Has the Noel Clarke controversy spurred the UK film and TV industry into meaningful change?

When bullying and sexual harassment allegations made by more than 20 women against UK actor and filmmaker Noel Clarke were first made public in April 2021, many in the UK film and TV industry felt blindsided. There was a feeling the UK had already tackled this issue. Clarke had just received Bafta’s outstanding British contribution to cinema award and the ripple effects of Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction and the anger and moral force behind the MeToo movement had resulted in the UK’s leading film and TV bodies creating formal tools to help industry members address the crisis.

But Clarke, who denies the allegations of sexual misconduct, seems to have been hiding in plain sight. 

There have been plenty of measures in place to help enforce safe working environments for the last few years. In 2018, the BFI published a set of ‘Principles and Guidance’, updated in 2020 to include a commitment to anti-racism that acknowledged Black Lives Matter. The BFI and Bafta also launched the Action List in 2021, outlining steps employers could take to help prevent bullying, harassment and racism in their workplaces. In 2021, Time’s Up UK published a resource called Guide To Working In Entertainment, detailing how to deal with harassment, discrimination and misconduct while working in film and TV. 

Several reports had appeared, among them The Looking Glass, commissioned by the Film & TV Charity to look at mental health in the UK film and TV industry. Published in February 2020, it had revealed that of its 9,399 respondents from every area of the industry, 87% had experienced a mental health problem. The report also revealed 84% of respondents in film and TV had suffered bullying and harassment. 

The Film & TV Charity has funded a 24-hour telephone support line since 2018, and digital services Bullying Advice Service and Spot. The latter is a recording tool through which workers can keep a digital private record of what they have seen or witnessed. And ScreenSkills has been offering free online courses tackling harassment and bullying behaviours as part of its updated guidance. It is intended to help those responsible for bullying and harassment to recognise their own behaviour. 

Meaningful change

But how effective are these interventions in practice? In early 2021, film and TV union Bectu published its survey The State Of Play, focusing on the unscripted TV sector, that spoke of “a set of conditions [in UK film and TV] within which discrimination, nepotism and bullying thrive and indeed are normalised as ‘just the way the industry works’”.

Could the shock of the Noel Clarke allegations finally spur the industry into meaningful change, giving offenders nowhere to hide? And what does that change look like? 

“I speak to men and women across the industry who have had terrible experiences,” says Jen Smith, head of inclusion at the BFI. “That galvanises us and makes us feel what we’re doing is incredibly important. There is a gap in the industry, for freelancers particularly and for employers, for having an infrastructure that is scaleable — and it is there when these issues arise.”

In June 2021, Time’s Up UK chair Heather Rabbatts called on the UK film and TV industry to set up an external independent authority for dealing with sexual misconduct allegations. But such a body is still a long way off (although the idea reportedly has some support within the government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport). Many feel it is badly needed to, as one observer puts it, “deal with serial offenders who just move around from production to production, wreaking havoc”.

Seetha Kumar, chief executive of ScreenSkills, suggests the Covid-19 pandemic has “articulated quite a few cracks that as a sector we were aware of but didn’t feel that visible in a pre-Covid world”. 

She cites the punishing hours in film and TV, the work-life balance and some of “the behaviours that people didn’t talk about, question or challenge. As I was growing up and working in the industry, rarely did you speak up because you just didn’t know how to and you didn’t really believe it would effect any changes.”

Those behaviours are certainly being challenged now. However, the upcoming publication of The Looking Glass 2 report is likely to provide a nasty jolt to anyone who thinks the problem is close to being solved. “In terms of the prevalence [of] bullying and harassment, there is no indication that it is going down,” says Lucy Tallon, head of mental health and wellbeing at the Film & TV Charity. 

The problem of systemic bullying and harassment has not gone away. As Philippa Childs, head of Bectu, the UK’s media and entertainment union, says: “The fundamental problem is the project nature of the industry. The sorts of trust and confidence in complaints procedures that you might get in a ‘normal’ employer just doesn’t exist in film and TV production. As a result, people feel very vulnerable and not confident about how to pursue a complaint.”

There is a dispiriting sense those working in the industry almost expect the bullying and harassment to continue. “I call it back-of-the-bus syndrome,” says producer Loran Dunn, a Screen Star of Tomorrow in 2017. “Growing up, I caught a bus to school, and all the young kids would be bullied by the older kids who had a stronghold at the back of the bus. Very often, once those young kids who were treated badly had got older, they became the older kids at the back of the bus inflicting the same behaviour on a whole new set of kids.” 

However, there are signs of gradual change. “I’ve seen more of a willingness to talk about these things,” says producer Helen Simmons, a Screen Star of Tomorrow in 2018. “There is definitely an openness to sharing stories and people are less scared now too, within their own circles, to say, ‘You shouldn’t work with this person,’ or, ‘This person has done this thing.’ There’s more of a sense of trying to protect one another and being less afraid of any ramifications from that.”

Indeed, there is now the added economic impetus for the industry to pay more attention to workplace conditions and its impact on mental health. Competition for crew amid the ongoing production boom means producers simply cannot afford to lose crew members.

Now, intimacy co-ordinators and wellbeing facilitators (WBF) are often on sets as a matter of course. One company providing health and wellbeing services to productions such as Amazon Prime TV drama The Peripheral is 6ft From The Spotlight, a non-profit that works to improve mental health in workers across the film, theatre and music industries. Leo Anna Thomas is a director of the company, and has had her own experience of being bullied on a film set. 

