TV commissioners must improve gay coverage, says Stonewall

Published Thursday 29 July 2010 at 13:43 by Matthew Hemley

Stonewall chief executive Ben Summerskill has called on broadcast chiefs to send a “positive signal” to commissioning editors to counteract the negative portrayal of gay men and lesbians in UK television programmes.

His comments follow publication of research carried out by the equality organisation, which found that gay men and lesbians were portrayed for just five hours and 43 minutes in 126 hours of programmes most watched by young people. It also found they were portrayed positively and realistically for only 46 minutes of this, and that two-fifths of all portrayal was in soap operas.

The dramas monitored for the report - which included Merlin and The Bill - featured no gay people at all.

Summerskill has now asked executives of many of the major broadcasters - including Channel 4 and the BBC - to start “engaging actively” with commissioning editors to increase the amount of coverage gay people receive on television.

He said: “The people at the top - and certainly at the BBC - are very conservative. You can’t just say, ‘We have not forbidden commissioning editors from covering an issue’. You have to give a positive signal that you expect them [commissioning editors] to be reflecting modern Britain as it actually is. They have been given no positive encouragement to do so.”

Stonewall’s research, called Unseen on Screen, was commissioned to see how gay men and lesbians are portrayed in the programmes most watched by young people in the UK, following concerns that homophobic bullying in school is linked to what they see on television. It was conducted over a 16-week period and focused on 20 programmes, including EastEnders, The X Factor and Hollyoaks.

Out of the total five hours and 43 minutes of programming that portrayed gay, lesbian and bisexual people, two hours and three minutes featured negative portrayal and half was stereotypical, with gay people “depicted as figures of fun” or as “predatory or promiscuous”.

Stonewall’s research found that only 1.7% of programming on BBC1 made any reference to gay, lesbian or bisexual people and the channel had just 46 seconds of positive portrayal out of a total of 39 hours and 30 minutes of programmes monitored.

Responding, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said Stonewall’s research had “done a great job exposing the homophobic bias of the programmes most watched by young people”.

“Channel bosses need to take urgent action to remedy this bias,” he said.

In a statement, the BBC said it had earlier this year commissioned its own research into the portrayal of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, adding this would be “across all genres on every platform”.

“We will publish the findings of this project in the autumn,” a spokesman said.