Dave Howard attended the Media on the Move conference which explored the past, present and future portrayal of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. It was held by BBC Outreach and Travellers’ Times, which is a magazine and website for people in the communities and those who work with them. 1e2i3b

 

How can you represent people in programmes if they don’t trust you?  And how can you get people to trust you, if you don’t represent them in programmes?

These ‘chicken and egg’ questions were on my mind, as I attended Media on the Move.  The event, commissioned by Diane Reid, was intended to foster understanding between the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community and of the media.

People had stories to tell of media misrepresentation, broken promises, and of harm done to them as a result.  Yes, there is the ongoing travesty – as they see it – of Channel 4’s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

Elsewhere, it was pointed out the BBC and others often use words like ‘Travellers’ and ‘locals’ as binary opposites, as though it is impossible to be both.

Damian Le Bas of The Travellers’ Times described being asked to contribute on local radio, of waiting and listening on the line as caller after caller made derogatory or unsubstantiated claims about his community.  By the time he was asked to respond, he felt goaded into anger.

‘Once bitten, twice shy’, goes the old saying.

People from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities told they feel as though they have been bitten, bitten, and bitten again, to the point where any relationship of trust with the media is near to impossible.

My team and I know this to our cost. We run the BBC’s Generation youth outreach cohorts. We find young contributors from across UK political and social spectrums, particularly from harder-to-reach communities, and connect them with programme-makers.

Across four iterations of our project in the last three years, we have completely failed to find any young person from a Gypsy, Roma or Traveller background who was willing to be included.

We reached out, we invited in.

No luck. No one would come forward. No one trusted us.

A few years ago, a colleague and I made a Radio 1’s Stories documentary with the rapper Professor Green, hearing experiences of young people who had survived suicide attempts.

Elsewhere, I’ve recorded mums talking about how it feels to be bathed, toileted, or psychologically ed by their young carer children. Other mums have opened up to me about being physically and emotionally abused by their children.

All of these are difficult stories; the kinds of stories you can only tell if you can establish and maintain a strong relationship of trust with your contributor. I would argue that they are the kinds of stories we need to hear, if we want to understand modern Britain.

These stories can stop you in your tracks. When well handled, by the likes of Michael Buchanan or Fi Glover (and the teams around them), they can be raw, powerful, captivating - in short, brilliant.

However, if we screw up our dealings with people who have chosen to share these kinds of experiences with us – perhaps by riding roughshod over how they wish to be portrayed, by taking for granted what it has taken for them to share their experiences on air, or by breaking promises either made or implied – we shatter that trust.

In so doing, we scupper any chance of those individuals or communities ever talking to us again.

We have a lot of work to do to build a working level of trust with the country's estimated 150,000 to 300,000 Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers.

And if Media On The Move showed us anything, it was a willingness from both sides to get started. The very fact that the BBC was hosting the first ever dedicated event to discuss these issues was warmly welcomed.

There were other positives to build on, too.  BBC drama Peaky Blinders was praised, for having well-drawn, in-depth, relatable Gypsy characters, as opposed to caricatures or one-dimensional cartoon-villains.

On a more everyday scale, we were asked always to capitalise the word Gypsy or Traveller in copy, when referring to ethnicity, just as we would words like French or Chinese. One BBC producer enquired about a familiar pitfall; when captioning or introducing someone in a programme, what words should we use to describe them?

The response was delivered with a wry shrug: “Ask them. Go with whatever they tell you”.

Media On the Move was about building bridges between Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, the BBC and the media. It is often hard to define success in matters of ‘trust’ or ‘community relations', but in this instance I can give one concrete example.

I went back to Edinburgh at the end of the day with details in my pocket for a young Traveller woman who is happy to be approached for our next BBC Generation project.

After three years getting nowhere, I call that progress.

 

BBC Outreach & Corporate Responsibility brings the BBC closer to its audiences - particularly those audiences we have identified as harder to reach - with face-to-face activity, community and staff volunteering.

Maria McGeoghan attended the Media on the Move conference in July with BBC Outreach, the Rural Media Company and Travellers' Times magazine. She and other media industry delegates found out more about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, working with them on informed portrayal and looking at some of the myths that have grown up over the years.

How much do we really know about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community beyond the dresses and ceremony of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, drama depictions in programmes like Call The Midwife and Peaky Blinders, and ongoing tabloid battles about ‘illegal’ encampments?

I’ve worked in journalism for well over 30 years and the honest answer is: Not much.

So when BBC Outreach organised a one-day Media on the Move conference to bring us face to face with of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community - the turnout was high.  BBC staff, community groups, writers, producers and journalists came to the BBC Birmingham's Mailbox HQ to learn from a community we rarely get to meet. 

Held in partnership with Travellers’ Times, a magazine and website aimed at Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and with Rural Media, an award-winning media production charity, the tone at first was sombre.

“I’ve seen the depth of prejudice and racism Gypsy families face on a daily basis,” said Nic Millington, who runs Rural Media.

Then followed a beautiful film, The Oldest Show On The Road, by poet Damian Le Bas, editor-at-large of Travellers’ Times, outlining the proud history of his and the wider community which goes back through the centuries; a history of the slang names they have been called down the years from ‘untouchables’ to ‘animals’.

Between 1850 and 1950 was a golden age for the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, but mechanisation took many of their farming jobs and they had to look further afield to find new ways of making a living.

As we covered the event on Twitter someone gently pointed out that using capital letters for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller ‘would go a long way.’

Said Damian: “If you are Irish or Inuit - you expect your identity to have a capital letter. I want to get the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community recognised as a proper ethnic group with its own history, language and culture.”

We changed it.

During a very lively series of creative sessions to debate how the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities could find new ways of telling their stories in the mainstream media the ideas flew thick and fast.

What about a soap opera? A life swap programme? A documentary about being a gay Traveller? Anything to dispel myths, build trust and represent these communities as they really are.

During a Q&A session led by the BBC’s David Jennings, Head of Region for BBC West Midlands, Damian Le Bas revealed why it is often difficult to get someone from the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community to comment on a story.

“People don’t want to be racially abused on air, it’s not nice. There’s a presumption that we are all the same and we can take anything. There’s a lot of laziness. Two minutes Googling will tell you that we have our own history and our own languages. This is well documented. “

Damian’s wife Candis translated Romany for Peaky Blinders series three: “ I could get emotional about that. People like it and there was a real commitment to get it right,” he said.

One of the highlights of the day was a fantastic performance from award-winning Irish Traveller folk singer and story-teller Thomas McCarthy who thought that their ancient history as the Pavee or Walking People had been ‘totally ignored’.

“I’d like to see positives, because there is so much negativity,” he said.

Opening the conference Diane Reid, Head of BBC Outreach, said she hoped everyone would be open to new ideas and have ‘changed a bit’ by the end of the day.

I know I have.

 

Tweets from the conference used Twitter hashtags: #BBCOutreach and #MediaOnTheMove  with BBC coverage from @BBCAcademy and Tammi Walker 

 

BBC Outreach & Corporate Responsibility brings the BBC closer to its audiences - particularly those audiences we have identified as harder to reach - with face-to-face activity, community and staff volunteering.