some surprises about my audience recently through the power of the Twitter hash-tag. Hash-tags allow you to pull together people who are tweeting about the same subject to see what other people are saying about the same issue.  Increasingly, programmes are using twitter hash-tags to enable online / twitter group conversations about a programme as it is being broadcast. Want to know whether other people are thinking the same thing as you when you hear that awful / great intervention on BBC Question Time? Then follow the Twitter hash-tag #BBCQT and you’ll find out.

Broadcasters are turning to hash-tags for a number of reasons:

1. It means that people watch the programmes as they go out (great for advertisers).

2. Hash-tags turn a simple television into a social event.

3.Over 40% of people do other things like play with their phones while watching TV. This keeps their attention on your film even if they are doing something else.

4. Hash-tags help to generate a buzz about a programme.

For people interested in diversity issues on television, what the hash-tags also do is give a great insight into who is watching your programmes and what they think about them. It also causes you to confront your own prejudices as to whom you think is watching your output.

Like Angela, my black “ex-girlfriend” obsessed with Sci-Fi, I’ve found that my audiences rarely fit my target expectations and are a lot more diverse than I expect. For example, earlier this year I exec’ed a 60 minute film called “Portillo On Salmond”. It featured Michael Portillo following Alec Salmond on the election trail as he won an historic second term. With a hash-tag of #PortilloOnSalmond, I was able to see who was watching and what interested the audience. What amazed me was the level of tweeting that occurred when the film showed Alec Salmond campaigning in an Asian neighbourhood.  Knowing what I know now, if we were to cut the film again, I would definitely want the director to feature more of how Alec Salmond won the Asian vote.  It has also made me think about whether to commission a radio programme looking at the rise of the importance of the BME vote in Scotland.

It goes without saying that one has to be careful when looking at your audiences through Twitter hash-tags. There is no doubt that Twitter is not completely representative of the general viewing public – it skews towards the young and web savvy. But the hash-tags are still useful to execs and producers because when a programme goes out no longer is our audience an amorphous blob represented by large ratings figures the next day. We can now see the modern equivalent of the 12 year old Angela’s and myself in the audience and “eavesdrop” on what they are saying about our programmes.  Once other execs and producers realise the diversity of their audiences, I’m hoping, like me, they will be more willing to reflect the audience’s own diversity and cast diverse talent on screen, as well as cover issues that reflect their diverse interests.  Now that will make TV far more personal, interesting and something worth tweeting about.