Give them a hand
Now is the time to protect and encourage our young colleagues, says producer/director Sara Feilden
A dream shared by many an able student is to work in film or TV and they are prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve their goal. The problem is, as one recent graduate put it ‘getting a degree with a 2:1 just doesn’t seem to be enough to get you a job anymore’. With huge numbers of applicants for every job, students feel they need to offer experience as well as a qualification to get that edge over other candidates. An internship is often seen as their best hope.
I’m a TV producer and director. When I joined the BBC as a researcher in 1989, it was only six months before I was put on a formal training programme and I started producing TV programmes within a year. Nearly a decade later, my son Tom did a job as a ‘runner’ during his gap year. Working for a small production company, he was given a short contract, which included a training commitment. In addition, he was allowed to use the company’s lighting and editing equipment to make a short film. I don’t think any of that would happen now. These days, production companies cut their costs by employing junior staff to do a lot of the work with little support, no training and often no pay either.
This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon – a period of low-paid or unpaid work has long been regarded as the unofficial price of entry into the ever popular broadcast industries. The hope was always that a period of ‘dogsbodying’ would be rewarded with paid work at the end of it.
But it didn’t always work like that. While some employers were responsible, taking inexperienced people on at the bottom end and offering both training and career progression, others callously exploited their young staff, using their services but offering very little in return. One company I know had a pool of unpaid ‘runners’, which they replenished on a monthly basis, never offering paid work to any of them. Another post-production house in Soho offered what they called ‘Trial Days’ with the promise of paid work if the day went well. But no-one was ever taken on and there were enough applicants for the company to get several jobs done, completely free, all year round.
With budgets dwindling it’s not difficult to see why a struggling company might want to get work done for free. And young people, desperate to gain experience, will continue working for months, sometimes more than a year, without pay. But only those coming from London homes with parents continuing to provide accommodation and financial support can even consider such extended periods of unpaid work.
All this makes a mockery of any idea of equal opportunities and, as a Quaker, I find this disturbing. But there’s more at stake: TV output should reflect a wide array of opinions, which just isn’t going to happen if the staff intake is as narrow as it is now. The demise of the unions hasn’t helped. Now that collective bargaining has virtually ceased, and while there is a constant supply of free labour, paid jobs will stay in short supply and those who eventually find work will also find their wages are lower than trainees of yester-year. Those who do get jobs rarely get training, they just have to hit the floor running and the quality of output inevitably suffers. In a country that has prided itself on the high quality of its TV – arguably a world leader – this should be cause for concern.
Now for the good news. In December 2009 a landmark employment tribunal (Ms N Vetta v London Dreams Motion Pictures Ltd) judged that Nicola Vetta was entitled to the minimum wage for work she had been doing, for free, on a feature film. This case was seen as a triumph by the union, BECTU, and others campaigning against exploitation. It made it clear that it is illegal to employ staff without paying them – with the exception of volunteers in registered charities – and that calling a job an internship does not exempt employers from paying the minimum wage. TV production companies are now being advised by employers associations only to offer placements to students as part of an accredited academic course with a full appraisal at the end of it. In other words, there has to be benefit on both sides.
It’s good to know this legislation has teeth, but we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. My son Tom graduated eight years ago wanting to become a film director. He worked his way through a series of jobs ending up at Film4 in their script department. But there were no openings for him as a director.
So what a young hopeful has to do is develop a showreel – better named a show-off reel. And it’s not only the director who needs one, so does an aspiring producer, writer, art director, costume designer, production co-ordinator and so on. So what often happens is that a group of talented twenty-somethings combine forces to make a short film. Once finished, this gets submitted to as many festivals as will take it. This is precisely what happened to Tom. His film was sponsored to the tune of £10,000 (not awarded to pay for people’s time but for actual costs: film stock, transport, food and so on) by Film London and went on to win the Soho Shorts Film Festival. From this Tom got his first TV directing job. The whole crew had a lot of fun and their careers benefited too. This was not exploitation, and if projects like this are outlawed by an insistence on the minimum wage being paid when there is no money, won’t the next generation of graduates be in a worse position than ever?
The same is the case with work placements. Haven’t you, at some time or another, talked to a younger person about your work, maybe allowed them to shadow you for a few days so they can see how it all works? I certainly have. Was that a wrong thing to do? It’s right to set guidelines for good practice but not turn the issue into a battleground where employers are so terrified of litigation that no-one is prepared to offer a helping hand. A little common sense is needed.
This month, the outcome of a major new survey of freelancers was published in Broadcast Magazine. Seventy per cent of respondents said their career was difficult or impossible to manage and fifty-four per cent thought they would no longer be working in the industry in ten years time. It makes depressing reading. The industry now needs to take stock and find ways of investing in skills for the future, but what seems to be happening is the precise opposite. When money is tight, organisations tend to cut back on any commitment to training. This means it’s up to individuals, those of us who have been around for a while, to think of ways to support our younger, less experienced colleagues. We need to watch out for cases where they are being treated unfairly, be vigilant and where necessary ‘speak truth to power’. They need all the help they can get to find that first foothold on the slippery ladder calling itself ‘a career in the media’.
Sara Feilden’s film Some Dogs Bite is being reshown on BBC2 at 4am on Friday 11 February. It will be available on BBC i-player for a further week.
Tom Harper released his debut film The Scouting Book for Boys in 2009.
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