James Graham: MacTaggart Lecture | Edinburgh TV Festival 2024
Words Spoken by James Graham at the Edinburgh TV Festival 2024
The James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture is our keynote speech by a leading figure in television. This year, we welcomed award-winning playwright and dramatist James Graham. If you would prefer to watch the lecture, you can find it on our YouTube.
Good evening.
One of the many pleasures in being given the honour of presenting the MacTaggart to you all is that you find yourself compelled to trawl back over the inspiring lectures given by the many wonderful speakers who have stood here in recent years.
And if you do, you’ll notice, like me, a common – and typically British – pattern to many of the opening remarks.
A mild sort of bewilderment, at being asked.
A sense of imposter syndrome, and some fear, despite the obvious privilege.
Well as a writer, I believe we should always aspire to being original, to break new ground and be daring in our choices. So let me say to you that I think the festival organisers have made exactly the right choice, it’s about fucking time, and I have absolutely no doubt about the merits of me being here.
If only that were true…
But – for those who don’t know me, and why should you – I am a dramatist. In other words – a professional liar.
The privilege of being a dramatist is that you get to invent characters who might have the confidence, the charisma and the charm you have never managed to exhibit yourself in public, but that is what I am going to try and manifest in myself, today.
Because, indeed, this is an honour. And I am mildly bewildered to be here. But also grateful.
I was taught by my mum from very young that when you get invited somewhere you should always, always, say ‘thank you for having me’.
There might have been an element of class insecurity there – and we’re going to talk about everyone’s least favourite diversity and representation category – ‘class’ – a lot.
It is a key theme, of this year’s festival.
Growing up, my family’s somewhat obsessive “thank you for having me” riff most likely came from an anxiety that many people from a particular kind of, say, “aspirational working class” background had, pertinent to the topic under discussion today about – ‘belonging’. And getting above your station. And where your place is.
For such families, the only thing worse than feeling excluded, the thing more distressing than not being invited somewhere – was to get invited somewhere.
Now that’s stressful…
Much of what we knew about social rituals and protocols would have come from television. Our window into the world beyond a mining village in North Nottinghamshire.
And coming from such a place, I know I wouldn’t be a writer, today, without two things.
The fact that my comprehensive school made no apology in foregrounding arts subjects for majority working or benefit-class kids in a socio-economically deprived area.
And because of all the truly high quality, inspiring, representative television I watched growing up, long before I ever sat in a theatre, a cinema, an opera house. Tele – with a myriad of complex and contradictory working-class, regional voices, characters and experiences that enthralled and enriched me. I thought the whole WORLD was full of people who spoke like, thought like, felt like my family – I’m not sure the same can entirely be said now, with – of course – some great exceptions…
TV was everything to me.
We were that family who ate every meal on our lap, on a tray, in front of the tele. Even Sunday lunch, because Sunday lunch was Eastenders omnibus time. Only Easter Sunday and Christmas Day was at the table.
TV dramas and soaps were my formative emotional, social, political introductions but there were others.
I can still hear the crack of the back of Tiffany Mitchell’s head as it hit the curb outside the Queen Vic on New Year’s Eve in the snow. And what it felt like to squeeze my mum on the sofa as Christopher Eccleston crawled, bleeding, out of Robert Carlyle’s house after being stabbed in Cracker. I can see the pain in Helen Daniel’s eyes in Neighbours as a road rage driver yelled at her about her age, and in that moment, as an 8-year-old kid, realising suddenly that one day we would all get old and we would all die…
I remember seeing my first gay kiss on Corrie and watching Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes tumble over the side of the Richenbach Falls, arm in arm with Eric Porter’s Moriarty. And while my Dad and siblings screamed in shock, I nodded to myself on the sofa, understanding even then as a 10-year-old boy how the antagonists’ souls had become so inextricably linked that if one could not live, neither could live…
I was a pretty shy and introverted kid, with some flamboyant exceptions.
I really did find it quite exhausting to be around real people, and preferred made-up ones instead – like training wheels, before trying out the real thing.
Glued to the TV, or hiding in my room, where – from about the age of 4 or 5 – I began to write my own stories …
But on those infuriating occasions when I would get sent off to a perhaps more well-to-do friend’s house, it had been so drilled into me to express gratitude that I wouldn’t even wait till it was over to say ‘thank you for having me’, I’d just blurt out it out as soon as they opened the door – thank you for having me!
