Are there too many ethnic minority faces on TV?

Dr Samir Shah, a non-executive director of the BBC, has said there are too many Black and Asian faces on television as broadcasters overcompensate for decades of not accurately representing Britain's melting pot of ethnic groups.

Shah said minority viewers felt embarassed and irritated, while representations of their groups did not reflect their experiences.

He cited the casting of the Ferreira family on 'EastEnders', who were axed from the show in 2005, as an example of inauthentic representation, claiming that an Asian family in London's East End should have been Bangladeshi rather than of Goan descent.

Are broadcasters striking the right balance or is Shah wrong to hit out at their efforts?

 

Broadcasters do overcompensate sometimes. The Ferreira family weren't very popular characters for EastEnders because it did seem like they had just been slung in there as the token Asian family.

There isn't enough ethnic minority faces on TV. Every attempt Eastenders has made has been really far from the mark in terms of representing real issues affecting ethnic groups.

Come on. This isn't the real debate. The real debate, the real issue is that there aren't enough black and ethnic minorities in the board rooms, the powers of position, the chief exec chair. Let's move on from the superficial and headline grabbing debate of whether there are a few too many ethnic minority faces on TV and talk about the most powerful part of Samir Shah's speech:

"The proof is this. 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 – and, until recently, largely male and largely Oxbridge."

It's a good point and one the IPA recently raised which led to a lively debate on BR.

That is what I meant by overcompensate. Broadcasters realise that they don't have enough people from ethnic minorities in positions of power so they are trying to make up for it by increasing the number in their TV programmes. But they haven't done it very well, as was shown by the Ferreira family in EastEnders.

It's too clumsy and it jars, particularly in BBC journalism and local news.

Equal opportunities, yes please, but there is a world beyond the estates and state schools of Shepherd's Bush that normally feature in news broadcasts.

BBC kids' programming is equally preachy and worthy - Marx would describe it as an 'ideological state apparatus'.