Trevor Phillips OBE has been a well-known face for many years - as a TV presenter and head of his own production company, Pepper Productions; as former Chairman of the Greater London Authority, and in his role as Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Although no stranger to the public eye, Phillips is often working away quietly, and not so quietly, behind the scenes.
He is passionate about the education of African Caribbean children and the responsibilities of African Caribbean parents.. Images of Black People on Television Increasingly, you are seeing more images of Black people on TV. There's no shortage of Black people on television. The most commonly seen face on television is Trevor McDonald. And also, by the way, the most popular face on television.
So I don't think we can have a lot of complaint about volume. What we can say is there probably isn't a reflection of Black life as certainly I would like, or its variety. There is a tendency - you know, there's Trevor and then there are the drug dealers. And that's it. There's nothing in between, we have no complexities in our lives, you know - we're not that often teachers and just ordinary folk. But that's changing. It's changing, but we've still got quite a long way to go on that.
Zhana - You have said there are not enough Black senior-level TV executives. TP - That's still true. We need to just keep beating away at the door. The sort of thing that we have done is to lobby Channel 4 successfully to get a requirement into their licence conditions that they must transmit a certain number of hours - 150 a year in their peak time schedule - of what are called multicultural programmes. There are all sorts of ways that people bend this, you know - cricket and so on. However, it's better than where we were before. And it means that they are paying attention, and Channel 4 are now doing some interesting things to bring people from Black communities into its commissioning structure. Things that I approve of, actually.
Working in Television If a Black person wanted to work in TV, first of all, I would say, 'Are you sure?'. And a way of making sure that you are sure is to say to yourself, 'Why?'. And if your reasons are to do with the media, you know, it's powerful, it's influential and all the rest of it, don't do it. Because there are all sorts of arguments about how true that is. You should only actually enter a profession because it gives you the opportunity to do something you want to do. Don't become involved with it because you think it will bring about social change or something.