Some rituals and phrases picked up from TV were clumsily misapplied. My family still talk about the time I stood on the doorstep with my mum, waving off one of her work friends who’d been round, cheerfully yelling “good riddance” – having heard it on a drama the night before.
It’s not that we weren’t proud. Or felt any less deserving.
But so embedded are those old habits, that learning, that to this day I can barely leave anywhere without saying it. The landlord of the pub I watched the Euros in. A theatre as I exit the auditorium, passing by the ushers, even after watching one of My Own Shows – ‘thank you for having me’. Even on those rare occasions where you might have got together with someone after a night out, and there it is, the morning after, the awkward goodbye made more awkward with the unintended double entendre – ‘thank you for having me’.
My point is – I do have a point, I promise…
This goes to a challenge, we face: the one of definition – ‘defining class’, in Britain, and how it might still affect your ambition, or limit your opportunities, in this industry, in any industry.
How someone’s socio-economic background is not – and this is something I really believe, and yet am often challenged on it – is not simply the financial circumstances you grow up in, the labour of your parents. It is – a culture, similar to that of growing up in a particular faith, or nationality, ethnicity - - all of which, of course, crossover and intersect with social class.
It is Not Just About money. You do not stop being it, the second you get a pay raise. Nor would I offer – and I’m sorry if this sounds exclusionary, or gate-keepery – do you become it, the instant you might drop below a certain level.
Because it is a culture. And the cultural reference points you grow up with.
A mindset you may develop. Never universal, or one size fits all. But shared outlooks. Learnt behaviours.
And yet – we are squeamish about defining it, and as a result, we quite often still exclude it from industry measurements around diversity. And I would like to talk about how we might collectively make progress on that front.
In addition to that, I’m aware I said yes to delivering this lecture when I assumed we would be approaching the “end” of something. The last days and weeks of an old government, a dying regime. Instead I find myself at the “beginning”, of something else.
This might not seem significant – but as a writer, I’m all about structure.
Planning for Act Five and finding yourself in Act One is no small matter.
But in many ways, I’m thankful. Looking backwards, ruefully, even angrily, might be more fun but – less fruitful, than looking forward. To imagining what could be. How to use this moment, any moment, of potential ‘change’.
So I’ll be speaking about how the new government should allow ‘culture’ to play an active part in this promised ‘national renewal’ – not just kept at arms-length in its own silo on the peripheries of policy making, as it so often is. TV production, cinema, live arts, comedy, music – stories… can benefit areas that range from levelling-up, to place-making, health, and social care, social mobility, education, mental health, economic growth, repairing our frayed social fabric...
Speaking of ‘the nation’ – I want to celebrate the power of television as a collective experience – something that we can still share, as an event. And to challenge the false narrative that such a phenomenon is either guaranteed to die out, or that there is no appetite for it. In this Olympic and Euros year of all years, to make the case for the social, and political, even spiritual function of collective TV experiences, and why we therefore need to make stronger arguments for them, and to fight for keeping them, in the more fragmented digital age.
Just as we must for making dramas that translate real-life stories to the screen, particularly those with a political & social bent. In this year of all years – when an ITV real-life inspired drama changed the literal law of the land.
It’s an area that I have been lucky enough to write and make work in myself, on stage and screen, covering such topics as the EU referendum in Brexit; The Uncivil War, the coughing major quiz show scandal, and some tragic killings in my own local community, in Sherwood. And a forthcoming TV adaptation of Gareth Southgate’s reformation of the Men’s football team in Dear England, which I can now start, since it has finally ended.
But such work does carry its own inherent headaches, and risks. Moral, legal. But we must take those risks. Our audiences want us to.
And that means a look at how we fight for our public service broadcasters, in the modern age.
I’m determined to be hopeful, excited, solution-focused, in these rare moments of transition.
But to the miserable stuff first…
… 8%.
8% of people working in television, from a working-class background.
As part of the recent survey many of you will have seen, released this year to Channel 4 News from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre.
That compares with the between 46-49% of British people, who identify as working class. So, almost half of the population.
But only 8% of them, working in our field. That’s across the entire field. In leadership roles, it will be even lower…
8%, bringing their experiences, outlook, stories, culture, to a platform that is meant to reflect all those things back to us…
This is the lowest percentage of people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, in Television in at least a decade, likely longer.
I know that it feels like this “where are the working classes?” question comes up often, doesn’t it, every couple of years, not necessarily part of any united or sustained campaign, as other areas of under-representation have benefited from. More a recurrent headline, expressed by an actor or writer, in an interview, with a tinge of helplessness and inevitability about it.
