I attended the very appropriately named ‘Is TV too Posh’ run by The Royal Television Society in central London. What intrigued me about the event was of course the title but also the panel, which consisted of:

Alex Graham

Chief Executive Officer, Wall to Wall

Marcus Ryder

Editor of Current Affairs, BBC Scotland

Donna Taberer

Head of Public Service Partnerships, BBC Academy

Toby Young

Writer

CHAIR

Stuart Cosgrove

Director of Creative Diversity, Channel 4

What did not impress me was the fact that this event gave priority to RTS Patrons and members. Surely that reaffirms the fact that TV is a closed shop and this would result in less people outside of the RTS circle attending, meaning the working class/unemployed would not be present. Anyway the event….

I was surprised at the input from the panel, in that they provided examples of the struggles of the working class and also the struggles of those in TV trying to improve its accessibility to all classes. I would never have thought Donna Taberer was from a working class background, council estate to be exact, it proves you can never judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately this event proved a lot of people in TV do judge which results in the imbalance of the classes due to hiring those you can relate to. I collected the best quotes from the panel:

Donna Taberer ‘Classes in TV are tucked away…..it’s a mates game, we have to be honest’

Marcus Ryder ‘TV is completely risk-phobic….we do need to take risks and employ people outside of our comfort zone, those outside of ox-bridge’

Toby Young ‘Many exec’s are from ox-bridge, they want to serve the middle-classes i.e. commissioning middle class content’

Alex Graham ‘Doesn’t TV content take the piss out of the working classes’

I felt the panel did ‘represent’ as they were diverse in background, class and region. I did think the ‘race game’ kept creeping in, which diverted from the ‘working class’ inclusion in TV but overall the content within this event needs to addressed on a larger scale. When I asked the audience how many were working class, just 5 hands were raised including mine. There were 40 members of the audience……

I also raised the fact that the industry will continue to be ‘too posh’ if organisations like RTS don’t interact with not just the working class but also young people. I read out the lack of communication from RTS on social networks and felt there would be no acknowledgement of my little rundown. I was wrong. At the end of the event the guy who I thought was the official photographer for RTS, who was actually the Chief Exec of RTS Simon Albury, stood up and said ‘To the Welsh girl thank you for that, we need to work on our interaction and maybe you could help us with that’. To which I replied ‘Great you can pay me’!