Am I Black Enough For You?

Where are you from?

I suspect every non-white person (and quite a few white people as well) will appreciate the complexity that such a seemingly simple question can pose. In those four words non-white people often have to work out what the person is really asking, and it’s hidden meaning can range from; “where do you currently live?” to “Were your forefathers part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and do you have roots in Africa?”

I was born in London, my mother is Jamaican and my father is British born to immigrant east European parents. I think of myself as a Londoner, even though I have lived in Scotland for almost five years and recently I was lovingly described as an “Afro-wegian” by a Scottish friend acknowledging both my black identity and the time I’ve spent in Glasgow. 

In an increasingly globalised, multicultural world questions of identity are complex and multifaceted. There are rarely any “right” or “wrong” answers when it comes to the question "where are you from?". The answers can change over time and sometimes they come down to fuzzy feelings of “belonging” and amorphous subjective qualities of values and tastes.

While the very fuzziness and multiple answers can work for an individual, and can even be liberating (I love the fact that sometimes I am British and other times I rejoice in my Jamaican heritage), fuzziness works less well when it comes to the television industry.

The question the British television industry often has to answer is; where does a TV programme come from? or more precisely; when is a programme made out of London? The BBC along with other broadcasters have quotas as to how many programmes they make outside of London. On the face of it that can seem pretty straight forward but like identity when can you say a programme is “Scottish” or “Welsh” or “Northern Irish” or just simply made outside of the M25?

For example what is the “identity” of a programme if it’s made by a company based in Scotland but the director and most of the team live in London and it’s filmed in Wales? To answer that question the TV industry has worked out three criteria to decide a programme’s “identity”: 

1. Where is the company based?

2. Where do the majority of the production team normally live, (“majority” is decided by share of salaries, otherwise you could just pack the team with cheap runners from a location)?

3. Where is the majority of the money spent (that means costs such as filming and editing)?

If at least two out of three of these criteria are outside the M25 then it is an “outside of London” programme. If at least two out of these three occur in a specific place, Scotland for example, then the programme is officially Scottish.

As someone who is interested in increasing diversity in the television industry I wonder if we should learn a lesson from how we currently decide if a production is officially an out of London programme.

Could we adapt the regional criteria to see if a programme is officially “diverse”:

1. Is the company (or executive producer) from a diverse background?

2. Are the majority of the production team from a diverse background?

3. Is the majority of the money spent with diverse suppliers (female camera operators, disabled editors for example)?

Regional programmes have to meet two out of three criteria, for diverse programmes maybe we would only have to meet one, or we might want to judge the diversity of programmes by different criteria.

Unlike the broadcasting industry’s approach to regionality I am not suggesting quotas but I am suggesting that we start monitoring. Are in-house production teams and independents becoming more or less diverse? How well are BME owned, or disabled owned, independent companies faring? Are we making more or less diverse programmes? It is only through monitoring that we will know if we are making progress and the first step in monitoring is working out what we are measuring.

I might be happy with a multi-hyphenated identity of being a mixed-race-afrowegian-londoner-living-in-Scotland but we might need to be a little less woolly when deciding if our programmes should be called “diverse” or not. As a Scottish executive producer I often go to meetings where we discuss whether a programme is officially “Scottish enough”, who knows in the future I might go to meetings to decide if a programme is “diverse enough”.

Do TV Executives Employ The Best People Or Their Best Friends?

Every TV executive I know loves to hear 5 magic words: “Your programme has been green-lit”. After weeks, months and on a few occasions even years of working away in the murky world of development you can become obsessed with those five words, you start hearing them in your sleep and think you can almost see them in cryptic messages  when you are reading a newspaper. For those of you who are less telly-savvy “green-lighting” is when the programme idea you have been pitching to a commissioner or channel controller is finally and officially commissioned.

Yet the  green-lighting comes with some unique problems. According to a new study by Professor Irena Grugulis of Durham University, the time immediately following a green-light is possibly when one of the biggest obstacles to increasing diversity in the media industry comes into play.

