I
t is the best of times: the television business is booming. It is the worst of times: there is a skill shortage, so wage costs are soaring. Yet shouldn’t that make it the best of times again? Won’t television be forced to find and train a new generation of programme-makers who won’t all be white and middle class? This, I tell Seetha Kumar, the ambitious chief executive of ScreenSkills, is a battle she can win. “You make it sound so simple,” says Kumar. She is in her office close to Euston station where her skills-body charity works to ensure that film and television find the people to make the magic happen. She has been telling me how the industry needs to think through a new “skills pipeline”, scrape the opacity from its gateways, end the biases that exclude and, before all that, nurture a “whole-child” approach in schools, where creativity and technical skills are meshed, rather than divided. So she still thinks it could all go wrong? “No, I hope that you’re right. I think we should win. There is a genuine economic and social purpose to effect change in our industry, and we
Television www.rts.org.uk March 2020
The Billen profile
Andrew Billen hears how ScreenSkills CEO Seetha Kumar defied the BBC’s ‘glass cliff’ to reach the top have a moment in time to do it. I just think, as always – and I say this to people internally – anything worthwhile and challenging is never easy.” The difficulties in Kumar’s own career in television, since she moved from India to London in her twenties, become a big, knotty strand in our interview. It was certainly not the best of times when, in 2015, Kumar, a former 20-year BBC staffer, was headhunted from the educational publisher Pearson to run what was then known as Creative Skillset. It was, she says, “a perfect storm”. The advent of multichannel, tax breaks, rising demand for high-end drama and the imminent arrival of the streamers had created a
ScreenSkills
Champion for TV talent production boom in television. At the same time, over the years, the BBC had less and less money for training, and, although people delivered homilies about “inclusion”, it was never a “powerful driver” in recruitment. And then there was Creative Skillset itself, set up by the screen industries back in 1992 as just plain Skillset. Under the post-1997 Labour governments, it had received consistent government funding. The David Cameron-led coalition replaced that with project funding and, by 2015, when Kumar arrived, even that had only two years left to run. “We had a brilliant board, and the board wanted change,” says Kumar, the first BAME woman to receive an RTS Fellowship, “but I genuinely wasn’t entirely aware that (a) the project funding was going to end, or (b) that internally there was a problem that some of the contracts hadn’t been paid for a period of time.” Contracts? “From the Government. There was a hiatus in payment.” The Government hadn’t signed the cheques? “There was a hiatus, OK? I’m going to put it very politely.” So her first instinct was clearly to �
17