So we arrive here, worse today, than we were 10, 15 years ago. Maybe worse than it’s ever been. Why?
Of course – right now – so many of us are struggling. And I know that, and you know that. These are incredibly difficult times, for creatives, for crews, but also for producers, for broadcasters, the employ-yers, as well as employ-ees.
Ad revenue is down, costs are up.
TV production has been contracting significantly, since last year’s festival.
“Peak TV” having peaked – this, the trough.
That depressing mantra of “survive, until ‘25”. Not even to thrive, but for many of us simply hoping to be here next time.
It is hardest of all – for freelancers.
I am a freelancer, a proud one. A lucky one.
But two-thirds – two-thirds – of freelancers, when asked by BECTU in a poll at the beginning of the year, were out of work. Waiting, hoping, for green lights, for productions to start up again.
75% of those polled were struggling with their mental health, as a result.
And really shockingly and upsettingly, that figure amongst younger workers in our sector, rises to an unbearable 90%. 9 out of 10, of every person under the age 24, in our profession – struggling to cope, mentally and emotionally.
Speaking to many of my fellow writers, their mood right now ranges from frustration, to panic, as so many are in limbo, struggling to get anything away…
All this is leading to, as we know, many in their thousands, leaving the industry. And – as ever – most of these will be from those minority and under-represented sections of the workforce, who simply don’t have the reserves to keep going in difficult times, exacerbating further the problem with regards to class.
What do we do?
How do we avoid these cycles, of boom and bust?
Two years ago?: “over-production”. Not enough crew to fill all the jobs, spending tens of millions, sometimes on high-budget shows, some of which then don’t even get released! It’s – grotesque. A grotesque thought.
All that money and talented people’s time, and it all gets buried, an audience not even able to see it.
To now: a drought, a desert. This climate, of extremes…
Maybe at some point we can interrogate how it’s even possible for an industry that is manufacturing one of the most in-demand products on earth – content, entertainment, stories – how it’s possible to have drifted into a global business model where so few are able to make any money from something that’s never been in higher demand.
But that’s beyond my pay grade. So I’ll go back to more comfortable territory.
Wanging on about class.
But only briefly, I promise.
That was an instinct, for me to write & say that. I’ve no doubt a misplaced one, but I kept it in, as I think it shows I feel both somewhat presumptuous and slightly guilty talking about this – that old “thank you for having me’, again. Which I think comes down to a number of factors.
One, is that we have made leaps forward in representation, courtesy of the passion, time, and effort, of so many people. People in this room. The chronic under-representation of those from ethnic minority backgrounds, on and behind the screen, has increased by 15% in the past few years.
Representation of LGBTQ+ people, and characters, has increased too. Those who identify as disabled have seen a slower rate of increase, at only 1.1%. But advocates like Jack Thorne, and Rose Ayling-Ellis, are identifying it, fighting for it, making gains in it.
Whether any of these statistical increases come with real power, and agency, whether those representations are positive, authentic, is another matter of course.
But it’s important to identify progress when it occurs as it motivates the belief that more is possible.
Secondly, I could be wrong – but compared to other areas of under-representation, when it comes to class… I feel like we just don’t feel it, as much. In our bones. It might be that British embarrassment over ‘money’ thing; we’re uncomfortable, whereas other, more visible, sometimes simpler to define areas of diversity fire up the activist in us. The fight seems purer, the target real.
How to define it? Richard Osman once offered one of the more enjoyable and I think most rigorous metric as being the time you open your presents on Christmas Day – the earlier, the more working class you are. We were As Soon as you woke up, and had stuck the kettle on, FYI, but the closer to lunch the more middle class you become, and once you hit the evening, we’re talking Baronets and Earls.
It may also come from the third and final reason for my guilt: imagining that many of you are sitting there thinking – “is this fucker really working class?” “Like really”?
Does he sound working class? Can you be working class, if you’ve arrived at a point in your life, career, where you are giving the MacTaggart memorial lecture?
I’m not mocking the question, I think this is a fair, revealing and necessary question.
We have a suspicion, a prejudice, don’t we, based on countless examples of folks claiming to be from a working-class background, only to discover that miiiiiiight not be quite so simple.
