http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/26/bbc.television
Broadcasters have overcompensated
for their lack of executives from
ethnic minorities by putting too
many black and Asian faces on screen,
a leading television industry figure
said last night.
Samir Shah,
a member of the BBC's board of directors,
said this had led to a
"world of deracinated coloured
people flickering across our
screens -
to the irritation of many viewers and
the embarrassment of the very people
such actions are meant to appease".
Shah, a former BBC head of current
affairs who now runs an independent
production company, Juniper,
as well as being a non-executive
director of the cor****ation,
used a speech to the Royal Television
Society to call for current TV industry
diversity policies to be ditched because
they were not working.
In an echo of the speech earlier
this year by comedian Lenny Henry,
who bemoaned the lack of diversity
in British broadcasting,
Shah said UK television had to go back
to the drawing board to increase the
number of black and Asian executives.
Speaking to an audience of
television insiders, Shah said:
"The difficult truth I want
you to accept is this:
the equal op****tunity policies
we have followed over the last
30 years simply have not worked.
"Despite 30 years of trying,
the upper reaches of our industry,
the positions of real creative
power in British broadcasting,
are still controlled by a metropolitan,
largely liberal, white, middle-class,
cultural elite - and, until recently,
largely male and largely Oxbridge.
"The fine intentions of equal op****tunities -
and they are fine intentions -
have produced a forest of initiatives,
schemes and action plans.
But they have not resulted in real change.
"The result has been a growing resentment
and irritation at the straitjacket on freedom
such policies impose and, paradoxically,
the occasionally embarrassing
over-compensation in an effort
to do the right thing."
Shah said that instead of dealing
with the issues surrounding why
greater numbers of people from
ethnic minorities had not made
it to the executive level of
British television, broadcasters
had instead put more black and
Asian faces on screen, regardless
of whether they were cultural
fits to the programmes they were in.
"I don't think that such
over-representation is a
brilliant idea.
Another thing that's not real is
some of the casting of non-whites
in fiction," he added.
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