By common consent, there is too much TV to watch. But, paradoxically, TV’s once ironclad commitment to local journalism is a shadow of its former self.

That was one of the main takeaways of an RTS evening with Sir Trevor Phillips, who, more than 40 years ago, helped to change the face of TV current affairs as a pioneering black journalist at London Weekend Television.

He said: “One of the great failures of contemporary journalism – newspapers, radio and TV – is that there’s a shortage of serious local journalism. On The London Programme, we’d spend six weeks making half an hour of telly. If we couldn’t get there, we’d spend nine weeks. That wouldn’t happen today.”

Phillips added: “We’ve got these great big machines that are 24-hour news, like Sky News, whom I love working for. People care about the output, but there is a different culture today.

“Television journalism has been infected by entertainment. In TV journalism, we now think first about the booking and then about the story. When I started, the story came first – then we’d worry about who we were going to interview.”

Grilled for the RTS by his young colleague, Sky News presenter Kamali Melbourne, Phillips, who had been planning a career as an engineer, revealed that he had some misgivings about working in TV, despite a family friend suggesting that he should try for a job at LWT.

“I thought that journalists were basically parasites,” said Phillips. To his surprise, joining LWT turned out to be a revelation. The highly profitable London ITV station was a hotbed of innovation.

LWT was famous for entertaining millions with shows such as Blind Date, hosted by the ever-chirpy Cilla Black, and its stellar arts coverage, thanks to Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show. But the ITV station also re-invented current affairs with programmes such as the cerebral Weekend World and more populist fare including The London Programme, an RTS award-winner that employed Phillips for more than 15 years.

To say that LWT was ahead of its time is an understatement. At the start of his LWT career, Phillips worked in the company’s London Minorities Unit on Skin, aimed at London’s black and Asian  communities. The company also pioneered a show for gay people and another for teenagers.

"I thought that journalists were basically parasites"

Much of the impetus for these groundbreaking initiatives came from John Birt, the hands-on programme chief who would go on to become Director-General of the BBC. “John Birt was involved in the hiring of all staff, not just senior employees,” Phillips remembered.

Landing a gig at LWT was far from easy: the rigorous Birt led an eight-person interview panel that put applicants through their paces. Thousands of people applied for the job that Phillips secured at LWT, he recalled. But once you were in, you were looked after.

“There was complete confidence in you,” he said, recalling how Birt and his lieutenants encouraged programme-makers to push boundaries.

What was it like walking into the LWT newsroom as a young black man? “I was fortunate because I wasn’t alone. There were other places where you’d be the only one, but [at LWT] there was a group of us, including [current BBC Chair] Samir Shah.

“Samir and I started on the same programme on the same day. We’d been hired to be ourselves. I was very, very lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

“Nobody who works in television today could imagine the amount of time and money that were put at our disposal. We’d go out to make a short video with a crew of nine. ”

As the presenter and editor of The London Programme, Phillips, along with his team, became known for exposing aspects of the city’s underbelly, including ticket touts and sex traffickers.

“If The London Programme’s ratings were falling, we’d do crime, sex or house prices – and they’d pick up.”

‘In conversation with Trevor Phillips’ was held at the Everyman, King’s Cross, London, on 26 November. The producer was Phillip Barnes.