According to Prof. Grugulis, the time between a project being green-lit and when it has to go into production has decreased dramatically over the last twenty years. Previously there could be several months between a commission and needing to fully staff it, now that time has been reduced to an average of just two weeks. That means, to TV executives like myself, two weeks to find a director, assistant producer, researcher, runner and any other people that might be needed to bring the programme to our screens. Prof. Grugulis thinks that this pressure to staff up a project in a short period of time is having a devastating effect in BME and disabled people working in television.

I can see why.  When you have a month or more to staff up a project this gives you enough time to advertise for the positions and to hold proper interviews to fill them. When you have two weeks or less it is invariably a case of the TV exec or series producer picking up the phone and just calling their friends or getting word of mouth recommendations.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out how calling up friends to staff up a project will favour people who are from the same social circles as the person making those phone calls. If you are white and/or middleclass you are far more likely to have a social circle filled with white middleclass friends and all of a sudden the staff on your project will look extremely non-diverse.  Of course, it can go the other way too.  If you are black, disabled and/or from a working class background your social circle is likely to reflect that heritage or background. But the fact is that most TV execs at the moment come from white middle-class backgrounds.  The end result is not necessarily determined by racism or prejudice but it can be very problematic despite the best intentions of everyone involved.  Indeed, according to a report by the Government’s  Department for Business Innovation and Skills word of mouth recruitment “limits the number of applicants”, “it discriminates against those not aware of the vacancy” and “narrows the pool employers can chose from” and is “not very 'diversity friendly'”.

So what can we do to try and solve this problem? Here are my three suggestions:

 

The first thing we should do is raise awareness of the issue. I honestly do not think most commissioners are aware of the problem and the effect their actions are having on creating a non-diverse work force. Every commissioner I have spoken to seems genuinely surprised that green-lighting a project late in the day might have the unintended consequence of adversely affecting BME and disabled staff.

Second, we need increased awareness of (and more) online message boards like the TVCollective where job opportunities can be posted at short notice. The TVCollective and online message boards are not a substitute for a fair interview process but they do help alleviate the worst excesses of competent people not even being aware of job opportunities.

And third, we could ask broadcasters and large television companies to record how many positions they filled through advertisements and interviews. It is only by recording this that we can see if the problem is getting better or worse over time. How can we praise best practice unless we know it is actually happening?

So next time a programme maker is pitching their idea I’m sure they will still say a little prayer to hear those 5 magic words, but maybe we could also ask for a little more time before we have to staff it up. Who knows, commissioners might even like it as they will get the best people to work on their programmes rather than just the TV executive’s best friends.

You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry

In one of my first jobs in television I worked in an open plan office with the boss working in a glass panelled office. When the boss was annoyed with someone they would call them into their glass office and tell them to close the door and then start shouting. When the boss was really angry they would ask the "victim" to leave the door open so the whole team would hear the full extent of their wrath and we could witness our hapless colleague’s humiliation. 

Years later I remember once going to a Current Affairs party with a non-TV friend and when she saw the reporter John Sweeney she didn’t know his name but turned to me and whispered “that’s the angry one”. To be fair if you look up “John Sweeney” on YouTube the first three clips are all him losing his temper on the Panorama programme “Scientology & Me”.

While the behaviour of my old boss was a bit extreme and John Sweeney’s rant has now gone down in television history, unfortunately in the media industry displays of anger are all too common; possibly due to a combination of creativity and high pressure.

Anger however is not just a television issue, it is very much a diversity issue.

It seems that some people are allowed to get angry while other people are meant to bite their tongues. Victoria Brescoll an academic at Yale University in America wanted to test the theory that men are positively rewarded when they get angry while women on the other hand are punished for getting angry in the work place.

She conducted a series of tests; in one of them she got men and women to watch different videos of actors playing out job interviews. In one video a man being ‘interviewed’ described being angry because he’d lost an account, in another the man described being sad because he’d lost the account. There was also another set of videos with women being angry and sad. The people watching the videos were then asked how much money they thought the men should get paid and how much the women should be paid. Roughly speaking the sad men and women were awarded the same salary of approximately $30,000. But when it came to anger the answers were quite different. On average the people watching the videos assigned the angry man a salary of $38,000 and the angry woman was given $23,500. People watching the videos thought angry men displayed authority and deserved more senior pay while anger in a woman displayed a lose of control and so deserved less pay.

