Comment: The BBC’s LGB research – what is it good for?

by Petit Fours

It was nice to be invited to the BBC’s presentation of their findings from a year’s research into gay people on TV, and nice that the head of BBC radio came down to address a crowd of bloggers, but it felt a little like being bodyslammed by the 20^th century.

The findings – that gay people would like to see more gay people on TV – seem to me to have been glaringly obvious since the gay rights movement in the 1970s, and the BBC’s promises of what they’re going to do next – the working group recommended that the BBC “addressed the issues raised” were more watery than the stingiest gin and tonic.

As I was listening to the presentation of the results, fresh in my mind was Dan Savage’s YouTube campaign It Gets Better, a reaction to a teen suicide a few weeks ago, that has produced a massive video channel, generated hundreds of thousands of views and sparked a real valuable social movement within a matter of days.

As a particularly twitchy member of generation Y – that’s the kind of speed I like action to come in. And the grindingly slow pace and vagueness with which enormous media behemouths have to go about making decisions is obviously not something I’m used to dealing with.

Hearing from the BBC research that 19% of Britain’s population was uncomfortable watching scenes of emotional intimacy between same-sex couples just made me think “well screw them” rather than, oh how do we cater to the sensitivies of this group while still fulfilling our role as a public service broadcaster representing diversity in modern Britain.

But then, perhaps that was the important bit of this research.

Gay people have been good at carving out their own spaces, particularly online, but we do also need to share a space in straight world, and sometimes with bigots and people who think our lifestyles offend them.

This piece of BBC research was about presenting Britain’s gay people to Britain, not just to ourselves: to straight couples in Derbyshire, retired people in Glasgow, children in smalltown Leicestershire and we kind of need to do that. I know my parents watch the BBC. If we want to gain broader social acceptance and political change that process often starts with cultural change and while it’s horribly slow even in institutions.

And TV is still a big deal and a high-impact medium just because it so visual and emotive.

So what does it actually mean?

Well while the findings may seem to state the obvious, they do at least put the case down in black and white and give the BBC a reference document. Precious of the independence of their editorial teams, Tim Davie head of Radio and Chairman of the Working Group kept saying  “we don’t do quotas”   - so no, it’s not like 5% of BBC programming will now feature gay people in them, it’s not like they are even commiting to do more coverage of gay people or gay issues. At times it seemed like the “creatives” were the vulnerable group here who needed to be protected.

But after several people pushed them on what they actually meant by “addressing the issues raised” it turns out that editorial heads in all the key areas of the BBC will be given the document. If they or their teams are doing a programme which does, or could, touch on gay issues then the programme-maker can look up this document and work out what is the responsible or appropriate way to depict those things. The fact that gay people would like to see more representation and that 80% of straight audience are comfortable or don’t feel strongly about it, is a positive finding that gives the BBC a license to do more.

Otherwise, there were useful findings from the research about to how to manage that portrayal in ways that made more people comfortable.  One was by signaling that there would be gay and lesbian content in a particular programme, one was just having gay people not doing anything particularly gay – say a lesbian couple looking for a house on a property programme, and for the uncomfortables, a key demand was that their worldview was at least acknowledged and represented in the programme, even if it doesn’t win out.

Two years ago the BBC conducted similar research into its presentation of disabled people – another under-served minority group just like us – and now there are several more disabled people in BBC programmes.

DFC detailed most of the important findings in her post here.

Let’s hope they’re not just paying us lip service.