A benevolent but colour-blind Auntie? Oxbridge, male and middle-class? ‘Horrendously white’? The BBC has been researching its image, output and employment practices, and is determined to make changes. Sue Caro, Senior Diversity Officer at the BBC, reports.
Since Greg Dyke was appointed Director General (The Boss Man) of the BBC, the organisation has been undergoing a major culture change that was well overdue.
Shortly after he took up the post of Director General, Dyke observed that the BBC was an ‘horrendously white organisation’. This widely-reported comment was sincere, and since making it Dyke has overseen many initiatives to bring about change. The Diversity Unit has been established, with a remit to work across the BBC to ensure that the organisation becomes both more representative and more inclusive, on screen and behind the cameras. The Unit is headed up by Linda Mitchell, a former presenter and reporter on Black Britain, who is proud to describe herself as a Welsh woman of Jamaican and Yemeni origin.
Although race has rightly been at the top of the diversity agenda at the BBC, it is important to stress that diversity is not only about race: it’s also about gender, disability, sexual orientation, faith, social class, regionality, education and age. If the BBC is to survive in its current form, funded by a universal license fee, then it has to serve as broad a section of the UK’s population as possible – something that it has not always achieved to date. This is the ‘business case’ for Diversity, and a different way of thinking about Public Service Broadcasting. The BBC will lose its funding and its status if we do not accurately represent the UK as it actually is in the twenty-first century, rather than how it was in the 1950s.
The BBC is currently the largest employer in the UK – 26,000 permanent staff at last count, plus a huge number of people working as freelances and on short-term contracts. In the Diversity Unit, we recognise that it is virtually impossible to disconnect the output from the people employed to work on it; the more varied our workforce, the more diverse, interesting and creative our output.
Recruiting diversity
Through extensive research we now know that many people from Black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds would not consider a career at the BBC, largely because of the perception that the organisation is not for them. We are working hard to try and change that. Greg Dyke has set targets for the employment of Black and Asian people within the BBC that have to be met by the end of 2003. Overall, 10% of our total workforce should be from Black, Asian or other ethnic minority backgrounds. This does not include cleaners, security or catering staff; as all these services are contracted out, staff working in these areas are not BBC employees and therefore cannot be included in the 10% total. In Senior Management (i.e. the top jobs) the target to be reached is 4%. Our current figures are 9.1% and 3.3% respectively.
In order to spread the word that you don’t have to be white, male, middle-class and Oxbridge educated to work at the BBC, we have been targeting schools, colleges and universities with a diverse, multi-ethnic student body. This is nationwide, not confined to London alone. Among other things, it involves attending careers fairs, more specific outreach work, and the centralisation and broadening of our work experience scheme, making it fairer and more accessible.
We have put a number of schemes into action, several in partnership with another BBC department, SkillXchange. For instance, we have run a project with the From Boyhood to Manhood Foundation in Camberwell, working with Black teenage boys who are excluded from school, or who are at risk of being excluded. The boys made a short film, Moving Forward, about people’s attitudes towards them as young Black men and the effect this has had on their lives.
Another similar project, entitled Bad Girls Don’t Cry, was recently completed with Phoenix High School, in West London, which has a mainly Black and Asian student body. A group of teenage girls who attend the school were given the opportunity to make a short film on a subject of their choice, with BBC managers acting as tutors in production techniques such as camera, sound-recording, editing, lighting and script-writing.
The Diversity Centre also initiated and part-funded a Summer School project this year with QPR, our local football club. This was aimed at the kids on the West London White City Estate, and was football-focused but with a substantial media element. The kids on the scheme were invited into the BBC to meet some of the big names working on BBC football coverage, including Mark Bright, Ray Stubbs and John Motson. They went onto the studio floor, got to find out what went on behind the cameras, and which other jobs there were to be done – as well as meeting some famous faces. Their perceptions of the BBC have been completely changed as a result, and hopefully they will consider the possibility of a career at the BBC as an option for their future.
