Carol Vorderman has used her Alternative MacTaggart lecture to take aim at the TV industry’s “snobbery” and its disconnect with working class viewers and those who live outside the capital.
She said that “our industry is an industry of snobbery – regional snobbery, class snobbery and educational snobbery” and that “the truth is, your family background, where you went to school and if you live and are active in London – these are the three factors which will largely determine whether or not you even get your foot through the door, let alone rise through the ranks.”
She also argued that on screen, working-class people “feel they are not represented, their situation is not represented, the lack of opportunities and lack of money and jobs is not represented, and so where do they go – they go to social media in their droves.”
And that could be disastrous for the TV industry: “For the first time ever, a massive quarter of people in the UK are not watching broadcast television on a weekly basis and the annual rate of decline is so large it’s likely that within 5 years, less than half of the UK population will be with us at all.”
She argued that the disconnect is particularly stark in terms of where people now get their news. “In the Reuters Institute report from June this year, around three-quarters of people (73%) said they get their news online, compared with 50% for TV and just 14% for print, so why are we still doing the bloody newspaper reviews morning noon and night, and not social media reviews? Interest in news in the UK has almost halved since 2015. Trust in the news has fallen from 51% pre-Brexit to just 36% now. The report stated that “those choosing to selectively avoid the news also often do so because they feel “powerless”.”
Vorderman said that opportunities to work in TV for working class young people and those outside London had declined dramatically from when she started out in the sector, when there was “far better representation of the regions, lots of local shows being made by local people for local people, there were TV powerhouses in the regions Granada, Yorkshire Television, Central, a long list. I was trained up as a researcher and then a producer, worked all over the country on a multitude of shows behind the scenes as well as on camera.”
But with “the big move of most of ITV’s output to London 20ish years ago, the shaving of BBC local output, came greater inequality. Of course it did. In 2024, consider this scenario for a young Carol or David right now, one who is growing up in poverty in the North, and on free school meals. This young person would graduate with massive student debt. Not a chance in hell of buying a house, or even renting. They’re especially bright, but know nobody in television.
Compare to a privately educated child who went to the same university as the poor kid, BUT lives at home in London, speaks the language of the seniors in television with the same voice and accent as you, knows people you know, knows the system you know.”
She said that “regional snobbery is rife” in TV. “Our industry is now more heavily weighted to London than ever before” but the “population of Greater London officially stands at 9.75 million people. Guess what? The population of England alone stands at 56 million. So that’s 46 million people in England alone who don’t live in London. We fail within the industry to represent our population.”
Vorderman also took aim at TV’s role in losing the trust of the public in mainstream media. “After 14 years of austerity and lying by the privileged political class, this country is in an absolute mess and the TV industry must accept part of the responsibility for that too, including the riots.”
She said that the TV industry “used to be the message makers, the ones who tried to determine the conversation of the country” but “how responsible have we been with those messages? Not very, in many ways. In some cases, some might say reckless.” She listed the “normalising” of Nigel Farage on I’m A Celebrity and “opaquely funded right wing lobbying groups, appearing as so-called independent voices so many times on BBC political shows they’ve probably got their own dressing rooms” And said, “you cannot be an industry with the power to create the conversation and then claim that nothing is your responsibility – the two simply don’t add up.”
Jon Creamer
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