White men dominate TV industry

While in the process of getting a website created for Lucecannon PR I thought I would dig out some of my journalist credits from back in the day.

I was delighted and somewhat over awed to interview Sir David Attenborough by phone for the Edinburgh TV Festival in 2006 – I would have been overawed to interview him face to face but by phone, where you only have the instantly recognisable and super soothing voice to focus on, was quite a lot to take on board.

And Sir David was a tough cookie. He didn’t really open up and, without the ability to build any kind of rapport in person, it was a fairly short and to the point interview. He was receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Edinburgh TV Festival awards that year and, while we discussed some of the revolutionary changes to the TV industry since David was an executive for the BBC in the 1960s, he wouldn’t be drawn on advice for channel controllers and TV executives in the present day.

Other memorable interviews I’ve done include Ricky Gervais, also for Edinburgh, John Humphrys, Ted Turner, Jay Leno, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jon Snow.

Running through the list in my mind I was starting to feel more and more uncomfortable. They are all white men.

So, the interviews I did between 2000 and 2008 of leading figures in British and US television were all with white men. That just shows who had got to the top of their particular specialism in the Noughties.

I’d like to think that if I was interviewing people in similar positions today there would at least be some women and some people from BAME backgrounds in the mix. Certainly, the Edinburgh TV Festival has done its bit to champion diversity by ensuring that the keystone MacTaggart lecture has been delivered by Michaela Coel and David Olusoga in recent years. (But look through the MacTaggart hall of fame dating back to 1976 and it is dominated by white men and just a handful of white women. Micheal Coel in 2018 was the first black woman to give the prestigious lecture.)

So, I’ll still share some of the interviews I’ve done but with this caveat: that they’re very much a snapshot in time. There is still a huge amount to do in Britain to level up opportunity for all. And I’m committed to doing everything I can to represent the diversity of contemporary Britain in my work and work that I cover in this blog.