Can a new access scheme get more working-class people into the TV industry?

“TV was everything to me,” said British playwright James Graham at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival’s MacTaggart lecture on August 20. The dramatist used his recollections of the television he watched in his youth together with tales of his working-class background to discuss a possible future of TV – including the launch of a new scheme to get more people like him into the industry.

The James MacTaggart memorial lecture has been the centrepiece of the Edinburgh TV Festival since 1977. It is named after the Scottish writer, producer and director who died in 1974 after a career making groundbreaking TV such as Play for Today and Z Cars, an early British police drama.

The first lecture was given by John McGrath, founder of the radical Scottish theatre company 7:84. Since then the people chosen to deliver it have been a mixed bunch. When I was attending regularly, it was the domain of the industry big hitters – I remember the sense of icy dread as James Murdoch took to the stage. As Ken Loach memorably quipped to the Guardian: “The people giving the lecture are the authority that MacTaggart would have cut off at the knees.”

Lately though, the requests to deliver the lecture have gone out to writers and creators – documentarian Louis Theroux last year, actor and screenwriter Michaela Coel, and dramatist Jack Thorne before that. This year’s subject, James Graham, is surely someone of whom MacTaggart would approve.

Born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Graham has made his name as a writer of political screen drama (Brexit: The Uncivil War, and Coalition) and award-winning plays (Dear England, Boys From The Blackstuff). But he is perhaps best known for the BBC series Sherwood, based on the mining village where he grew up – series two of the hit drama starts on August 25.

Despite being very much the kind of person MacTaggart would have wanted to deliver his lecture, Graham started by discussing imposter syndrome. The feeling that not only did his working-class background ill prepare him for working in television, it didn’t permit him to operate there without being overly grateful.

Much of the lecture focused on the lack of working-class people working in TV production, offering some startling statistics. Between 46% and 49% of the British population identify as working class, but only 8% of TV industry jobs are filled by people from such backgrounds.

As Graham pointed out: “It is the category of representation with the largest disparity between make-up of the country and make-up of our industry … Yet it is the only significant category not to be formally included in most of our standard measurements of diversity.”

In his post-lecture discussion with BBC journalist Kirsty Wark, Graham also highlighted the lack of arts-based subjects in the core curriculum in state schools. This, he said, added to the feeling that music, drama and the arts were something “other” to mainstream education, and less likely to lead to employment. It also fostered the belief among working-class families that the arts were only for those who could afford it – or that working in theatre or TV was a distant hope for working-class youngsters.

Access and acceptance

The University of the West of Scotland where I work is a “widening access” university with a higher percentage of working-class students than any other Scottish university. Teaching them TV skills and introducing them to people who now work in the industry is the first step to getting them – and importantly, their stories – onto TV.

We’ve had lots of successes, but despite Graham’s insistence that it isn’t about money, I believe it is. How can the young graduate, paying the rent by working 40 hours in McDonalds, give that up to take on a two-week contract as a runner on a production?

Which is why the Impact Unit, the new scheme launched by Graham in his lecture, which aims to make the TV industry more accessible to working-class people, is to be greatly welcomed. Run by the TV Foundation, a charity that supports new and emerging talent in the TV industry, the scheme will “develop measurements and a monitoring system” and establish a set of expectations that companies can consider in career planning.

As Graham highlighted, it is the ability to decide who is working class that has always been a problem. Despite being raised in a working-class household, even he would hesitate to describe himself as working class.

How do we measure such things? It is to be hoped the scheme will mean that the working-class voices missing from the writers’ rooms and production offices will find their place and flourish so that genuine working-class stories will become more prevalent on our screens.

If this can happen, Graham is hopeful for the future of the TV he loves. Despite welcoming streaming services, his new series Sherwood will be released twice weekly, returning to the old days of slow-build tension and anticipation.

Graham is a great believer that millions of people watching the same programme at the same time serves a “social, political, even spiritual function”. He continues to argue for the preservation and further production of “collective TV experiences”.

We have seen over the years that diversity in staffing and casting can breathe new life into ageing TV formats. Look at Rose Ayling-Ellis’s time on Strictly in 2021. Not only did she represent the deaf community on TV, she helped tell compelling new stories to a jaded audience. There shouldn’t need to be a commercial justification for diversity, equity and inclusion in TV – but that’s the way business works – and television, sadly, is no different.

The opening up, or widening, of pathways to television for people from working class backgrounds is simply another way to make producers make better TV. Because as James Graham pointed out in Edinburgh: “What is a nation except the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves.”