“I’ve been in broadcasting for 37 years now. Most of my career has been as an editor but in recent years I’ve directed and produced too. In 2005, somebody said to me, there’s not enough Black people in this industry. And I had heard that before during my career – in that moment, it put me back 20 years earlier. So, I went home, and I got angry at myself. Because, what had I done to help? I thought it was high time I threw my own little pebble into the water.
“I’m from a generation of the first Black-British born in the country en masse. In my background there was anything from the open racism we had to go through, to teachers saying we were not going to make anything with our lives. And then the violence on the street, just between boys. We didn’t call them gangs – that feels more like the Kray twins and Al Capone on the TV. These were just boys that didn’t like each other. And the only retaliation back that anyone could do to get any kind of respect would be to either kill or do life-changing harm. My friend said, ‘we need to get out of here.’ In 1978 I joined the British Army to get out of danger. Six months later we were in Northern Ireland. The logic of a 17 year old…
“14 years on, when I was looking for a civilian job, I had no qualifications. And I went immediately back to when I was leaving school. My aspirations went to zero again, and I just took on warehouse work. One day the boss of this video duplication company gave me a parcel to take to an area that I had never been to before – it was a technical area. I walked into the room and it was filled with big reel-to-reel machines, and monitors with coloured flashing lights. It was like Christmas.
“I said: ‘Can I work here?’ I mean, I didn’t even know what they did. I didn’t have any qualifications to work in a place like that. They said no. Eventually – it was a Friday afternoon at 4pm – they said okay. At 5pm, I ran out of the building. And while I was running. I was seeing all the negative things that had happened to me, and all the violence I had seen. I know now I was washing away the past because I knew I was running into a new future.
“That is the essence of MAMA Youth Project: because every one of them gets a job. That moment is life-changing for someone from a challenging background. Of course, there were always good-hearted people who wanted to help Black boys like me when I was young. They take you somewhere nice, then they ask if you had a nice time. And that’s it. When it came to my own youth training scheme, I thought: what happens at the end? It had to have a tangible outcome and that outcome was employment. We do full inclusion. If you’ve found a challenge in your life, and you haven’t got contacts, then you can apply to us to see if we can help you and change your life. That’s also why I was really glad that disability was mentioned in the 2024 TV Craft Awards’ citation. we’ve been above the national average for years.
“We’ve changed the lives of over 900 people now. I remember what every single person was like at the beginning, and they are a different person by the end of the training. We help them prepare for the tough environment of this industry; they are ready, and they are assets.”