So according to the experiment anger paid men $8,000 while it cost women $6,500. Or to put it another way angry men got paid $14,500 more than an angry woman.

As far as I am aware relative tests have not been conducted concerning anger and race, but when I have spoken to black colleagues (especially men) they have often expressed that they feel they are unable to express anger in the work place. They fear that any display of anger will stereoptype them as “angry black people” and they will not be taken seriously. They don’t just fear being paid less they fear losing their jobs.

If people from diverse backgrounds are to break the glass ceilings in the media industry and be paid what they deserve we need to project power and authority. The paradox is that some of the very tools that some people can use to display these qualities actually hinder us.

I deplore  anger in the work place – I feel it is often just one very close step away from bullying – but it is unrealistic to think that in a work environment, where we often spend more time with our colleagues than even our family, emotions are not going to occasionally come to the surface. If we are interested in addressing issues of diversity then when those emotions do bubble up to the surface we need to make sure that everyone is treated equally. Rather than rewarding some and punishing others.

Finally I consciously didn’t reveal the gender of my boss at the beginning of this blog post. How many of you thought my angry boss was a woman and how many of you thought my boss was a man? Whatever you thought let’s make sure our own stereotypes don’t influence  how we treat our colleagues.

RACISM IN FOOTBALL ONLY SCRATCHES THE SURFACE

Six years ago I used to be the series producer of “Whistleblower” a BBC investigative series where we used to go undercover to expose serious wrong doing. Our different reporters went undercover in high profile estate agents, high street banks, supermarkets, and airports. They would often be undercover for months on end secretly filming whenever they saw something that needed to be exposed.

Anyone who has ever done secret filming will tell you that it is less of a science and more of an art, you can often miss the very crucial thing you are trying to film; you end up turning on the secret camera too late, or you are pointing it in the wrong direction, or the camera’s battery runs out at the most crucial time. The fact of the matter is that any number of things can go wrong.

However when it goes right there is nothing better than secret filming: The confession caught on tape, the bad meat being put through the mincer so it can be resold to an unsuspecting public, the estate agent faking documents. It was capturing these incidents on film that gave the series its power and ensured the people secretly filmed were “caught red handed”. It even led to us having a phrase printed on the office wall: “If it didn’t happen on film it doesn’t exist”. We knew capturing wrong doing on film meant everything.

I was reminded of “Whistleblower” and the power of capturing wrong doing on film as the Euro 2012 football tournament starts today already embroiled in rows over racism.

A BBC Panorama programme recently revealed the racism of some football supporters in Poland and Ukraine, where the tournament is being held. The investigation filmed fans making Nazi salutes, singing racist chants and even beating up Asian fans. Racism in the football stadiums is a major concern for England (and other European countries playing in the competition) who’s number of non-white players and fans have grown substantially over the last twenty years.

And England is not free of its own home grown racism issues that it brings to Euro 2012; black player Rio Ferdinand hasn’t been selected for the England squad and the suspicion is that he was dropped due to the inclusion of the white player John Terry.  John Terry is currently charged of racially abusing Rio’s brother and the case will go to trial after the tournament.

All of these alleged racist incidents were brought to light because they were caught on film (John Terry’s alleged racist incident was caught by television cameras covering the match). Television is very good at capturing and exposing these types of racial issues; overt and crude. The weakness of television however is sometimes it is less good at capturing subtleties.

While “Whistleblower” went undercover in high street banks filming the mis-selling of financial products by clerks we weren’t able to capture the far bigger problems that led to the banking crash that would happen just a year after broadcast. While we filmed in Tesco and Sainsbury’s exposing employees breaking their own “sell by date” rules and tricking customers we were unable to cover the controversial, and most would say more important, issue of whether large supermarkets are contributing to the demise of Britain’s high streets.

So it is with issues regarding racism in football and wider society in general. Capturing the football fan making Nazi salutes makes for dramatic television but how do we capture the fact that there is clearly a glass ceiling when it comes to black people entering management position for football teams in the English Premiership League? How do we capture the glass ceiling in most large TV companies and broadcasters?

