Black creatives and executives in the UK film and TV sector are questioning the level of progress made towards the creation of a more equitable industry for Black and global majority individuals five years on from the surge in profile of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd.
Floyd, a Black man, was killed during an arrest by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020. In the wake of the murder, which was filmed, the public discourse around racism and representation in the US and UK put a tremendous amount of pressure on film and TV organisations to address their own shortcomings.
In the UK, companies launched schemes and initiatives in an attempt to redress racial imbalances. The British Film Institute (BFI) was a founding part of the Anti-Racism Task Force for European Film in the summer of 2020; Warner Bros Discovery launched Black Britain Unspoken, a short film initiative, in 2022.
In the TV sector, the BBC committed to spend £100m on diversity and inclusion content between 2021-24; ITV commissioned a series of short films about the Black Lives Matter movement, Unsaid Stories, produced by Greenacre Films; and Channel 4 launched a project called Black to the Future.
“We saw a wave of public commitments from broadcasters, streamers and production companies, and a raft of new incentives,” says Sheila Nortley, UK producer of Netflix series Supacell and executive producer at UK outfit Osun Group.
“It was unprecedented. A collective rallying around awareness of anti-Blackness and also of diversity and inclusion more broadly across the industry. What was encouraging was the mainstream awareness, for the first time, of systemic exclusion.”
But beyond the schemes and initiatives, Nortley says that structures were not put in place to turn these into long-term careers.
“The biggest challenge was always going to be sustainability,” she notes. “These shifts needed to be embedded long-term rather than treated as a passing trend.”
Nortley’s comments are echoed by Naomi Sesay, who left her role as head of creative diversity at Channel 4 in June. In a LinkedIn post, she wrote of 2020: “There was programming. There was funding. There was space. There was a feast of ‘Black, Black, Asian, Black, disability, Black’ – a hurried, half-hungry attempt at justice. But anyone paying attention could see the truth beneath the frenzy: fear, not change, was the fuel.”
Marcus Ryder, a former BBC executive and now CEO of the Film and TV Charity, says 2020 was not the beginning of something. Instead, he believes the most positive strides made in diversifying the industry took place in the preceding years.
“In 2016, the government put diversity into the white paper for the BBC’s charter for the first time; in 2018, you had the high-profile appointment of Kamal Ahmed as BBC editorial director; in 2019, June Sarpong was put on the BBC board,” he notes.
“It was a 10-year period of amazing progress, and then you see it start to falter.”
He points to Steve McQueen’s BBC series Small Axe, commissioned in 2015 and broadcast in November 2020 – but not recommissioned.
“Most political movements have their day in the sun, then they start to drop off,” Ryder says.
He is tired of seeing training schemes as the industry’s default response.
“Training is draining,” he says. “If we frame the problem as a training problem, that invariably blames the Black and global majority people. We’re saying they’re not good enough, they need more training.
“If you frame it as a credits problem, you shift the blame onto the employer, whether that’s the commissioning company or production company. Of course we have training issues, but we need to make sure the balance of blame is in the right place.”
For Black and global majority creatives, the standards are set higher, he believes. “Sometimes we do good jobs, sometimes we do bad jobs. That’s just the way it is.
“The problem is that when someone from an underrepresented group does a job that isn’t great, that sticks to them. When the white man doesn’t do a good job, they get a second or third or fourth break,” he suggests.
“These people are ready – we just need to make sure we don’t unduly punish them when they make mistakes, if they don’t knock it out of the park every time. Invariably, when it comes to people from underrepresented groups, it’s one strike.”
Underrepresented people are still too often seen as a “risk” in the film and TV sector, believes Nortley. That is not just a loss for the creatives being overlooked, but for the industry and the audiences.
“This cuts across the board from writers whose voices aren’t heard in the room, to senior creatives who are publicly praised as trailblazers but undermined and belittled in the actual workplace,” Norley elaborates. “I love seeing people flourish despite the obstacles, but I also wish success didn’t have to come with struggle as a prerequisite for so many.”
Priscilla Igwe, founder of the New Black Film Collective, an organisation dedicated to bolstering Black-led film production, distribution and exhibition, has a different view on the proliferation of training schemes. Black and global majority creatives, she says, should make the most of all the schemes on offer but always with an eye on the long term, on the ability to create your own work.
“Do not be dependent,” Igwe emphasises. “Work with allies, fantastic, great, work with schemes. Get your support, your funding, but with the mind of doing something independently.”
Data difficulties
It is difficult to obtain good data on how effectively the film and TV sectors are diversifying across its many different facets due to the largely freelance nature of the sector.
“It’s quite a siloed industry,” agrees Melanie Hoyes, BFI director of inclusion. “A lot of other industries have embedded data, you can do it at the point of contracting.”
