Ade Rawcliffe

In September, when dance troupe Diversity took to the stage for prime-time TV’s most controversial four minutes of 2020, one woman was watching especially intently – Ade Rawcliffe, ITV’s freshly promoted group director of diversity and inclusion.

“I was told they were going to do the dance. I thought it was incredibly moving, a wonderful creative expression,” she says of the group’s routine inspired by some of the year’s seminal events, not least the global Black Lives Matter protests.

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 extent of British broadcasters' new found commitment to diversity came under the spotlight at a packed RTS event provocatively entitled Diversity: Job Done?

A year ago the BBC Director-General Tony Hall unveiled plans for on and off screen BAME representation at the BBC and the setting up of new Independent Diversity Advisory Group.

Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, a member of the group who became disabled as a child, said there had been change at the BBC in how minorities are portrayed but more work needed to be done.