Samir Shah, who sits on the BBC board of directors, has hit out at the lack of black and Asian executives working at the top end of the British TV industry.

In a Royal Television Society speech on 25 June, he said that three decades of equal opportunity policies have failed to result in any meaningful change. "Despite 30 years of trying, the upper reaches of our industry, the positions of real creative power in British broadcasting, are still controlled by a metropolitan, largely liberal, white, middle class, cultural elite," he concluded.

He said there was a tendency for senior executives to hire underlings in their own image. "We need to break the cultural hegemony that has dominated broadcasting in Britain if we are to tap into, and not lose, the creativity among all our people." He would like to "make it incumbent on every major broadcaster and producer in the UK that, within five years, they need to demonstrate that executives with real power over airtime or commissioning budgets come from a variety of backgrounds, life experiences and ethnicity".

He expressed the view that as a result of the exclusion of ethnic people in broadcast positions, there was an industry overcompensation by putting too many black and Asian faces onscreen. "The plain fact is that this tick box approach to equal opportunities has led to an inauthentic representation of who we are: a world of deracinated coloured people flickering across our screens – to the irritation of many viewers and the embarrassment of the very people such actions are meant to appease."

Source: The Knowledge