How much did we all really, like really enjoy David Beckham teasing Victoria in the great Netflix documentary, over her dad’s Rolls Royce. I did. It was brilliant. I loved them both, for that, actually. Sort of naming and enjoying naming the thing,
We have an inbuilt alarm bell, an innate bullshit detector, especially when – elephant in the room – it comes to white men waving a diversity flag. Which I suggest is correct. A necessary cynicism, born out of evidence.
Nevertheless – this question of ‘proof’.
You’re never required to prove, say, your gayness, or your blackness. Or – and God, I hope this is true – your disability once declared, is believed and recognised.
So here goes. Just for the record. My working class bona fides, and a little of my journey.
“Parents profession”. My mum’s jobs have included a bar maid in our local pubs and working men’s clubs, and until recently, a primary school receptionist in the day and packing boxes in a logistics warehouse at night.
My father worked in local government, for Nottingham City Council, in conveyancing Ooof. That’s quite dicey isn’t it. Sounds very lower-middle, or at best upper-working.
But hold on, my parents divorced when I was young and I technically lived with a single mum – so, phew, we’re back on track – with a step-dad who was the local window cleaner, one of my first ever jobs, cleaning the mining terraces in an area of significant depravation of that Red Wall you all keep hearing about.
I was state school educated at a comprehensive – like 93% of the country.
93%.
Whereas – and figures can vary – but in many parts of the cultural sector, sometimes only 22% of the workforce went to a State School.
The first in my family to go to university, in Hull. To study drama. The government paid for my fees – thank you, for having me.
My jobs have included the same warehouse as my mum, or night shifts in a plastics factory. After my degree I was the stage door keeper at the Nottingham Theatre Royal – which I loved, seeing the touring West Shows pass in and out – and later jobs in theatre marketing once I moved to London to pursue my dream of being a playwright. Sleeping on friend’s floors and working in call centres and bars while I wrote and started to slowly get my plays put on, for free, at fringe venues and pub theatres, as my journey – thankfully and gloriously – began...
However, there is not one, homogenous “working class” experience.
Indeed, if you’re, say, a black working-class female writer from anywhere outside the South East of England, you are about as unrepresented a figure as you can be.
And I was incredibly lucky, in many ways. To the best of my awareness at the time, I was never hungry. I didn’t particularly notice going without, although I knew there were luxury things we couldn’t have. I had holidays – sometimes in a caravan on a camping site in the same town where we lived. But sometimes here, to Scotland, and sometimes my parents saved up and we went abroad.
A lot of my wider family – cousins, uncles, aunts – were benefit-class, in social housing. They thought of us – frankly – as having airs and graces!
Yes, I had to share a room often, a bunk bed, but I had quiet to do my homework in, and – statistically the most crucial – books in the house to read. And I loved to read them.
The stratas of class are varied, and vast.
But that doesn’t mean we can any longer fail to find a way to make them as equal a marker of diversity and inclusion, in the monitoring of our employment practices, in our targets for commissioning and grants, and in our awards.
Sigh, yes, sorry, I know awards aren’t the be-all and end-all. But they are a symbol. And there’s a telling anomaly here...
BAFTA, who have become brilliant industry leaders in this area, set out their new diversity standards in 2020 following the visible lack of diversity in both its membership, and in its nominations and awards. Their aim for 2025 included specific targets for gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability. At the time, they did not include class.
However, as of last autumn, this has finally been addressed, with BAFTA offering new resources and schemes to help organisations become more ‘class aware’.
What we need though, I feel, is a proper, industry-wide standard, and plan.
When I completed my last three diversity monitoring forms following a wrap on a production – I was asked to indicate my race, my gender, my sexuality, and my disability status on all of them. Only on one, did it ask for my parent’s occupation.
On the other two, I was not asked about my class.
On jury panels – many of you here will have been on them – there is no requirement, or formal mechanism in place for the panel to raise or consider the social class of any of the artists or creatives involved. And even if, at the chair’s discretion, it is raised as an aspiration… where is the data or evidence to know which nominees identify as what, and how would the jurors know, given that class neither has any obvious visual indicators, or is a protected characteristic to declare? When me or my colleague's work has been nominated for various awards, there's no way of them knowing mine, or many of my actors or the director's class. They haven’t us. Nor to be fair, have we found a way to tell them.
When you factor into all this that working-class audiences have been measured to be the demographic who consume the most hours of television – linear, and SVODs…?
These are anomalies, are they not?
It is the category of representation with the largest disparity between make-up of the country and make-up of our industry.
