It is always a pleasure to start the working week in your PJs and know that you can stay in them for most of the day, having meetings without anyone knowing or caring.
It is one of the rare weeks when I will spend the majority of it out of London. I am going to Manchester to attend an awards ceremony where I have been nominated for an Inclusive Companies award.
Back in the late 1990s, Ade Rawcliffe was working on Ainsley Harriott’s show, Party of a Lifetime. They were in Teesside, filming with children from a housing estate. They all had a question: was Rawcliffe Harriott’s wife or was she his “girlfriend”?
Ade (pronounced Addy) thinks that they were not used to seeing two black people in the same place at once. They might, it occurs to me, have been equally puzzled by the spectacle of two black people working on the same television programme.
The Creative Diversity Network (CDN) and Creative Skillset have called for the TV industry to improve the representation of disabled people in television.
According to Creative Skillset's workforce survey, released in May, the proportion of disabled people in television is still much lower than in the economy as a whole and has not improved for 10 years.
Just 5% of those who work in TV consider themselves to be disabled, compared with 11% of the wider working population.
