It’s September. That means back to school. And not just for the kids.
With Edinburgh hangovers barely forgotten, and TV execs and politicians still reeling from Dorothy Byrne’s outlandishly honest MacTaggart Lecture, conference season gets into full swing.
Not in Bournemouth but in Cambridge, courtesy of ITV, for the RTS biennial convention. There’s no prorogation for us.
At her very first World in Action meeting as a young researcher, Dorothy Byrne experienced a feeling she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Until she realised that it was “the feeling I got if I accidentally wandered into the gents’ toilets – I shouldn’t be here!”
Being a rare woman in a man’s world in the early 1980s didn’t deter her, however, and Byrne has now worked in investigative broadcast journalism for nigh on four decades.
TV current affairs and documentaries are obsessed with the new. That means we can ignore problems which continue over decades. My month begins with watching Channel 5’s Raped: My Story for a panel I’m on.
It’s a really daring programme precisely because there is nothing new in it; it is a devastating document of the way rape ruins lives and survivors are denied justice. And that’s a story we need to tell again and again.