Yet it is the only significant category not to be formally included in most of our standard measurements of diversity.
They are the largest potential audience to reach, for the content we make.
Yet they are the demographic least able to find a foothold in the industry to bring their experiences and stories to make that work.
Why is this?
Don’t we care?
Of course we care. I know we all care.
But what, just not as much as we can care, can measure the unforgivable, under-representation elsewhere?
This all got me to thinking. If I got my wish, my desire, for a box to suddenly appear on all the forms, the submissions I make … which box would I tick?
“Working class”?
Because, behold, yet another insecurity, another dilemma in this area.
Am I still … working class?
Does my job now, my income, do the stars in your reviews or how many times you pop up on the Today programme change your class?
Truthfully, I wouldn’t be able to stomach or bare the eye-rolling I’d get and have if I dared to suggest I belonged to that class now.
And herein lies a key problem, and also a slight personal sadness.
I meant it when I said that class isn’t just money, or your parents listed job when you were 14, it’s part of the culture that forged you. In other words, a key part of your coding. Your sense of self.
Which creates a philosophical quandary. In no other part of your identity do you become less yourself as your circumstances change. Society doesn’t demand that you become less Christian or Muslim depending on how work is going. You don’t become less black or white, or less gay, bi or straight, have less Latin American or South-East Asian heritage depending on how your last projects went. All the brilliant facets of ‘you’ that make up ‘you’, that you proudly carry with you.
It's only the class part of our DNA that is demanded we Must Lose, as our circumstances change, despite how fundamental it is to who you are.
Does that matter? Boo hoo, first world problems – I do get it.
Except of course that means we have this strange feedback loop, whereby the call rightly goes out, periodically – “Where are the working-class writers, there aren’t any?!”
And then some working-class writers emerge, early career, and they are championed. And they start to do well, too well, so then our slightly snidey, sneery, “are you really though?” culture kicks in and goes, “well you can’t say you’re working class now, sorry”.
And then they look around and go, “wait, where are the working-class writers, there aren’t any”?!
And so the depressing headlines come out again and the hopelessness sinks in again, for that kid in his flat in Merseyside that tells them they shouldn’t bother.
So. What can we do about this lack of inclusion in the inclusion metrics thing?
I would join others in our sector and ask that we begin to recognise class as a consistent, and specific characteristic in our diversity monitoring forms.
That it becomes not only an aspiration, but a concrete part of industry tent pole organisations like BAFTA – who have already shown provable progress in these areas – when it comes to membership, and nominations.
Brass tacks, then: how would a commissioning editor, an Arts Council officer, a BAFTA panel judge know, and trust, that you are - - “working class”.
I am not imagining some nightmarish Orwellian panel with me, and Julie Walters and Lenny Henry sat behind a long table while we ask you to do the Lambeth Walk.
A few of us actually wrestled with this in the theatre industry, some time ago. I was a proud patron of a group called ‘Common’, that tried to bring together working-class creatives into a network that could provide mentoring, campaigning, and – at one point – aspire to build some sort of database. A ‘working-class’ Spotlight, of sorts, that could be a resource for producers and employees and funders to search for, say, a working class choreographer, or intimacy coordinator, if that was the desire for a particular project.
We managed to raise funds into the tens of thousands, and began work on building such an online base. But due to a myriad of the usual factors, exacerbated by the impact of Covid on freelancers… pressures on the group saw it disband and the moneys returned.
But a joined-up approach is still needed and I would welcome the resources and expertise of those in the television and film industry to help get the funding to build something, and keep it running – as a statement of intent toward change, as much as a genuinely valuable resource.
It gives me great pleasure then to say that the TV Foundation, the charity which owns the Edinburgh Television Festival agree and will be an organising force behind such an endeavour dovetailing with work they’ve already undertaken. There’ll be an announcement going out after this lecture about that launch.
I’m keen that any such conversations feel inclusive, and kind. Recognising that those in our sector who come from more privileged backgrounds don’t choose the class they’re born from into any more that the less privileged. This is simply about equity of opportunity, and a refusal to believe that this is the one area in unfair, unjust, under-representation that we simply cannot and will not crack.
And it must be cracked, for the same reasons we know the value of it being cracked in other areas. If you see a person, or a character, who looks like you or sounds like you on screen, whose experience or dilemmas, or joy, reflects your own… you feel more seen. There is a catharsis there, for audiences. A validation.
And an opening-up for potential future creatives and workers, of the psychological block that prevents you from even imagining such a job, a future, in the first place.
