Nick Ahad: Why Britain needs to listen to Idris Elba

The subject being the dire lack of diversity in Britain’s creative industries. Thanks Idris, thanks a bunch. You couldn’t just let me get this panto column out of the way first? Clearly, I jest and mean a genuine, heartfelt unmitigated cheer of thanks to Idris Elba, the toweringly brilliant British actor who had to go to America in order to stop his head bumping against an all too clear glass ceiling for British talent of colour.

Elba visited Parliament this week and told an assembled group of MPS that in Britain ‘talent is everywhere, opportunity isn’t’. He was addressing the desperate need of British television to start looking like Britain. If you look out of your window, argued Elba, you won’t see Downton Abbey. So why are we seeing it on our screens?

The fact that an actor of Elba’s talent – in Luther he appears to suck the very air from every scene in which he appears – had to go to America to find success is a cause of enormous shame to those in charge of Britain’s creative industries.

I’m not going to go over the solutions Elba proposed. Go watch the speech, if you haven’t already. Suffice to say, it’s incumbent on those in charge to stop wringing their hands and actually do something.

British creative talent of colour is sick and tired of being overlooked. I met with a British Bangladeshi director the morning Elba gave his speech. He’s directed films and TV and is now going to America to escape the boxes in which Britain has trapped him. The problem is endemic.

All of which gives me 100 words to talk about panto. Last week my mum came on my radio show and outed me as someone ‘who hates panto’. I was about to interview a panto dame, so can only assume she thought it would be amusing. To prove I don’t hate it, tomorrow I’m going to the brilliantly reviewed Bradford Alhambra pantomime and I’m taking a kid with me who happens to be from an ethnic minority background.

That’s one way we’re going to win the battle, a long way down the line: access.

My tiny act of incursion will be shouting at the stage of the Alhambra theatre tomorrow afternoon with a kid from a background currently under-represented on British stages and screens.

Not a bad little act of revolution.