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Screen Australia to gauge lack of diversity in Australian Drama

"Put more beautiful people of colour on TV," Miranda Tapsell told the Logies. Now somebody is doing something about it.

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Calls from actors including Miranda Tapsell, Firass Dirani, Jay Laga’aia and Remy Hii to end “white casting” on Australian television have helped lead to a study by Screen Australia on diversity in local drama.

Screen Australia has today announced a new research project into the levels of representation of cultural diversity, disability and LGBTQI in Australian television.

It will analyse the main characters and the actors that played them in Australian adult and live-action children’s TV dramas (including comedy) broadcast from 2011 to 2015 on commercial free-to-air networks, public broadcasters and subscription channels.

It will be the first analysis of this kind undertaken by a federal screen agency since Harvey May’s 2002 ‘Broadcast in Colour’ report for the Australian Film Commission.

Screen Australia CEO Graeme Mason said: “Diversity has been a key point on Screen Australia’s agenda for some time, and this research project is an important factor in understanding where Australia is at. We are fortunate enough to live in one of the most diverse countries in the world and our TV drama should reflect the energy of all those stories.

“We want to create a benchmark from which we can gauge the relevance of our on-screen stories to contemporary audiences. This is an important issue for all of us in the screen industry and we encourage everyone approached to take part in the survey.”

Screen Australia will also explore experiences and perceptions of barriers and successes in representing diversity in TV drama. Actors, agents, casting directors and the credited producers, writers and directors of television drama will be surveyed and responses will be anonymous.

Working in association with the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Diversity Council Australia, and with consulting partners the ABC, SBS, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Australian Writers Guild, Australian Directors Guild and Screen Producers Australia, Screen Australia intends to announce the outcomes of the research in the next few months.

 

8 Responses

  1. You really don’t need a government bureaucracy to write a report on the bleeding obvious. Of course non Anglos are poorly represented in local drama and the commercial broadcasters are well aware of this and move slowly. The ABC has much to answer for with its very white bread casting and stories but has got away with it for years and SBS has very little money though I was always amazed that the documentary series Who Do You Think You Are was so heavily concentrated with Anglo celebrities. It is the reality and entertainment shows which actually lead here because when it comes to cooking or DIY you need diversity and ability to sustain both the show and broaden the audiences. Drama is much trickier and higher risk commercially so it is far easier to just roll out the Anglos again and again.

  2. Sorry guys but I’m so over the PC world people are trying to make us live in. To have greater diversity on the screens stories have to be created for them.
    Just because some committee say we should have a certain ethnic group in the show doesn’t mean the the public will agree. Some years ago Neighbours brought a Asian family into the show and then couldn’t get them out quick enough. The public didn’t want them. You have to make show that the public want to watch, not what you think they should watch.

    1. Well said. At the end of the day they are commercial businesses so chose casts that are going to rate / sell the best. I’m sure the do gooders would prefer quotas be introduced so that there is x number of this and y number of that. Thankfully this is not the case.

      And some of the arguments that are used to justify certain things are appalling. My 10 year old daughter provides better analysis than some of these so called experts in the media wether it be diversity on TV, the pay of woman in the workforce or if shows are being cancelled due to so called ‘piracy’.

  3. I hope they don’t enforce quotas, and instead instigate a more organic approach of looking at their characters and making them think “can this character be (opposite gender, another race, a different sexuality) and still be essentially as written?”

    In response to the lack of diversity controversy that Midsomer Murders dealt with a couple of years ago, they kind of overcompensated this season with having at least two South Asian characters every single episode, plus a new regular. It felt a little forced. So I hope they can solve this for Australia a bit more organically.

    1. Grey’s Anatomy has been good ‘blind’ casting, although not without some in-fighting. It will be interesting to see if the results include a show by show breakdown and a channel tally. Also with the actor backgrounds not sure they will ask who is gay and who isn’t.

      1. Yes, Grey’s has successfully portrayed characters with sexuality being an aspect of their character, not the only facet.
        It would still be good to have a gay male character in Home and Away, without being too tokenistic or scandalous.
        I had to re-read the article twice as I didn’t register the survey potentially asking actors their sexuality.

    2. While it’s a fictional county I used to live in an area where many episodes of Midsomer Murders have been filmed; the lack of diversity it was infamous for was certainly not indicative of that region.

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