Interesting report on diversity of representation in BBC programmes

[DuchessofReality]

Report here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/thematic-review-of-portrayal-and-representation.pdf

BBC article about it here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9312091kpeo

Well worth reading the whole document. It mentions, among other things, lack of representation of women and older women in particular, lack of diversity of geographical and class-related views, and how tick box diversity annoys people.

Sentences I appreciated:
We also found that measuring diversity by aggregating groups of sometimes very different people (such as BAME, disabled people, LGBTQ+) misses crucial detail which is required to ensure an appropriate range is present in content over time.
.....
However, there’s a noticeable gap between those whom the general audience wants to see more of and what specific groups within the audience feel they need. This gap is widest for LGBTQ+, black African and Caribbean communities, who express a greater desire for increased representation than the wider audience does for them.
.....
Nearly nine in ten say that women over 50 are represented poorly in adverts, films and television. And two thirds of women cease to feel represented in the media from the age of 46.
......
Commissioners should now take a proactive role in developing on- and off-air talent, to ensure authentic portrayal of the following groups: People from working class backgrounds (in a way that represents and celebrates their own cultures) South Asians (particularly in drama and entertainment) East Asians (in all genres) Disabled people with a range of impairments (particularly focusing on incidental representation) East Europeans (in all genres)
......

To help achieve diversity, measurements often group people together under labels like BAME or LGBTQ+. The term disability is itself an aggregation of a number of different conditions and experiences. This can result in some peculiar outcomes where very different groups are lumped together for no other reason than they share some common characteristic, such as being ‘non-white’.
.....

The aggregation ‘LGBTQ+’ tries to encompass a range of sexual orientations and gender identities, with the plus at the end used to ensure inclusivity of all identities beyond those in the term. It’s widely used as a term for gender, sexual and romantic minorities and, unlike some of the terms above, it specifically points out the range and variety it includes. However, it presents another issue in that the various groups in that umbrella label don’t always want to be associated with each other, specifically some of the L and some of the T. While we think it is still useful, it is worth pointing out that a single person cannot be LGBTQ+, any more than an individual can be BAME. As with all the above aggregations, where a programme is talking about an individual, it is best to be specific about that person rather than using an umbrella term.
.......

However, productions should consider their choices carefully when it comes to colour-blind casting. In depicting an anachronistic historical world in which people of colour are able to rise to the top of society as scientists, artists, courtiers and Lords of the Realm, there may be the unintended consequence of erasing the past exclusion and oppression of ethnic minorities and breeding complacency about their former opportunities.

Um... 15 years ago, when a chap with a cracking Suffolk accent had a lead role in a BBC drama about the murder of five women in and around Ipswich in 2006. He wasn't a dodgy cop or the killer. Many of us passed out from the shock.

Then we had to wait until 'The Dig' in 2021, when Ralph Fiennes went all-in on learning the accent to play Basil Brown.

But generally, yep, it's all zero-braincell yokels with dubious opinions talking in broad Clotshire.

Nah, it's because we're nasty buggers who drive them out with pitchforks...

Which is why, as a teenager growing up in rural East Anglia in the 1980s, I knew a gay couple who lived a happy life in our midst.

And why, 20-ish years ago, when my DC were at primary school with two mixed-race siblings, the kids' colour mattered much less than the fact that their dad was 'local'. They were Jean's grandchildren, and the boy, my God, takes after his dad, doesn't he?

The countryside has got less homophobic and less racist at pretty much the same rate as the rest of the country.

If we're going for Dickens authenticity, we're gonna see an awful lot of stereotypical depictions of Ashkenazi Jews.

I think sometimes in rural communities people assume racism when it is because they are outsiders - where outsiders means anyone whose family hasn’t lived in the community for at least three generations. If your family lived in the next village since the doomsday book but your parents moved five miles to this village before you were born then you are an outsider…

Just remembering how the hobbits in LOTR had different accents despite being from
the same village 😄

One of them was Scottish!

There were Black people living in Tudor England so why not tell (as far as possible) their own stories. Portraying Anne Boleyn as black isn't serving or informing anyone. Or, as another poster said, show a programme about an actual Black princess. As for regional accents, don't get me started on the West Country. There is zero effort made towards any semblance of reality. It's beyond lazy and insulting.

See, this is where it gets interesting because I am not particularly woke but I really don't care that much. I don't think "yay it's so diverse" either. I think it's just that I have already suspended belief re dragons existing and all of that so it isn't a problem. I don't think that makes my approach better than yours or anything. I certainly don't think it's a moral thing at all, and actually making moral judgements on the best way to appreciate a story/show is really dodgy and a slipper slope.
I think it does show how hard it is for programmes to satisfy everyone nowadays. Legacy producers (like the BBC) have to make shows that please large numbers of people/a large chunk of their total audience. So they are at a disadvantage to YouTubers/newer formats who can Taylor make specific approaches.

(I do get it. I get very irritated by a specific detail in films like Star Wars which.is that you can see over the time scale of the films data storage capacity.and data storage formats completely changes (realistically). But there are never any compatability problems or hardware obsalence issues. It is just glossed over and it irks me. I dont think that makes me a bigot. But it pulls.me out of the story.)

Bilbo lived in Bag End, Hobbiton
Frodo grew up in Buckland before moving into Bag End
Samwise also lived in Hobbiton but lower social status to Bilbo and Frodo
Merry was from Buckland
Pippin was from Tuckborough

I did quite enjoy the BBC version of Oliver Twist where apparently a workhouse in rural, scattered hamlet and farmland 1830s Dunstable had an incredibly ethnically diverse population of local orphaned children.