Higher up the age scale, we have been running a Sports Journalist positive action scheme with the University of Westminster. The aim of the scheme was to encourage Black and Asian trainee journalists to think about the BBC as a prospective employer (they are seriously under-represented in BBC Sport) through 12 month, paid attachments in the BBC Sports department. This scheme has been so successful that with the exception of one person who had to drop out for personal reasons, all the 12 trainees have been offered – and have accepted – full-time jobs with BBC Sport, even before the scheme has ended!
Portrayal – representing diversity
My special area of responsibility is Portrayal – how people are represented or portrayed in programmes on TV, radio, the web, in BBC publications and publicity campaigns.
The BBC knows it has not been serving Black and Asian audiences well – the evidence seems to be there, in that proportionally more Black and Asian homes have cable, satellite or digital TV than the white population. Alongside the specially commissioned research to find out what these sections of our audience really think of us, this clearly indicates that they are not happy with what’s on offer from the BBC. This has not happened overnight, but over a period of more than ten years. The BBC now has to work hard to win these sections of the audience back. In other words, Public Service Broadcasting is now having to compete in the marketplace – something it used not to do.
These sections of our potential audience don’t see themselves portrayed or represented in most of our mainstream output, and there is a big push to improve this. This lack of on-screen visibility is particularly true of Chinese people. Our research shows that they are almost never seen on our TV screens, and when they are it is in very stereotypical roles – as martial arts experts, for example! People of Asian origin – Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi – are also not adequately represented in our output. People of African and Caribbean origin do slightly better, but there is still plenty of room for improvement, particularly in how they are portrayed.
Drama and diversity
You may have noticed that recently EastEnders has become slightly more like the real East End of London – there are a few more Black and Asian faces both as main characters and as extras. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting there, even if the Truman family seems to be both Jamaican and Trinidadian in origin! There has also been an attempt to move story lines away from stereotypes – repressed, powerless Asian women, bad boy Black characters and so on – and from stories built around ‘problems’ arising from the race of the character.
This may have something to do with the fact that there are now writers, directors and production personnel working on the show who come from a range of different ethnic backgrounds. Recently, some of the most powerful episodes of EastEnders have been written by a Chinese woman, and there are now two Black directors, Michael Buffon and Christiana Ebohon, working regularly on the show.
Holby City and Casualty are two of our most popular, peaktime programmes – could this popularity be because the casting is based firmly in reality, what actually happens in real hospitals in the real world? Both of these drama serials feature a broad mix of characters of different ages, races and sexual orientation from various parts of the UK. As a result, larger, more inclusive sections of the population can now identify with the characters, issues and storylines. Mal Young, the Head of BBC Drama Serials, famously sent his writers and producers to spend time in hospitals, telling them to observe reality and then come back and represent it in their scripts and their casting. The results are there for all to see on the screen.
Targeting minority audiences
As well as ensuring that we are inclusive in our mainstream output, we also have targeted programmes. Examples would include this summer’s Jamaica 40 Season, marking 40 years of Jamaican independence with a whole range of programmes broadcast over three weeks on BBC2. Also on BBC2 we ran the new, second series ofBabyFather, a glossy, high profile eight-part drama series in peak time, featuring some of the best Black acting talent around. You may have seen those posters – four naked Black men in the shower. Did you find the posters offensive or appealing?
This summer also saw the launch of the new BBC digital radio station 1Xtra, dedicated to new Black music and unlike anything the BBC has done before. You can pick up the station on the Internet as well as on Freeview Digital TV and check out the latest in Hip Hop, Garage and much more – with no adverts!
Another digital radio station, The Asian Network, has just gone nationwide. Radio 3 is busy reinventing itself as the home of World Music, breaking out of its European Classical Music straitjacket with the help of Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah and complementing its changed sound with some excellent Internet projects such as World in Your Street.
There are many other good things going on at the BBC, too many to write about here. But hopefully you will have already noticed that ‘Auntie’ is changing, helped by the new, funky BBC1 channel idents. Check out the disabled, Black athlete and BBC presenter, Ade Adepitan, breakdancing in his wheel chair, or the Indian dance company doing their thing, or ‘spider man’ flying across London rooftops – and welcome the BBC to the twenty-first century! MM
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 3, February 2003
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