That was the greatest pleasure, and honour, in writing Sherwood – my BBC drama series, made by House Productions, set in my hometown, inspired by some specific real-life tragedies, and the more broader generational trauma and ongoing divisions that prevail coming out of the Miner’s Strike and collapse of our industrial heritage.
These places, my home, are sometimes over-simplistically described as the ‘left behind’, but that feeling is real. Feeling ignored, unseen.
And there are so many potential stories and voices waiting to be unearthed, nurtured and encouraged that come from these communities, that I’ve no doubt we are missing and have missed. It’s painful, and such a shame, for as all, as creators, and as audience members.
I was also incredibly grateful to have been included by the BBC, Charlotte Moore in particular, in discussions about scheduling, as the writer.
There was of course a discussion about whether to make the entire series available on iPlayer, rather than weekly.
I am not against that freedom of choice for an audience. A good old binge works for some shows. But I also really cherish those television experiences that stretch out, that demand we wait, so that actual, in-real-life conversations can be generated around the work. Those infamous “watercooler” conversations the morning after the night before.
I really felt like not only the twists and turns of Sherwood should be something that we protect, by teasing them out, so that a significant chunk of the audience were roughly following along at about the same time. But also because of the social and political themes that were deliberately structured to unravel at certain moments… it meant that, rather than an entire conversation around a piece happening only at the launch and abandoned thereafter, the national conversation about – say – levelling up, spy cops, trade unions, industrial strikes – were spread across a series of many weeks, across articles, TV, radio, social media.
I was so grateful for watch-along blogs, articles and forums where, week-by-week, audiences engaged in theories and responses and reactions … television as a collective experience, not just an atomised, lonely, private one.
And still, to this day, millions of people will make the choice to discover who ‘H’ is in Line of Duty or the fate of Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley together, at the same time, when every opportunity to consume it on your own terms has been provided you.
I also wonder often about loneliness, and social isolation, as one of the most under-discussed scurges of modern society. Under-reported, understandably, for a commentariat, and political class often defined by being surrounded by people.
But that box in the corner of the room – or laptop, or phone – that, in real time, or on catch-up, fine – connects you, to a wider community, a shared experience, a national conversation… we all remember the psychological value, necessity of that, in lockdown.
That’s why – incidentally – for all of AI’s so-called efficiencies, and its very real threat to jobs, I have every faith that it will in fact be audiences that reject its encroachment into ‘writing’, creating content and art.
Because the reason you cry at a Taylor Swift song, is that connectivity that comes with knowing that someone Human has felt what you have felt, and so you feel less alone with your pain. Alan Bennett, that working-class legend, said it best (someone has always said it better) in his line from the History Boys, about reading or art in general:
“When you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
AI cannot, and will never be able, to take hold of your hand. It will never feel quite the same. And we need to remind people of that.
Because what is a nation except the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. The big national moments we share together, where possible? The conversations we have?
The genie is never going to be put back in the bottle of modern consuming habits – and I don’t want it to be. We have, potentially, the best of all worlds. But only if we hold firm to the social, political and creative value of fighting to keep some of these collective moments, these public service benefits, in a world where they could accidentally just slip away on a trend; because the direction of travel seems inevitable, rather than something that can be directed by us, to gain the most amount of benefits.
I was lucky enough to experience first-hand the benefits and direct impact that communal storytelling had on a “left behind” place during Hull’s City of Culture, in 2017. The place I had studied, and was invited back to write one of the many pieces.
This had been a port city decimated by the collapse of the fishing industry – a key part of its identity, of its story, and a sense that nothing had arrived to replace it. That creates a kind of hopelessness, despair.
I’m not, I hope, naïve enough to believe that an influx of live music, dance and exhibitions was a one-stop cure for of those social, economic and philosophical ills. But a monitoring unit was established in the city, during the year long series of events, to survey and measure the “impacts” on residents, of art and culture, on their outlook, feelings – partly to hopefully, finally, have a dataset on hand for the inevitable, cyclical, never-ending fight to justify what the tiny proportion of national spending culture has.
And it was to be a no-holds barred, honest account for the tens of thousands of people questioned across the course of 12 months. If “the culture”, as it was called (what’s all this traffic for? Oh, it’s the fucking Culture”), was pissing you off, you were encouraged to say.
And ‘say’, the people of Hull did.
