There has been a recent review by the BBC on diversity, or, more specifically, on how far the BBC represents its audience to itself. This goes back to one of the public purposes of the Corporation as laid out in its Royal Charter, which reads (in part):
To reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom: the BBC should reflect the diversity of the United Kingdom both in its output and services …
I suspect that few media organizations have such a specific public purpose. And I suspect too that few look so carefully at themselves, or so publicly. This should be a cause of congratulation to the BBC.
The review has not of course been presented like that. Instead it has been an excuse for some triumphalist BBC bashing from the usual media suspects and others. The part of the report that has captured most of the headlines is this recommendation:
The BBC should aim for an organic and authentic approach to diversity rather than it looking forced or tick box.
The spotlight has been on the words “forced” and “tick box”, as if it was a well-deserved reprimand for (say) putting Black actors on screen in Miss Marple. The BBC has got its comeuppance from itself!
Indeed, there is a critique of tick-box culture in the review, and the idea (for example) that sprinkling some non-white actors through BBC drama constitutes diversity. But there is not a critique of the “diversity aim” itself, as you might imagine from reading some of the reporting. That aim is written into the Charter, after all. What you actually find in the seventy-nine-page review is a careful analysis of the portrayal and representation of diversity, laying out some of the reasons that it is such a complicated issue.
How, for example, does a national broadcaster represent the diversity of viewers’ and listeners’ real lives, when the diversity of real lives is so different across the country? In London in the 2021 census, 53.8 per cent of the population identified as “white”. In Scotland it was 93 per cent (97.8 per cent in the Highlands and Islands). That’s a clear indication, as the review points out, that the lingering London-centric bias of the BBC is bound up with issues of diversity, not separate from them. There is a sense that we still have a London organization representing the diversity of London rather than of Scotland.
It is easy in theory to support decentring and regionalizing the BBC, and quite a lot has been achieved on that. But many of us are hypocrites here. Writing as a resident of London and the South-East, I know that when offered the “opportunity” to go almost 200 miles from Cambridge to Salford for an interview, I tend to pass it up. It isn’t just practicalities, though. The review has collected some egregious examples of regional bias. “All the good the Today programme does by broadcasting from different parts of the UK can be wiped out when they say they are going ‘into deepest Wiltshire’”. One television programme apparently broadcast from the Western Isles, saying it was “the back of beyond”.
The review is well worth reading, carefully argued, sensible, sometimes witty and not simply concerned with Black actors in Miss Marple. It’s about diversity in many respects, from age and class to disability. I declare an interest here as I was interviewed a couple of years ago about older women on television. All the quotations from interviewees are anonymized, but I thought I recognized my own words here: “It is still the case that wrinkly old men connote authority, they connote wisdom. Wrinkly old women connote witches!” These issues are well discussed too. Take a look.
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