The TV industry is facing fresh calls to crack down on closed recruitment practices that are narrowing opportunities for working-class creatives.
Research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, published in partnership with the BBC and Channel 4, found that 61% of roles were secured through informal networks and only 8% through open advertisements.
Its authors are calling to make recruitment more transparent, including stating where roles are filled through referral or repeat hire and strengthening HR support for freelance hiring.
The report also highlighted a structural ‘survival test’ faced by freelancers from lower income backgrounds, who leave the industry despite having the skills and experience because they lack savings, family support or a partner’s income.
It identified their common experience of ‘near-miss progression’, in which secure regular employment, but on short contracts and with large gaps between jobs, and cannot build savings, with some taking on jobs outside the industry between productions to survive.
The report also includes recommendations to strengthen regional pathways to redirect more policy and commissioning power outside London; introduce interventions that improve pay, expenses and employment sustainability; and embedding a greater awareness of class into editorial and creative decision-making.
The report’s author, Professor Beth Johnson of the University of Leeds, told an Edinburgh TV Festival panel: “Financial security absolutely functions as a hidden qualification, particularly for progressing to creative authority positions.”
Speaking on the same panel, Hat Trick chief Jimmy Mulville declared: “Social mobility hasn’t stagnated its actually going backwards. There’s talent in those hills and they’re not seeing it. The more you disenfranchise people, the more prone you are to radicalisation.”
Acknowledging that “people default to what they know”, Mulville reflected on how the George Floyd protests in 2020 prompted Hat Trick to up its efforts to find people from underrepresented backgrounds after finding that his company’s recruitment was sub-par.
Mulville is currently working with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotheram and industry experts to set up a film and TV production school in his home city. He said he wanted to open opportunities to people from all backgrounds to counter the impact of the “pop-up factories” that emerge when TV and film productions come to the city but immediately leave afterwards, creating “resentment and disenfranchisement”.
The report, What’s On? Rethinking Class in the Television Industry (2023 2026), can be read here. It combines two anonymised drama case studies, 52 interviews (plus 14 supplementary interviews), case study analysis, and four audience focus groups conducted between 2024 and 2025.
