Black British TV makers are “fighting over scraps” because of the lack of opportunities, industry figures have said, arguing that conditions are worse now than before the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged in 2020.
The Guardian spoke to Black British executives, producers, directors and writers who said their industry had not fundamentally changed after the racial reckoning that was triggered after George Floyd’s murder in the US five years ago.
Andy Mundy-Castle, the founder of the indie company DocHearts, who won a Bafta and a Royal Television Society award in 2024 for the documentary White Nanny, Black Child, said despite critical acclaim it was as difficult as ever to get commissions.
“You are so far removed from the top of the food chain that you just get the scraps … we aren’t given the biggest opportunities,” he said. “I’ve been noisy and stubborn enough not to go away but there are so many people who have just said, ‘Fuck this. We’re leaving’.”
Marcus Ryder, the chief executive of the Film and TV Charity, said the lack of representation behind the camera at the highest level had contributed to the stasis reported by many Black figures within TV and film.
The regulator Ofcom’s latest report into equality, diversity and inclusion in broadcasting found 18% of people working in the industry are people of colour, but only 11% of senior managers are. The UK benchmark is 16%.
He said: “If we look at who still has fundamental control and say as to what we watch and how that’s made it is still disproportionately white people. So there has not been a fundamental shift in how television actually works.”
All the people the Guardian spoke to accepted that the “abrupt and precipitous” shift in fortunes of the industry, which spent record amounts on new shows post-Covid but has since contracted rapidly after a collapse in advertising revenues, was partially to blame.
A report published last year found 70% of indies faced the risk of closure if there was no improvement in market conditions. Peter Kosminsky, the Bafta-award winning director of Wolf Hall, said public service broadcasters could no longer afford to make high-end drama such as Netflix’s Adolescence.
That contraction and the rise of anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) politics in the US and UK has led to figures from the industry calling for TV bosses to not row back on promises to make the sector more equitable in the aftermath of BLM.
“Inclusion isn’t some fashionable accessory you put on when it suits and take off when the political weather changes,” said the comedian Lenny Henry during a speech at Birmingham City University last week. “It’s a duty. It’s a responsibility.”
The summer of 2020 was seen as a watershed moment for British TV and its attitudes towards race, and especially Black British talent. The historian and broadcaster David Olusoga used his MacTaggart lecture – the state-of-an-industry address at the Edinburgh TV festival – to insist he was not a “diversity success story” but someone who had survived in a hostile industry.
In the aftermath of BLM there was a spate of Black British TV commissioned and produced. Steve McQueen’s Small Axe was released in late 2020 by the BBC, which also produced Boarders, Mr Loverman, Noughts and Crosses, This Town, Dreaming Whilst Black and the comedy thriller Black Ops.
Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie came to Channel 4 and her show Champion was on the BBC; while Top Boy and Rapman’s Supacell were ratings hits for Netflix.
Channel 4 hosted “Black to Front” where shows such as Countdown were hosted by Black British talent, and new shows were developed and broadcast, although none were taken through to series. The Channel 4 News part of Black to Front was nominated for a Bafta.
“It was a great opportunity,” said a person who worked on a Black to Front show. “But years down the line things have gone backwards.”
Few of the shows that came after BLM have been developed beyond a single run; Riches lasted only one season on Amazon, as did Lenny Henry’s Three Little Birds at ITV. The broadcaster said the drama did not generate “the numbers that we’d hoped for” despite it debuting with nearly 3 million viewers in October 2023.
Many feel 2020 was a false dawn when channels wanted to be seen doing the right thing but without a real plan to change structurally or support talent long term.
A Black British writer who asked to remain anonymous said in 2021 they were asked to develop a show, shot a pilot and then were told in 2023 that the channel did not want to proceed. “They wanted to be seen as progressive and then when that time passed, they said: ‘Oh, like, we don’t need to make that effort any more’,” the writer said.
A Black British director who also asked to remain anonymous said that some production companies engaged in a practice colloquially known as “organ harvesting”. Directors are invited to pitch for a job, are subsequently unsuccessful but their concepts and casting ideas are used by white-led companies.
“We’ll take all your ideas, we’ll take all of your personal experiences growing up,” the director said. “We might even ask you to leave your mood boards, all of your suggestions of casting, and then … ‘Thanks, bye’.”
A forthcoming report from the Film and TV Charity found that Black British TV workers were more likely to experience suicidal thoughts (38%), leave the industry (36%) and have worked less than three months in the last year (21%), compared with their white counterparts.
Mundy-Castle said public broadcasters should protect a proportion of their commissioning budget (a figure in line with the black population of the UK, which is just over 4%) for shows made by black-focused production companies.
“It should be something that is a given,” he said. “A ringfenced amount of money that needs to go to the people that are creating shows for that cohort.”
Without change, he said, the current TV leaders would play out a “Jurassic Park” scenario where they were seen as dinosaurs in a shifting digital landscape they did not understand. He said: “You can benefit from our differences but if you want to close the gates to Jurassic Park, you’re going to be extinct very soon.”
