I was on a British TV diversity scheme – and saw why they don't change anything

Diversity schemes are controversial by their nature. The BBC’s recent announcement, for example, that it was investing £100m of its TV budget over three years to improve “diverse and inclusive content”, prompted an inevitable mixed reaction.

I take a particular interest in such diversity schemes. A few years ago I was selected as one of four ethnic minority writers to work on a top British TV soap, as part of a 12-week process designed to land one person a place on the show’s writing team. After more than a decade trying to break into the TV industry, I believed that this opportunity would finally kickstart my career in screenwriting.

How wrong I was.

On my very first day, I attended a writers’ meeting and it became immediately clear why the scheme had been launched. Every single one of the soap’s 22 writers was white. This lack of diversity was reflected elsewhere, from the production crew through to the editing teams, where there were hardly any black or brown faces. The resulting culture was, at times, toxic. I encountered a number of troubling incidents working on the show, from people mocking a black actor for “camouflaging” against the dark background, to insulting comments about Muslims and talk about blacking up for parties. There was one bizarre incident when a writer – touted as a “genius” by staff – pitched a toe-curling storyline where an Asian character becomes a violent Islamist radical and plans a bombing campaign. He didn’t realise that the character in question wasn’t Muslim but Hindu. Astonishingly, the “genius” writer did not seem to know the difference.

The most insidious thing to deal with in being the “diversity hire” was the underlying assumption that you were not talented enough to make it through the normal channels and had to rely on an act of charity to get through the door. Indeed, one of the most experienced writers on the team refused to speak to me because he felt I was the recipient of undeserved preferential treatment.

This was especially frustrating to hear, given how tough the selection process for the scheme had been. Application involved submitting a full-length script. If deemed good enough, you were then invited to a workshop for which you had to read a 46-page document and have your contribution to discussions assessed. Next you had to write a week’s worth of storylines (about 3,000 words) and an original story idea. Those who passed this stage then had to successfully complete a 12-week work placement on the storyline team. Only after all this were you finally offered the holy grail of a trial script submission, used to assess whether you should join the writing team. Even then, only one person would be chosen for a place on the writing team.

Compare this to one inexperienced white writer who, following a recommendation from someone on the show, was offered a chance to submit a trial script on the back of a friendly conversation with a producer.

At the end of my placement, I was left jaded. I was repeatedly told how lucky I was to be involved with a high-profile British TV show, but it had hardly been a beacon of inclusivity. The levels of ignorance about faith, race and different communities had been startling. There was little interest in nurturing my ideas and virtually no attention given to career development. The producer was obliged to select one ethnic minority writer to join the writing team: I didn’t get picked but the writer that did was only ever commissioned to write a handful of episodes before he too was gone. I still wonder whether the scheme had just been window dressing, an attempt merely to change the optics of an all-white writing team.

We should be in no doubt that a diversity scheme is an admission of failure. A failure to build a workforce that is truly representative of modern Britain. Yet progressives often blindly welcome such schemes and applaud employers for showing commitment to fair representation. More fundamental questions about how we reached this situation are ignored. Why the failure to recruit any ethnic minority writers? Why the lack of diversity across the departments? Why have unrepresentative working environments been allowed to flourish?

It is disingenuous to see handwringing decision-makers lament the lack of diversity, while taking no responsibility for creating the situation in the first place. Instead, rather than turn the focus on their recruitment decisions, the blame is shifted towards disadvantaged communities themselves. They are deemed “hard to reach” or “not showing enough interest” and, when it comes to the arts, “not sending in enough manuscripts”. It’s damning that so many people in power refuse to explore how their own behaviour and prejudices may be barring ethnic minority people from pursuing careers in their field.

We should not look to temporary diversity schemes to remedy the lack of representation, but look at the decision-makers themselves. If the gatekeepers – the producers, the commissioning editors, the executives and directors – have failed to recruit a diverse workforce, it is they who should go. It is their failure.

Real change is not change from the top, it’s change at the top. Maybe then, diversity would be embedded in the fabric of organisations, not just reserved for tokenistic schemes that offer nothing but false hope.

• Tabasam Begum is a film critic and freelance journalist