Self-esteem measurably improved amongst young people under the age of 18. Every single school child in the city got to experience, or make, at least one piece of art during the year.
There was a notable uptick in “pride of place” from residents of any age, but particularly older ones. Mental wellbeing and motivation to try new things grew.
Even the smallest, seemingly innocuous fact of the putting Hull on the BBC Weather map – where it has thankfully stayed – was the talk of the community at the time.
People just really didn’t think that anyone knew where they were…
The plays, short films, spoken word poems in the civic spaces around the city weren’t just sugar-coated propaganda either. They were often deep dives into local trauma, upset, injustices. The legacy of the slave trade, unemployment.
This is because storytelling as we know isn’t just a confection, a distraction – on stage, or screen. They can be mechanisms for exploring something, understanding something, and imagining a way out of something.
This is the social, political and spiritual function of drama, and has been for two millennia.
Framing your experiences with a beginning, middle and an end.
Human actions, leading to human consequence. Cause, and effect.
Walking in the shoes of those you might disagree with.
Generating empathy for experiences beyond your own…
I tried to put words to the necessity and need for building ‘new stories’ for ourselves, in Sherwood. In the final episode of the first series, the great Lesley Manville, her character is in a community meeting in the miner’s welfare as people try to process what has occurred. She laments their inability to move on from their past because of the language they use in that community to define themselves.
We are a “former mining town”. The place we live in is “post-industrial”. An ex-manufacturing base.
Forgive me for quoting my own line back at you – God, the vulgarity, but quote: “How are my grandkids expected to imagine a future for themselves where even the words we use to describe ourselves are about what we aren’t, anymore”. End quote.
What we aren’t any more. Not what we could be.
That’s why I have been so inspired by the approach and the subsequent psychological and cultural breakthroughs of Gareth Southgate in the England men’s football team, enough to put his mission on stage and now adapt it for the BBC.
Gareth identified early on that the crisis faced by England – the football team, but I would argue more broadly! – was a crisis of storytelling.
The reason why these young men felt their national shirt sat heavier on them than other nations was because they were trying to tell an old story, full of impossible expectation, that didn’t feel authentic to them anymore.
He used that language, to players and to press – my language, as a playwright. “We need to write a new story, for England”. He would say. In big matches, it was about “controlling the narrative”. Not ignoring the past, but not being imprisoned by it.
And we all saw it – the progress made, the liberation.
I believe so much of the crises we have been facing, politically and socially in Britain over the past few years – has been a crisis of storytelling.
The paralysis, and stagnation.
Feeling trapped in an old story, and not having the ability, the desire, the wherewithal, the skills, even – to imagine a new one.
How can we, when creativity and arts subjects have been systematically stripped from the education system in England over the past 15 years. A reduction of nearly half of all drama teachers, gone from those state schools since 2010. The slashing of hours devoted to music, dance.
It’s therefore so important that we all hold the new government to their pledge to restore creative subjects to the core curriculum. All of us – here, in television, not just the arts.
I believe that we should even contribute, as a sector, to the dialogue around what a modern, inspiring, accessible and inclusive 21st century drama curriculum might look like. One that includes TV drama, and documentaries, as much as it does reading Shakespeare. It’s all part of the same ecosystem – this city, Edinburgh, demonstrates that every summer.
There is also a danger that a whole generation of young people are simply not introduced to long form story telling.
As parents I’m sure many of you experience the near impossibility of getting your kids to sit with you and watch something that isn’t a two-minute Tik Tok.
Being able to concentrate on one thing, in this Distraction Economy, might be a skill young people lose. Can the curriculum, that great equaliser, encourage that development, not to save our jobs for the future, but because we know the benefits of investing in a long form story.
The complexity, the humanity, the empathy they encourage and generate, so lacking on social media platforms.
And – as I say – encouraging the capacity for imagination, that any nation needs, if it is to create its way out of its problems.
New. Newness. In an age when increasingly nostalgia sells.
“New stories” have to be at the heart of commissioning – scripted, non-scripted, factual, fictional … even in the most difficult climate, where the temptation, and we’re witnessing it, is to fall back on tried and tested IP. Source material, adaptations, expanded universes…
We need new universes.
Which means – taking risks.
Seeing “risk”, as a long-term investment in the future health of our sector, is vital – and demonstrates the need for public service broadcasting to make programming decisions beyond the commercial pressures that – understandably – the steamers, the SVODs, have to take.
