Leading BBC hunt for minority comics – a white, male graduate

A NEW BBC-backed comedy unit tasked with finding stars from ‘under-represented’ backgrounds is to be spearheaded by a university-educated white man.

The broadcaster said yesterday that Shane Allen will launch the British Comedy Foundation, which will ‘open the doors to new voices’ that do not usually make it to air.

The new unit will set out to ‘engage and enable and enrich the under-represented and underprivileged’, the BBC said.

However, it is likely to face a backlash from critics over its decision to appoint Mr Allen, who attended the prestigious Belfast Royal Academy grammar school before studying at Edinburgh University. His first recruit on the project, Emily Allen, went to St Andrews University. She is also understood to be white.

The venture follows criticism from audiences that the BBC is too white, too middle-class, and does not take enough risks. And it comes less than a year after John Cleese claimed that the BBC would never make Monty Python these days, because it was focused on ‘social engineering’.

Mr Allen – who will work on the foundation alongside his existing role as the BBC’s controller of comedy commissioning – said he wanted to ‘explore what a comedy foundation might look like, who it could unearth, what it could achieve and who’d get behind it’.

The BBC has agreed to fund Mr Allen for three months while he develops the new unit, in the hope that it will become an industry-wide body. Yesterday, the broadcaster it was too early to say whether it will become a permanent fixture with Mr Allen as its head.