I gave a talk about race and racism, diversity and inclusion in the television industry in the summer of 2020, a month after the slave trader Edward Colston's statue was destroyed and three months after George Floyd was murdered outside a convenience store in Minneapolis. I utilized that venue, the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, to tell the narrative of how, for decades, television has failed not only to address but also to admit its diversity problem. On television, as in the worlds of art, literature, theater, and film, who gets to tell their tales and who gets to tell them has never been solely based on talent and enthusiasm.
Television is an old medium with a long-standing internal culture, one that grew over decades and was exclusive rather than inclusive from the start. The BBC, which began broadcasting in the 1920s, reflected the class-bound society that had given birth to it. London dominated early television, and its shows were mostly produced and delivered by people of the middle class.
Despite the well publicized transfer of numerous broadcasters and production businesses to the regions, we still do not think of a television producer with a regional accent from a working-class upbringing a century after British broadcasting began. People from wealthy families who attended private schools and prestigious institutions are commonly referred to as "traditional backgrounds" in the television recruitment culture. People with backgrounds like mine, who come from council estates and failed comprehensive schools, are aptly termed as "non-traditional."
Putting words into the world, as I did that summer, can have unanticipated consequences. One of them was that it assisted a group of people with whom I now collaborate in developing an initiative aimed at influencing the creation of a new medium. In addition to working in television this year, I'm involved in StoryTrails, a project led by StoryFutures Academy, the UK's National Centre for Immersive Storytelling at Royal Holloway, University of London. The metaverse, a 3D internet that employs virtual reality (VR) to create new worlds within a headset and augmented reality (AR), which adds layers of digital imagery to the real world that can be seen through your smartphone, is the next media in which we are working.
A new medium enters the world without a history or, to some extent, cultural baggage. Women in the technology industry may question the notion that technologies developed in such a male-dominated environment are wholly free of baggage. However, because these technologies are new, they have the ability to prevent individuals who build the metaverse from being classified as "traditional" or "non-traditional." The original sins of the British television and film industries – exclusivity, metropolitan focus, tendency to privilege middle-class outlooks, and long histories of misogyny – should and potentially can be left behind, and prevented from infecting VR and AR, as well as the employment cultures that will emerge around them.
Our StoryTrails initiative is putting these new technologies in the hands of 50 creatives from throughout the country, whose backgrounds reflect the diversity of UK talent, with the goal of instilling a new and better creative culture. They're in charge of producing immersive storytelling that allow viewers to touch, feel, and interact with history right where it happened. They will allow audiences in Blackpool the chance to ride the "Queercoaster," an augmented reality tour through Blackpool's LGBTQ+ history, using film archive from the BFI that has been reinterpreted and turned into spectacular 3D. Sheffield residents, meantime, will be able to watch how their city is transforming into one of the greenest in the UK, thanks to large-screen immersive domes that display how it is reducing its carbon footprint.
