The sinister push to enforce diversity is killing quality television, argues Michael Cole

Michael Cole contacted a TV company about a Raine Spencer film he appeared in. He was then asked about his personal life, to promote diversity. The equality obsession, he says, is killing quality television

Iappeared in a Channel 4 programme recently. It was called Princess Diana’s ‘Wicked’ Stepmother and purported to be a portrait of Raine, Countess Spencer, who died, aged 87, last autumn.

The programme, produced by a company called Firecrest Films, wasn’t a celebration of Raine’s remarkable life, but rather an attempt to catch the Diana tsunami created by the twentieth anniversary of her death.

In that, it succeeded. It attracted Channel 4’s biggest audience of the year, to that date.

Some parts I liked; some I didn’t. I made my views known to Firecrest. I expected to hear no more. I was wrong. I’ve just received an email from an entity called Silvermouse, which had been given my contact details by Firecrest.

Silvermouse invited me to take part in a survey it is conducting for Diamond Diversity – a branch of the Creative Diversity Network, or CDN.

The survey would be asking me about my gender, ‘gender identity’, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability. Silvermouse said CDN was working on behalf of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and Channel 5/Viacom.

CDN wants to know more about the people who make British TV and whether viewers think they reflect their own lives.

There were two questions, according to Silvermouse: do the people who work in TV, on and off the screen, reflect UK diversity; and do the audiences of all kinds see themselves on the screen?

The real purpose of collecting this information is to limit the creative freedom of people working in television. Its ultimate aim? To control what appears on the screen and who is in it.

If the results of this survey are used, it will only stop talented TV professionals making their own decisions on programmes they want to produce.

The survey will be used to erect artificial barriers that will do nothing to improve quality or artistic achievement. Creativity will be permanently impaired.

News and current affairs have to be unfettered, adhering only to the laws of the land, if they are to command the confidence of viewers and listeners. Because that essential freedom has always been fiercely protected, the BBC has been widely trusted around the world, even if its reputation for political impartiality has taken a beating at home in recent years.

Until now, the true judgment of any programme was left to us, the audience. From now on, hidden hands will be at work, deciding what we should see and hear. We won’t even realise what we are watching has been censored. Because that is what it is, censorship.

How lunatic it would be if creative judgments were dictated on the basis of replies to a survey that has all the precision of a bludgeon, not a stiletto.

First question, Gender. Male, in my case. Then ‘Gender Identity’? How can such a sensitive question be anything but a private matter that has nothing to do with television? On ethnicity, twenty answers are offered, with several choices of white and a wide range of other skin tones and racial origins.

On sexual orientation, choices include ‘intersex’ and ‘non-binary’, whatever they mean. But what that has to do with the interviewees chosen for a factual documentary completely baffles me.

The absurdity of all this comes clearly into focus on the Raine Spencer programme. The interviewees were all white, all middle-aged, mostly British and mostly middle class – if you didn’t count Lord Fellowes. Raine lived through an eventful nine decades but her acquaintances did not include many transsexuals or Colombian drug mules. Must future programmes like this include people of diverse gender, ethnicity and sexual preference?

Sharon White, the chief executive of Ofcom, television’s governing body, has ordered the BBC and other broadcasters to publish information on the social background of their employees in an attempt – it is said – to break the middle-class stranglehold on the media.

What poppycock! I worked for the BBC for more than twenty years. When I joined in 1968, I don’t remember being asked what my parents did for a living. But I would have proudly answered that my father was a London taxi driver and my mother a book-keeper, before she became a mother and housewife. I am sure my contemporary John Humphrys would have answered confidently that his father was a French polisher in Cardiff.

We were hired for our abilities as reporters. During two decades in TV News, I never met anyone hired on the basis of anything apart from talent and willingness to work. If anyone had been brought in to fulfil a quota, they would have been found out in five minutes.

There were people from many ethnic backgrounds and nationalities. But none of them was there because of antecedents. That would have been hugely insulting to friends of mine like Moira Stuart.

Television is already one of the most diverse industries in Britain. It is something that has happened by a process of natural selection. And it has been achieved without the interference of the authorities. Fatuous surveys are an impediment to further diversity as well as creative achievement.

Knowing my answers would be used to turn television into a distorting mirror of British society – one that would do nothing to improve TV programmes – I treated it with the contempt it deserved.

I deleted it, unanswered.

Michael Cole is a former BBC royal correspondent

‘Fatuous surveys are an impediment to diversity and creative achievement’