Not that Netflix, the Amazon and Disney and co don’t take risk, invest in talent, strive for originality. The revelation of these modern platforms has often been how inventive, how authored so much of the most popular and successful streaming drama has been – we all benefit from that.
But if a case is to be made – and it has to be made – in this modern, multi-platform environment, for the BBC, alongside ITV and Channel 4, Channel 5… then surely it is that.
They are the state school equivalent – the equalising force; the subsidised National Theatre equivalent of being given public funding, to relieve some of the commercial pressures, in order to take non-commercial decisions, in finding and training and amplifying voices that on paper may not have an easy, wide audience yet – but one day will.
Speak to American screenwriters or programme-makers, and they are bewildered at our complacency over our PSB’s.
They wish they had a BBC.
We will miss them, if they ever go.
We must make sure they never go. We must find the language, the enthusiasm, to make the case for them, not just when they’re under siege, but in the good times as well as bad.
That rhetoric – “defund the BBC” – is a staple of the new populism. I believe it is partly a failure of storytelling, again. In the noise of the toxic stories of the modern day culture wars, the pick-a-side society which make a neutral BBC vulnerable… what is the “patriotic” case to appeal to those voices? Don’t they realise that without the BBC, we lose our competitive advantage over the US markets. That not-for-profit means British stories, set in British communities, with British characters are protected by the license fee, and may disappear without it?
And – of course – recognisable, high-quality working-class stories with them.
Their existence provably appeals in any argument for keeping a strong BBC.
But how are we to find them, build them, in this difficult climate?
The storytellers of the future. The new stories.
A lot of the arenas, the platforms and training grounds that particularly working-class voices built their muscles in are disappearing.
Those long running, returning series, daytime dramas, cut back or cancelled. The all-but near collapse of the single drama as an entity – where big is more economic than small, volume is prized over niche.
It’s single dramas where I got to train my television muscle 15 years ago. Prove myself.
What is the modern-day equivalent of those original singles, those Plays For Today, not too expensive to produce, but found audiences because they were presented under a trusted umbrella, a recognisable brand?
I recently got to work with Alan Bleasdale, on adapting the seminal Boys From the Blackstuff for stage – something that would have been incomprehensible to that shy young lad who watched Jake’s Progress on the sofa with his mum as a young teen.
He curated a format in the 90s known as ‘Alan Bleasdale Presents’ – a series of single commissions for emerging writers to be given training, support, and ultimately, a production. A springboard, meaning they were less of a ‘risk’, in the eyes of broadcasters, and got to begin building a relationship with an audience.
What might be the 2025 equivalent where the tutelage of Russell T. Davies, or Michaela Coel, or Tony Schumacher, might find, curate and present a rotating series of work by new writers, to present on linear television and online, and the endorsement, under the banner, for an audience, of a trusted, familiar name?
I don’t know. I’m not a commissioner – but some of you are.
And I know that your passion for work that is politically-engaged and socially-minded matches mine. And if that work tends to sit more in the single tv films and the limited series, despite their lack of obvious or immediate commerciality – then we must fight for those. Those that shine a light on injustice – from the poverty of Cathy Come Home 50 years ago, to the Post Office scandal of today.
Not just because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do, or it makes us ‘feel important’ as makers. But because audiences want work that engages with the society around them – to face the world, not just escape it.
I’ve spoken a lot about community. And about storytelling. So I wanted to leave you with a example. This year I wrote a play called Punch for my local Nottingham Playhouse; the story of a young man who got into a fight and killed a stranger with one punch. He was jailed, but then went on a surprising journey with the parents of his victim, on a restorative justice programme. One that turned his life around. He has since been through higher education, received a degree, and now works with young offenders himself. It’s a story that demands a revolution of our justice system.
Sounds like a “tough watch”, right? Hard to get an audience? Not only did the show sell out in a majority working-class community, but – similar to my desire for television watercooler conversations around the work – we built a “talking circle” outside the theatre, for any audience members who wanted to stay behind and chat about the themes of the play. Given the show finished at 10pm and folk would want to get off, we thought 8 chairs would be enough.
But on a regular basis, 200 to 300 people would stick around after, craning to hear the speakers talk, long into the night. Delaying their journey home.
Storytelling – on stage, on screen – and the conversations they generate.
The shared sense of community – together, or apart – they create.
It has been the greatest pleasure to talk with you, and raise some of these areas of concern today. I look forward to the ongoing conversations with you all.
Oh, and of course, needless to say – thank you for having me.