Diversity in the Media

Lord Taylor of Warwick Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Taylor of Warwick (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady King, for securing this important debate. This issue is not a minority one. It concerns who we all are today in modern Britain.

Diversity is a very wide topic. I am aware that gender, sexuality, disability, culture, age and religious issues are all important aspects of diversity, but if I may, I wish to focus on racial diversity in the media. Of the UK’s 63 million population, 14% are black and ethnic minority. The media industry is a very influential sector of society, so it is vital that it represents society as it really is. The reality is that Britain is multiracial, and all the better for it. I can still recall watching with disbelief the 1999 British film “Notting Hill”, starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. It was a lovely romantic story, but no black people at all were portrayed as living in Notting Hill, which is famous for its Caribbean carnival. It was a major film that was shown worldwide, yet it presented a false image of modern London and modern Britain.

While television is using more black and Asian presenters, the recent report by Directors UK, to which the noble Baroness, Lady King referred, states that the number of BAME directors working in UK TV is “critically low”. A sample of 55,000 episodes drawn from 546 titles found that only 1.29% of programmes were made by black, Asian and ethnic minority directors. That is clearly disgraceful. In some areas such as period dramas, talk shows, panel shows and sketch shows, not a single episode had been made by a BAME director. In the mid-1990s I was a television producer at the BBC at White City. It got to the stage when I asked if it was called White City because everyone else above kitchen level was white.

While at BBC Television, I started presenting early morning newspaper reviews. I would do two each morning, the last being just before the 9 am news on BBC1. In those days Ainsley Harriott would follow with his fantastic food show. I recall that one day a letter came in from a very disgruntled lady stating, “I have just seen a black chap doing the newspapers. I think his name is Taylor. Then there was a black cook who came on immediately afterwards. Please, is the BBC being taken over by black people?”. I believe that Britain has moved on from those attitudes, but every speaker has made the point that we have a long way to go.

It was during that period that I also started in radio and loved presenting shows on BBC Radio 2. I was delighted when the BBC said that I would have my own radio show at 4 o’clock. I said, “Wow, this could not be better. Drive time”. The commissioner said, “Er no, it is going to be 4 am, not 4 pm”. But I did it because I had to learn, and I eventually got a 5 pm slot. I enjoyed it and was delighted to then get a call from BBC Radio London about presenting a show for it as well. I went for the interview and was met by two very pleasant white middle-aged producers. One asked, “Right, John, can you speak Patois?”—remember that this was more than 20 years ago. When I asked why, the producer said, “Well, we have a lot of black listeners these days and we thought it would be good if you could speak Jamaican. Can you do a black voice?”. The producer then attempted to demonstrate by lifting her arm and saying, “Haile Selassie, Rastafari”. I realised that the job was not for me.

The point I am making is that diversity should not be about putting people in boxes. I was a barrister for some years and became the legal adviser to the BBC’s top television gardening show. I went along to Shepherd’s Bush to speak to the independent producer of the series. To my pleasant surprise he was black, from the Caribbean. I did not realise he had been producing that series for well over a decade. When I asked why he did not do any personal interviews to make his success more public, he replied that he was concerned that if it was known that the producer of that middle-class show was black, there could be a backlash against him. He was keener to show that he had green fingers than brown ones. He just wanted the commissions each year. The goal for him was simply to get commissioned without any fanfare. Although I understood and respected his view, I thought it rather sad that he felt he could not come out as being black. As for newspapers, Amol Rajan is the only ethnic minority editor of a national newspaper, the Independent, which I note that recently became available online only. City University’s survey in March this year found that British journalism as a whole is 94% white. Is that right? I do not think so.

For 10 years I was vice-president of the BBFC, the British Board of Film Classification. Although the board treated me extremely well, it was a very white organisation when I first joined. If I achieved anything at all there, at least I encouraged it to place job adverts for the BBFC not only in the mainstream papers but in the ethnic minority newspapers such as the Voice and the New Nation.

Last Sunday evening, we had the BAFTA awards. Apart from the high-profile Sir Lenny Henry, there was a distinct lack of racial diversity among the award winners. However, I did note that there were at least four ethnic minority award presenters. Two of them remarked that BAFTA appeared to be ticking the diversity box. Those comments brought a rather nervous laugh, but it shows that we still have a long way to go where diversity is concerned. As to the programmes that were showcased at the BAFTAs, the ones that had any links to race had names such as, “Refugee Crisis”, “Paris Attacks Special”, “My Son the Jihadi” and “Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners”. These are quality programmes that needed to be shown. All I am saying is that it would be good for the media, especially television, also to portray the successes of minorities in Britain. I know that major broadcasters such as Sky and Channel 4 do take this issue seriously, but it was the BBC that dominated the BAFTAs, so I support Sir Lenny Henry’s call for diversity to be written into the BBC charter. That would be an important signal.

It is also vital that a more diverse pool of programme commissioners is established. Ideas need to be drawn from the widest field possible. I understand that the BBC is developing a diversity creative talent fund, and I welcome that because class is also an issue. Poorer communities have that extra disadvantage in breaking into the media. There is also a place for more training internships for high-potential BAME graduates. I am glad to hear about the BBC Academy and its enlarged apprenticeship and social inclusion initiatives. I sort of fell into the media industry: there was no career path and no mentoring, which I would have appreciated.

I noticed that one of the BAFTA award winners was Channel 4’s “Humans”—a great series. This of course is the hit science fiction TV series about robots. I long for the day when diversity is no longer an issue to be discussed and agonised over. After all, in reality, unlike science fiction, there is only one race: the human race.