The TV industry has more available data than the film industry. The Creative Diversity Network (CDN) publishes its annual Diamond report, used by the UK TV sector to obtain diversity data on programmes that are commissioned by the BBC, Channel 4, ITV, LumoTV, Paramount, Sky, S4C and UKTV, with a 32.5% industry completion rate. The most recent report covered 18 months from August 2023 to December 2024.
The report showed there has been a decrease in the number of Black, Black African, Black Caribbean or Black British people in senior roles, to 2.6%, from 2.9% in 2023-4 and 2.8% in 2022-3.
The Black population is estimated to represent 4.9% of the UK workforce.
Off-screen contributions from all levels of Black, Black African, Black Caribbean or Black British industry professionals has fallen to 3.1%, from 3.5% in 2023-4 and 3.9% in 2023-3. The current figure also represents a slight decline on the 2018-9 and 2019-20 levels, which were steady around 3.2%.
In the 2023-4 Diamond report, representation of people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups off-screen increased from 13.4% to 14%, but is still lower than UK workforce estimates (17%).
A similar data tool of this breadth does not exist in the film industry. However, the BFI publishes statistics of its own funding and staff composition and it makes for positive reading.
From April 2024 to March 2025, 35% of recipients (director, producer or writer) of BFI production funding were for people who identified as Black or global majority in London, and 24% outside London.
April 2024 to March 2025 is the first year the BFI has had geographical data to distinguish between inside and outside London. The UK-wide figure was 28% in 2023-24. The UK-wide figure was just 16% in 2018-19 and jumped to 28% in 2019-20.
The BFI’s target for Black and global majority-supported projects is 40% in London and 30% outside of London.
In development funding, the BFI is exceeding its targets, with 58% of funding recipients identifying as Black or global majority in 2024-5 inside London and 34% outside of London, compared to 38% in 2023-4 and 20% in 2019-20.
Within BFI employees, 20.2% identify as Black and global majority, down from 21.4% in 2023-4, but well above 16.2% of 2019-20.
While data tells part of the story, Hoyes is keen for it not to be the whole story about inclusion.
“As important as data is for accountability and telling us where we are and where we need to get to, a few years ago we got caught up in data, and data being inclusion work.
“I don’t think it is, it is an accountability tool, it’s important for looking at the landscape, but it’s a baseline,” she cautions.
The Film and TV Charity’s most recent Looking Glass survey on mental health in film and TV painted a bleak picture.
In total, there were 4,300 respondents across the film and TV industry. The proportion of Black and global majority respondents reporting ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ mental health (38%) was higher than among respondents from white ethnic backgrounds (34%). Just over a third (34%) of Black and global majority respondents had suicidal thoughts over the past 12 months, compared to 29% of respondents from white ethnic backgrounds.
Almost half (49%) of Black and global majority respondents had experienced bullying behaviour over the past 12 months, compared to 39% of white respondents.
A higher proportion of Black and global majority respondents had taken ‘firm’ action towards leaving the industry over the past 12 months – 35% compared to 31% of respondents from white ethnic backgrounds.
The Black In Focus report, supported by Pact and the Film and TV Charity and published earlier this month, cited that 53% of 164 TV mid-career respondents felt that diversity and inclusion has stagnated or worsened in the last 10 years.
Meanwhile the latest Thrive report from Creative Access, which interviewed 200 individuals working in film and TV and 100 employers between March and April of this year, noted that one in seven larger employers reported a decrease in diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) spending this year, which may be contributing to a decline in workforce diversity. Forty-seven percent of employers said their teams had become more representative, down for the fourth consecutive year.
However, 44% of organisations said they had increased their DEI spend, an uplift on last year’s 35%.
Political dimension
The election of President Donald Trump in the US for a second term and the very high-profile shift in US government policy away from DEI initiatives has caused heightened anxiety in the UK film and TV sector. When Trump signed executive orders in January to reverse DEI efforts in federal government, many entertainment-owning large corporations followed suit. Disney, Amazon, Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery all either rolled back or loosened the language around their own DEI initiatives.
“The fear is once the language changes, give it a year, give it two years, three years, the policies will change,” says Ryder.
In March, the Film and TV Charity and CDN held a closed-door meeting with senior DEI leads throughout the UK.
“We recognised there is tremendous distress for people working in DEI right now – DEI is under threat in America, and there are clear links between America and Britain,” says Ryder.
Ryder believes the solution to combating racial imbalances in the screen sector cannot be purely industrial. “There is hardly a major company I can think of that isn’t doing good work… The problem is wider and bigger than each individual company.
“The only people that can change the structures are the license agreements set by Ofcom, set by [UK government department for culture, media and sport] DCMS. The whole tax environment set by the Treasury. Those are the people that can change the structures of the industry.”
“It’s a political problem,” he declares. “One of the reasons we care about this is that it’s about our democracy. This is about representation. We need to have our politicians involved.
“Sometimes we feel uncomfortable talking about politics as part of our game as well. But it has to be.”