“I was being spoken to very aggressively and was gaslit in front of an entire department and nobody did anything. Nobody stepped in,” she recalls. At the time, Thomas was a young art department assistant with very little experience. “I started to question what I was doing wrong. I just remember I was very stuck. I was working very long hours as an assistant. I was first in and last out.”

Thomas ended up leaving the industry and going into therapy. She returned four years later. “I came back. I was very open about why I left, very open about mental health and I made the promise to myself that I would talk about the stresses involved by how many hours we worked, why we have to work those hours, with no proper breaks.”

So where do you go when you are being shouted at by a producer who is running a production? That was the question Thomas wanted to answer following the death by suicide of several close friends whose suffering she believes was exacerbated by bullying on set. She teamed up with Matt Longley, who had known of similar incidences that he believes had ended in suicide and together they came up with the concept of an on-set wellbeing facilitator. 

There is an extra cost in having a wellbeing facilitator or safeguarding officer on set. The US streamers and studios have been readier to pay for such services than some independent producers who are already facing stiff budget rises from the challenges of Covid-19.

In response to this, the BFI is now contributing to the funding of safeguarding officers and welfare facilitators on all the productions it backs. 

The benefits are manifest. According to Thomas, crews are far more comfortable confiding in an outsider like a wellbeing facilitator than in senior members of the production. What they say is kept completely confidential unless they give consent. Thomas describes the well­being facilitators as both “mediators” and “first responders”. The aim is that wellness facilitators will be given the same authority that intimacy co-ordinators now have to intervene when they feel boundaries are being broken.

“From our experiences, when we go in at the beginning, when we’ve developed a working relationship with the producers at the start, they understand. It is a little bit tricky when we are brought in to basically, well, we use the expression, ‘Mop up the blood,’” Thomas notes.

There are no statistics about how much bullying and harassment has cost the UK film and TV industry in terms of lost working days and crew members who have quit the industry. To help address this chronic data shortage, producer Kate Wilson, working with TV producer Jules Hussey and TV director Delyth Thomas, has created the Call It! app, now in its pilot phase. It operates on a traffic-light system where workers in film and TV can answer simple questions about whether or not they were treated well that day. It provides an opportunity to monitor the experiences people are having in the midst of production.

“That doesn’t mean ‘Are you happy?’ because you can find yourself filming on the Isle of Skye at midnight on a January evening,” says Wilson. ”That’s not going to make you happy but you can still be treated well and with respect. The quantitative data could be very valuable so that it forces those who are in decision-making positions to take their head out of the sand and remove that denial that anything wrong is going on.”

Wilson was spurred in part by the way the women who spoke out against Noel Clarke were treated. 

“What upset me most was the failure of the industry to respond adequately to these women. What was happening was a dumping of responsibility at their feet,” she says. “We don’t listen to women. We still haven’t figured out how to listen to people that are having bad experiences. We don’t listen when people say they have experienced racism. We try to explain it away and get defensive.”

Cost of conflict

Arbitration body Acas has conducted independent research across the whole of the UK titled ‘Estimating the costs of workplace conflict’, which came up with eye-watering headline figures. Acas published its findings in May 2021, stating: “The cost of conflict to UK organisations was £28.5bn [$38.6bn] — the equivalent of more than £1,000 [$1,350] for each employee. Close to 10 million people experienced conflict at work. Of these, over half suffer stress, anxiety or depression as a result; just under 900,000 took time off work; nearly half a million resigned, and more than 300,000 employees were dismissed.”

Film and TV is part of this picture. “There is an economic cost. There is a human and moral cost. There is the cost to the quality of your output,” says the Film & TV Charity’s Tallon. “If you have people who are feeling they’re not well treated and their mental health is suffering, they will probably not be doing their best work. 

“It is also going to cost you in terms of talent retention,” she continues. “Employers spend a lot of money trying to attract new talent into the industry, particularly and rightly a diverse range and people from underrepresented groups. But you also need to look at why people are leaving.”

She talks of the “revolving door effect”, with many new entrants coming into the industry and then leaving quickly. This trend needs to be reversed, urgently, given the UK desperately needs to recruit new film and TV workers to service the inward investment and content boom. 

“Optimistic realists”

The anecdotal evidence about on-set working practices remains disturbing. Instagram account @BritCrewStories posts anonymous reports from crew members. There are reports of actors harassing female members of staff and of crew members on low-budget horror films working unpaid on 15-hour days.

But almost all of those people contacted for this feature are optimistic the old bullying and harassment cult­ure is slowly transforming.

“What we’re seeing now is a collective agreement, and genuine urgency that this needs to change,” says Dunn. 

“I think very gradually things are beginning to change,” agrees Bectu’s Childs, citing the increasing prominence of wellbeing facilitators and intimacy co-ordinators. 

“We are optimistic realists,” says Wilson, who experienced bullying and harassment earlier in her career, forcing her to temporarily leave the industry.  “I am angry I missed 10 years of my career. I haven’t achieved what I wanted to achieve because of how badly I was treated in films and TV when I gave everything to it as a young person,” she says. “People need to be valued for the skills they bring to the table. There is a world where you can absolutely love your job and be treated well. They shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.” 

• Screen digital edition: February 2022