However the fabulous Sophie Okonedo played Nancy in that adaptation, and that was absolutely historically possible as well as being extremely well acted.

I am a bit torn about colour blind casting, I remember seeing Sophie Okonedo playing a queen in one of Shakepseares history plays on BBC4 I think, and I really would not want to deny any actor or actress the opportunity to play those roles, tho where that leaves Othello I really don't know. And I can suspend my disbelief possibly rather extremely on occasions so I do understand it can be distracting and maybe annoying.

Now I get to shriek BUUUUUUUT!
It all rather depends on knowing that it's a play, and that the actual queen was not black, ie knowing the history. I saw stuff after Bridgerton where people were having conniptions about how great it was that there were 18th century black royals and aristocrats and how terrible that it has been hidden and denied.

No people, it's fiction and acting!
Whereas Laurence Fox was wrong when he had a rant about non-white parts in a film about WW1, I'd love to know more about those men. I live in a county famed for WW2 airfields and the only Spitfire pilot I ever knew was black and originally from Jamaica, now there's a story to be told. He was universally adored at the school gate where he collected his grand daughter and such a gentleman.

And The Shire covered an area approximately the size of the Midlands. It took them about a week to get from Bag End to the Prancing Pony and then 300 odd miles to get from Bree to Rivendell.

Last time I looked, it was fairly easy to hear a difference in the accents of people from Coventry, Leicester, Derby, Stoke, Shropshire, Lincoln and Worcester, never mind that if you go half that distance from Leicester, you'd find yourself in Edinburgh.

I mean the battle of Bamber Bridge is a real historical event from WW2.
There are also novels like The Chequerboard about WW2, which has black characters in England and it's historically accurate. I definitely think there's a danger in veering.too far the other way into refusing to believe any black person in the UK pre the 1970s is realistic. Britain was an empire and while Britain itself was much less diverse than it is today port cities like Liverpool/the London Docklands would have seen a lot more mixing of cultures than rural areas. And because WW2 was a world war, there were people from all parts of the British Empire who ended up being in Britain for one reason or another. As well as American servicemen. So absolutely you can have historical dramas/World War dramas set in Britain that have a diversity of casting. But that's different anyway from colour blind casting.

That would be a great drama or film! Another group never mentioned, the several Polish squadrons in WW2 who having escaped Europe, fought with the RAF and were famous for their bravery.

So Edinburgh is roughly Weathertop?

Henry Higgins claimed to place someone within two miles in London, sometimes two streets in My Fair Lady.

And the Gurkhas, big community, only ever hear about them when its about a political thing or gardening/cooking shows, I bet there are fabulous stories to be told.

Yes, I agree, I've written about two different things there, colour blind casting and telling stories that seem to me to get lost.
Bamber Bridge wasn't the only incident but maybe the biggest and most well known. DS is a local history enthusiast and we have an ex WW2 airfield nearby that the US had. DS has dug around and found things in newspaper archives about white US servicemen (military police I think) trying to get local law enforcment and magistrates involved in persecuting the black men and enforcing segregation. They got nowhere because there were no cases to answer and it was just racism which was seen right through.

Also not forgetting that there were students in the UK even before WWII from all corners of the empire - some were funded by their own (wealthy) families, others won imperial scholarships.

There were also men from various parts of the empire who fought in British units during the war.

It's the implausible casting that gets on my nerves, as well the inability to include certain sections of the population as anything other than stereotypes.

There were people of other races in the UK before WW2 and there stories should be told. But they should be told correctly and in context.

The BBC likes to rub people's noses in its version of DEI. To demonstrate how progressive it is as an organisation.

But it has yet to acknowledge classism as part of its inclusivity package. Which probably affects more people than currently sit under its diversity umbrella collectively.

It won't. Because it's more than satisfied with the cosy little meritocracy of upper middle class poppets that inhabit its hallowed halls. Looking down their noses at the great unwashed who don't fall in line with its version of progressive social cohesion.

Hypocrite thy name is Aunty Beeb (she/they).

I've just thought, an unintended consequece of colour blind casting when coupled with historical ignorance might mean that if the stories of non-white people are told it could be tricky for some to actually understand that they really are the stories of non-white people, rather than colourblind casting and really about white people....

Yikes. Hold out foot, take aim and fire.

Quite. Or why their story is notable if every third person in the UK aristocracy was black…

A tiny rural village of people who are supposedly from there but look totally different is weird.

…and they all have different accents. This really annoyed me in the film series of Lord of the Rings where the hobbits were all supposed to have grown up together.

The document you posted does talk about class, and the BBCs failure to provide enough representation thereof though.
I agree with you it's a.problem. and maybe they won't actually do anything to fix it outside this report. But to be fair to them they do acknowledge it as a thing.

I seem to recall that in the books, Bilbo or someone comments about the hobbits in Bree having a different accent.

I find accents can be easier to overlook, simply because there are a lot of them, and sometimes people can have unexpected or strange accents for reasons you just don't know, and wouldn't expect to know in the story. A parent from elsewhere, time spent working in a different place, etc. I have some cousins, who have lived together the whole 60 + years of their lives, who have completely different accents.

But the weird random ethnic mixes you see just don't make any sense.

I didn't post any documents.

A superficial acknowledgement of a huge issue means nothing.