RTS Technology Centre

At an RTS event last month, BBC correspondent Marianna Spring discussed being on the receiving end of abuse from trolls supporting Elon Musk – and how she deals with it.

Investigating social media, she explained, “triggers a wave of trolls and conspiracy theorists in a way that I didn’t used to experience. But I think, for me, the most positive way of dealing with that is [to think] I wouldn’t be doing my job right if... I wasn’t getting that kind of response.”

The RTS Technology Awards returned to the historic Wokefield Estate in Berkshire after a gap of five years with an expanded number of awards – eight in total – on offer to leading industry lights.

DTG Chief Executive Richard Lindsay-Davies was named Leader of the Year. “[He] has been at the forefront of many of the UK’s key television industry developments over a number of decades and is known for bringing together people, products and technology,” said the judges in their citation.

Parallels were drawn between TV’s ambitions to decarbonise and its far-from-swift attempts to introduce a more diverse and inclusive workforce during a fascinating session, “How clean is TV?”, organised by RTS Technology Centre.

Cinelab focuses on film processing, scanning, restoration and post-production and, despite the prophesies of some, film clearly still has a key role in the presentation of the moving image.

Host for the evening was Adrian Bull, Cinelab’s MD, whose persuasive case for film challenged the attitude of those who think “film is dead”. That is not to say that digital does not have a complementary role, particularly in distribution media.

In South Bucks alone, more than 20,000 jobs will be created in the next two years by new studios.

The session explored the idea that the industry should not be “doing” diversity, but rather focusing on developing an inclusive environment in which all talent can flourish. Only by casting the net more widely to discover where this talent is will film and TV start to meet such ambitious employment targets.