Secret filming can capture the ignorant, stupid and obvious but the challenge for all of us working in television interested in addressing issues of diversity is how we take our skills and capture the real issues that affect our lives. The issues that result in people with a disability, black people, Asians and other ethnic minorities being seriously under-represented working in TV and the media generally. And these things happen without a single racist word being uttered and definitely no one making any Nazi salutes.

The fact is six years on the printed words on the “Whistleblower” production office’s walls now haunt me; “If it didn’t happen on film it doesn’t exist”.

The problem is some of the biggest issues that affect people from diverse backgrounds will never happen on film but that definitely doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

A Week In The Life Of A TV Executive

MONDAY
Week really starts on Sunday when I received the call that convicted Lockerbie Bomber Megrahi might be about to die. He’s been “about to die” ever since he was released on compassionate grounds in 2009. The Lockerbie bombing was the largest single terrorist act over British soil so it casts a large shadow over Scottish current affairs. The Sunday phone call hijacks most of my Monday morning as I make sure our Lockerbie current affairs output is up to date. Although talking to the team one thing is certain we are NOT preparing an obituary! We don't do obits for convicted mass murderers - I feel I could pre-write the letters of complaint now if we did. We have to get a film ready that will cover all the issues relating to Lockerbie and Megrahi when he dies. A film that will mark a convicted terrorist’s death that isn't an obit’. It's not easy (did I mention some people think he’s innocent?)

TUESDAY
Meeting Head of Scheduling at BBC Scotland (wish I had her job). At school I used to play chess at the National Championships and scheduling is the closest I get to exercise that strategic part of my brain. I've got a big investigation into Rangers football club and we've got to decide where to place it in the schedules. I've been in Scotland five years and I'm only just getting to grips with the place Rangers and Celtic play in the Scottish psyche. It’s nothing like any Premiership clubs in England, it's more like Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spain representing specific histories, politics, and unfortunately in the case of Scotland often religions. Being English I tread carefully when covering these Scottish icons. I still find it strange to describe myself as "English" something I'd never done before coming up to Scotland. Five years ago I was "black British", a “Londoner”, a “Brixtonian” but not “English”, Scotland quickly knocked that view out of me. Nothing like being in a minority to make you aware of your identity.

WEDNESDAY
TV history is being made with cameras being allowed to film the sentencing in an Edinburgh Court of David Gilroy for murdering his lover Suzanne Pilley. I've got a special into her murder going out that night; only interview with the family, exclusive access to police investigation etc etc. Network news is going big on it as well. It definitely feels as if Scotland is ahead of the curve when it comes to filming in court. But we were ahead with the smoking ban and minimum pricing of alcohol – wow, can’t believe I’m saying “we”!

THURSDAY
Massive spring in my step: overnights have come in and last night's doc gets a 24% audience share – great for a current affairs programme. Have a meeting with a London indie. It seems everyone has woken up to the fact that Scotland has an independence referendum looming. It's like being the plain Jane who's had a make-over and now everyone wants to ask you out for a date.

After the indie pitch I catch a flight to London for a meeting with Doreen Lawrence about taking part in a TV event. I often feel I inhabit two worlds. Exec'ing Panoramas and Scottish commissions I firmly park my race at the front door. But I'm also acutely aware I'm one of the only non-white execs working in current affairs so I have an added responsibility (being a role model and all that stuff). To be honest I think being black has really helped me in Scotland: I’ve been having conversations about independence since I was a teenager - Martinique model (stick with the devil you know) vs. Jamaican model (independence or die). And as for feeling a minority in a larger UK I totally get that.

FRIDAY

Still in London. Chasing network commissions. The Panorama Editor Tom Giles is always looking to feed the ravenous beast that is Panorama so meeting goes well. Nothing green lit, but nothing ever is at the first pitch. As I leave White City someone asks if I'm moving to Channel 4, it seems I was spotted "lurking around Horseferry Rd". The reality is a lot more mundane as I was just popping in to see Daniel Pearl new Editor of Dispatches to discuss some academic work I'm doing for Bournemouth University. They really need to get a back entrance at Channel 4, for once I have sympathy for Murdoch visiting Downing Street. The sympathy doesn't last too long though as the following Monday the Leveson Inquiry interview both James and Rupert and the media world erupts again - but that's the start of another week.

(Edited Version First Appeared In Royal Television Society's "Television" Magazine, May Edition)