All white on the night of filming leaves BBC red-faced
A film made to help recruit young talent into the media has been used as part of a damning package of evidence attacking the BBC’s record on diversity, thanks to it revealing a wholly white team working behind the scenes at Newsnight.
The 11-minute film made by the Royal Television Society (RTS) last December features staff of the flagship BBC2 show, ranging from the presenter Evan Davis and editor, Ian Katz, to the producers, those attending editorial meetings, those in the production suite, the floor manager and the lighting director. All those featured are white.
Submitting Behind the Scenes: Newsnight to the Government Green Paper on the broadcaster’s future, the Campaign for Broadcasting Equality notes that the film, “to provide information for young entrants into the television and media industry, shows not one single BAME [Black and Minority Ethnic] person in the entire production team or visible in any role”.
The package, seen by The Independent, also includes a 16-minute public presentation made last month by the controller of Radio 5 Live, Jonathan Wall, titled “Where next for Radio 5 Live?” in which he makes no reference to the BAME audience and includes no non-white people in a video used to demonstrate the station’s ambitions.
Although the entire staff of Newsnight and Radio 5 Live are not exclusively white, the campaign’s long submission suggests that limited progress has been made since the former director-general Greg Dyke described the BBC as “hideously white” in 2001.
The report coincides with the corporation’s “British Bold Creative” contribution to the Green Paper yesterday, in which it portrays itself as a universal broadcaster providing a service to licence-fee payers of all backgrounds.
SimonAlbury, a former RTS chief executive and chairman of the Campaign for Broadcasting Equality, writes in his report: “The BAME population is under-represented in terms of BBC employment, it is underserved as viewers and the BBC response has not been proportionate to the scale of the problem.”
Statements in the submission by black and ethnic minority contributors to programmes suggest the BBC’s much-vaunted diversity policies have had limited effect.
At an event in her honour at the BBC RadioTheatre in London in February last year, Baroness Doreen Lawrence complained there were no people of minority ethnic background among production staff.
The BBC has recruited six people from BAME backgrounds for its “Senior Leadership Development Programme” to get experience at the top of the corporation, alongside the director-general, Tony Hall.
“We want an open and diverse BBC, which is why we have an ambitious range of plans that we believe will make a real difference on and off air,” a BBC spokesperson said.
“Internally, the percentage of both staff and senior managers from a BAME background increased last year, while, on air, BBC1 remains the UK’s most popular channel across all BAME audiences.
“By 2017, we aim to increase BAME portrayal on air from 10.4 to 15 per cent. We are working with groups such as ...[the] Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust to improve our diversity record.”