In the summer of 2020, a month after the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was toppled and three months after George Floyd was murdered outside a convenience store in Minneapolis, I gave a lecture about race and racism, diversity and inclusion within the television industry. I used that platform, the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, to tell the story of how for decades TV has failed not only to address its diversity problem but, at times, even to acknowledge that it has one. On the small screen – as in the worlds of art, publishing, theatre and film – who gets their stories told and who gets to do the telling have never been based on talent and passion alone.
Television is an old medium with a long established internal culture, one that developed over the decades and from the outset was exclusive rather than inclusive. The BBC that emerged in the 1920s very much reflected the class-bound society that had spawned it. Early television was dominated by London, and its programmes were largely produced and presented by members of a middle-class elite.
