Published: 19 September 2012
Country: UK
The new BBC director general George Entwistle has promised that gender and age would not be a barrier at the BBC. He has vowed to place more female presenters on the news following criticism by news presenter Fiona Bruce that going grey was off-limits for women on screen, reports Guardian.
“The key here is to take every opportunity that arises, whenever there is a possibility of putting in a new female presenter in to do jobs in the news, we should look for it and take it if we can,” Entwistle told Radio 4’s Today programme.
Entwistle who took over from Mark Thompson earlier this week was responding to remarks made by Fiona Bruce in an interview in Reader’s Digest in which she admitted that she dyes her hair as a BBC newsreader.
New BBC director general said he was “sorry that Bruce feels that she has to say that”. He said he would make sure that women, including older women “get the right opportunities and are given the space they deserve”.
Entwistle argues that the BBC was taking steps to redress the imbalance and pointed to grey-haired Mary Beard, the Cambridge academic who presented BBC2’s Meet the Romans as a shining example of the BBC’s efforts to find jobs for older women.
Beard, who has long grey hair, has been attacked by TV critic AA Gill who said she “really should be kept away from the cameras altogether”. The BBC director general told Radio 4’s Today programme “She is delightfully unbothered, as indeed are we, about the colour of her hair.”
But newsreaders such as Huw Edwards or George Alagiah have nothing to fear from a new wave of positive discrimination as Entwistle said he wasn’t going to “remedy one inequity by indulging in another, turfing out a whole load of blokes who might be doing their job brilliantly with a view to getting women in”, reports Guardian.
According to the new report published just before the Olympic Games 2012, the BBC on-air presenters and quests are mostly white, well-educated men.
The researchers at the recently launched website OurBeeb have found out that on an average day’s programme on BBC Radio 4, only a third of voices belonged to women – none of them over 60.
