Krishnan Gurumurthy on why TV still needs to tackle racism
Despite a glittering 20-year career in broadcasting, Krishnan Guru-murthy still feels like an outsider, he tells Rosa Silverman
‘Politicians have changed. They’re less willing to be held to account’
‘Istill feel like an outsider,” says Krishnan Gurumurthy. “Even though I now inhabit the establishment, and
I’m very aware of that.” Indeed, as if being a well-respected
Channel 4 News presenter weren’t proof enough of his “metropolitan elite” credentials, he’s even a trustee of Kew Gardens. Add to that the fact that we’re chatting in the rather fashionable surroundings of High Road House, a private members’ club in leafy Chiswick, west London, and you get the picture.
But, as a second generation immigrant who grew up in the North West rather than the rarified air of Eton, Guru-murthy, 48, retains a sense of difference from many of those in the orbit he now occupies.
“You’re always kind of wondering if the way they’re talking to you or the way they’re treating you might be because of that. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t,” he muses.
Guru-murthy’s parents were born in India and his father was a consultant radiologist. He attended then-independent Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Blackburn, before reading PPE at Oxford. But, he says: “The idea of doing what
I do now was very, very far away from anything [my family] grew up imagining we’d end up doing.
“I know people and meet people and work with people for whom what we do now is the most normal thing in the world,” he says. “It’s never been the case for me, so I think I do still feel like an outsider to a large
degree in that I don’t have that ‘born to rule’ thing that some people do.”
I’m not sure he has that “born to bake” thing either, judging by what I’ve seen of his efforts on The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up to
Cancer. We’re here because Gurumurthy is one of this year’s contestants and, although I’ve been warned against publishing any spoilers before tonight’s episode, it’s safe to say that at least one of his bakes was a disaster.
To be fair, few of us would be able to represent ourselves through the medium of biscuit, as Guru-murthy and his fellow contestants were asked to do in the “showstopper” task. When he shows me photographic evidence of his half-baked version of himself on his phone, I can’t help but exclaim that he looks as though he’s been in a fight.
“Yeah, I screwed up the icing,” he agrees, with some understatement. Then again, he makes no claims to being much of a home baker – nor even much of a cook: “I do it in a very male way,” he says. “A bit haphazardly.”
Fortunately for him, Guru-murthy has other talents. He began his career presenting youth programmes for the BBC at the age of 18, moving from
Newsround to Newsnight before joining Channel 4 in 1998, at the age of 28, where he’s also a regular on the foreign affairs series Unreported World.
Having ascended to the higher echelons of broadcasting, he’s happy to speak about its failings. Among those he has previously pinpointed are its lack of diversity – well-meaning assumptions that the problem has been sufficiently addressed, let alone solved, are still premature, he believes.
“In some ways it’s got a lot better, and in some ways it’s got worse,” he says. “On the face of it, you will probably notice a lot more diverse faces on the television but in terms of positions of power – the controllers, the people running the companies – all of that is still incredibly white and middle class, often very male.”
But because broadcasting is generally run by “a nice, liberal, enlightened, educated bunch of people, who can’t for a minute imagine they could ever be accused of racism, a lot of people just didn’t understand it could be a problem still”, he says.
“They thought ‘well I’m not racist, how could there be any racism in this organisation?’ But they didn’t understand that there is an implicit racism in the decisions they take and the people they hire; hiring people who look like them and sound like them and being uncomfortable with people who don’t. That’s why we’ve got to keep talking about it, pinpointing it, measuring it.”
It is not just about race, he adds, but ensuring there’s equality when it comes to gender, disability and sexuality. And hiring people like himself is not enough.
“I’m at the easier end of diversity, because I can talk your language and fit in and wear your clothes and all those sorts of things, even though I may not really feel like an insider,” he says. “I can play the game, and so I’m relatively easy to integrate into the system. But that’s not diversity. Diversity is when you actually embrace people who are different.”
Not one to shy away from thorny issues, perhaps it’s no surprise Guru-murthy is relishing reporting on Brexit, despite the difficulties particular to its coverage.
“I’ve always found it really exciting and interesting and very engaging, so I always slightly struggle when people go ‘I’m so bored of it’. How can you be bored of it? This is massive right now,” he says. It is that. But it is also, he admits, “so technical that most people can’t be bothered to follow the detail”.
Besides which, broadcasters are battling not just the public’s exhaustion with the subject, but the challenge of persuading politicians to appear on camera to debate it.
“The culture of politics and politicians has changed and they are much less willing to come and be held to account and to explain themselves,” he says. “They don’t want to be given a hard time and they don’t always have the answers. They know what we’re going to ask them and they don’t necessarily want to answer those questions, and don’t want to be seen not to answer those questions, either. Politicians used to be able to dodge the question and get away with it, but now audiences have wised up to all of that.”
Not only have they wised up but audiences also love a “gotcha” moment now. We enjoy it when our politicians trip up, far more so than when they explain something coherently. But while many of Gurumurthy’s own interviews have gone viral (such as when Jeremy Corbyn lost his temper, Quentin Tarantino lost his cool and Robert Downey Jnr walked out altogether), he insists he has never been very interested in catching people out.
“We are not about trying to get a minute of viral video of a politician looking stupid. They’re perfectly capable of doing that themselves.”
Outside of work, how much time does he have for life with his son, daughter and his photographer wife?
“I do have time for family,” he says. “A 13-year-old and an 11-year-old are incredibly demanding, and also really good fun to hang out with.”
Yet work takes up more of his time than ever. “I’m very bad at saying no to things,” he says. Ambitious baking challenges included.