Identifying the Barriers to Change in TV Production: Affectivity, Care and the Prevention of ‘Good Work’

This article examines the British television production industry’s failure to implement an ethic of care, promote diversity and address deleterious production conditions ( Aust 2020a ; 2020b ; 2021 ; Berridge 2019 ; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011 ; SIGN and Candour TV 2021 ). Despite years of purported progressive change, the industry continues to exploit its workers, resulting in negative impacts on mental health, lack of workforce diversity and detrimental working conditions. The industry’s failure to address these issues is rooted in proven structural and economic factors such as deregulation, privatisation for profit and a neoliberal workplace culture that values individualisation, precarity and competition. Discrimination based on race, class, disability and gender remains endemic and inhibits meaningful change. This article therefore explores how the industry’s failure to fully understand the affective nature of television work hinders collective action. However, it also highlights the capacity for change illuminated by adjustments made in post-COVID-19 returning to work and the parallel emergence of industry roles such as wellbeing facilitators, intimacy coordinators, sustainability officers and the practice of job-sharing. Such developments disrupt the neoliberal logic of production and offer potential for progressive change. Through twelve targeted interviews with job-sharers during 2023, the article examines the potential for structural change expressed through this different way of working. The interviews explore how ‘good work’ can take place but also how that goal can be undermined by economic rationales and by workers themselves. Overall, this article highlights the urgent need to address issues of social justice, care and wellbeing in the British television industry, in order to improve the conditions of creative labour.