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Sir Lenny Henry was at the British Diversity Awards in London on Wednesday night (25.03.26) to collect the Lifetime Achievement Award for over four decades of championing diversity in media and he spoke to BANG Showbiz about the need for more action and initiatives to bring talent from minority groups through both in front and behind the camera.

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00:26In terms of recognising talent and recognising
00:29diversity, where do you think we are now compared to when you started talking about it?
00:33Well remember I was 16, so there were very few people that looked like me on the television
00:38as Rudolph Walker, Derek Griffiths, Floella Benjamin and then eventually by the mid-late
00:4470s, Trevor McDonald. So that's like five or six people and I knew them all. So these
00:50days now we have a much bigger plethora of artists working in front of the camera but
00:55still behind the scenes we need more gatekeepers and we need more producers and directors and
01:00writers in the mix too. It's about everybody not just about a small group of people and
01:05I think we're getting there but it's a slow glacial pace still. It's almost like we're
01:12going backwards sometimes. What can be done to get more people behind the scenes working?
01:16We changed the gatekeepers, we changed the way decisions are made about who gets to make
01:21watch. We changed how the room looks. You know, it's things like that. It does count.
01:26You know, if the room is inclusive and feels equal, you're not getting the same answers to
01:33the same questions all the time. People are saying different things based on their gender
01:36or their culture or their class or something. They're offering something original and unique
01:40rather than the same old stuff that those blokes Moxbridge keep coming out with. It's a different
01:46vibe if the room is diverse. So that's why we're still fighting for it years and years and
01:51years and years later.
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