How many is enough?

I was quite surprised to hear Lenny Henry complaining recently about a lack of ethnic diversity on television. He said:

“When I started, I was surrounded by a predominantly white workforce, and 32 years later, not a lot has changed,”

I am not sure what he really expects to see in his workplace, but with 90% of people in the UK being white, almost all workforces are likely to be predominately white. The laws of probability states that for every 100 people in the television industry, just 2 will be black and 90 will be white.

When I was a boy, the only time that I would see a black man on TV was when my father walked over to turn the set on and I caught sight of his reflection. These days television is positively brimming with black people, and other ethnic minorities for that matter. Certainly a marked change from a few decades ago. Indeed, Lenny Henry claims that nothing has changed since he started his career, but that isn’t true. Lenny Henry was unique, because he was the only black comic on TV at that time. I remember seeing him for the first time on New Faces.