Beyond tokenism: Power,partnership,and the craft of authentic portrayal

The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity’s 2025 report, Authentic Portrayal in UK Media (Bristol-Abbott et al. (2025)), captures a familiar truth: visibility has expanded, but structural authority has not. Across race, disability and class, the report’s panels describe a landscape in which marginalised lives appear more often on screen, yet remain peripheral to authorship, commissioning, and control. The report points to persistent structural barriers that shape who gets represented and how, alongside a lack of genre breadth and meaningful involvement in decision-making. Its recommendations stress more participatory approaches and policy frameworks that embed accountability beyond on-screen presence. My argument is that authentic portrayal will only arrive when three forces meet in equal partnership: lived experience, professional craft, and structural authority. The report becomes a springboard for a deeper question: how do we shift from token testimony to shared authorship, from headline ‘firsts’ to everyday commissioning habit?

Throughout this provocation, I use authentic portrayal to mean three interdependent things: (1) sustained commissioning rather than one-off breakthroughs; (2) shared authorship and decision-making power across writing, casting, and editing; and (3) tonal breadth across genres, so that marginalised lives can be shown as joyful, banal, comic or fantastical as well as suffering. I take the report not as an endpoint but as an opening. Its emphasis on lived experience is vital – the panels insist that those most affected by media portrayals must be at the centre of storytelling. But lived experience, left on its own, can become another token: invited as testimony, mined as ‘authentic input’, and then displaced when decisions about tone, form or budget are made. For portrayal to be genuinely authentic, lived experience has to meet professional craft and structural authority in equal partnership.

My aim here is to provoke debate rather than repeat findings. Drawing on the report, I ask: what would it mean to refuse television’s cycles of spectacle and containment? What would it mean to extend authentic portrayal beyond content and into craft, tone and everyday commissioning practice? And what would it mean for scholarship if we stopped cataloguing milestones and instead interrogated the structures that produce them?

What follows is not a neat set of answers but a series of provocations: about tone and relief, about television’s cycles of progress and retrenchment, and about the limits of genre and the performance of care. Each presses the same question: what does it take for portrayal to be more than tokenistic?

Opening vignette: Alma, laughter, and the craft of relief

What I remember most from Alma’s Not Normal (2020–24) isn’t a punchline but a pause. Alma (Sophie Willan) and Leanne (Jayde Adams) sit on a sofa, laughing in the way you do when the day has been long and unfair. A half-drunk brew on the armrest, a phone abandoned mid-scroll, a friendship too seasoned for sentimentality. Nothing miraculous happens. The camera lingers. For a moment, working-class women are granted something television rarely gives them: unshowy relief. As a scholar, I notice how rarely such moments are acknowledged in criticism. Analyses of working-class television, my own included, tend to centre on harm, grit, or deprivation. Those critiques matter, but they risk flattening the tonal range of on-screen lives. Alma’s sofa scene resists that flattening. Its authenticity lies not only in whose story is told, but in the craft choices that shape it: the timing of the joke, the decision to hold the frame, the willingness to let silence breathe.

A similar tonal generosity animates We Are Lady Parts (2021–). Its Muslim women characters get to be anarchic, sexually bold and ridiculous, shredding guitars while still navigating faith and family. Like Alma’s sofa pause, these moments refuse the default of trauma or solemnity; they let marginalised characters be funny on their own terms. This is where lived experience and professional craft meet. Willan’s background informs Alma’s Not Normal, just as Nida Manzoor’s authorship shapes We Are Lady Parts. Both draw on lived experience but rely on writing, performance, direction and editing to make joy legible and turn testimony into narrative. I do not mean this as a dismissal of social realism. Realist attention to labour, cost and care has produced some of television’s most vital accounts of inequality. But Alma’s Not Normal and We Are Lady Parts widen the tonal field. Where much social realism presses the bruise to prove its point, these serials let the pain coexist with wit, self-mockery and affection. They show that difficulty and joy are not opposites, but companions.

The report’s panels on class, race and disability reach a similar conclusion: authenticity is not only about presence, but about the emotional registers that characters are allowed to occupy. Joy is not a denial of difficulty; it is part of how difficulty is lived. To notice that, and to craft space for it, is part of what authentic portrayal must mean.

Television’s cycles of breakthrough and containment

British television has always been skilled at narrating its own progress. The BBC’s Play for Today strand in the 1970s offered working-class stories celebrated as raw and truthful. In the early 1990s, Channel 4’s Brookside (1982-2003) introduced the Johnson family – Mick, Leo, and Gemma – offering one of the earliest sustained portrayals of a Black British family in a primetime soap. More recently, Ralph & Katie (2022) has been lauded as a BBC One drama led by two actors with Down’s syndrome. Crucially, every episode was co-written by at least one disabled writer – a rare example where lived experience and craft authority were braided together. Each of these moments mattered. They opened space, however briefly, for lives not usually granted primetime visibility. But each breakthrough was also contained. The working-class dramas of the 1970s were largely authored by men outside those communities. Brookside’s integration did not spark a wave of Black-led soaps. Ralph & Katie has not yet normalised disabled leads across genres. Progress has tended to appear as singular achievement rather than systemic shift.

As Anamik Saha (2018) reminds us, cultural industries often manage diversity through containment, limiting the scope of racialised representation while celebrating symbolic breakthroughs. The report shows how this cycle endures. Across race, disability and class, representation is still treated as episodic, exceptional, even experimental. Milestones are celebrated, but the structures of commissioning remain intact. As panellists stressed, visibility without creative control is rarely enough.

The provocation is this: what might it mean to resist television’s tendency to frame diversity as a singular event? What would happen if we treated breakthroughs not as spectacles but as starting points, insisting on continuity rather than containment? Streaming offers some new possibilities: the success of Heartstopper (2022-) and Rapman’s Supacell (2024) proved audiences will follow queer teen drama and Black British fantasy worlds. But their novelty became the story, rather than signalling that such commissioning should be routine. These cycles of spectacle and containment are reinforced by genre conventions which determine not just who appears on screen but also the affective terrain their characters are allowed to traverse.

Genre and the limits of imagination

One of the most striking insights from the report is that representation is not only about who is visible on screen but about the genres in which they are permitted to appear. Disabled characters tend to surface in documentaries or issue-led dramas but rarely in sitcoms, family sagas, or period pieces. Working-class lives are most often confined to social realism or to representations that risk slipping into what has been labelled ‘poverty porn’, where hardship is foregrounded at the expense of complexity or agency. Racialised characters are frequently scripted through trauma, criminality or conflict, with fewer opportunities for joy, absurdity or banality. There have been notable exceptions (for instance, ensemble comedies that fold in racially diverse casts), but their rarity underscores the point: they are framed as distinctive events rather than an everyday commissioning habit.

Genre matters because it determines tone. It sets the emotional vocabulary available to characters: whether they can be witty, romantic, fantastical, or simply ordinary. As Christine Geraghty (2021) has observed, the rhetoric of ‘colour-blind’ casting can obscure more than it reveals, presenting diversity as interchangeable while leaving structural exclusions untouched. What matters is not erasure but extension. The prominence of a South Asian heroine in Bridgerton (2020-) and the success of Supacell demonstrate that audiences are ready for diverse characters across genres. The challenge is to treat such casting not as daring exceptions but as part of television’s ordinary grammar.

Guidelines and the performance of care

One of the more revealing insights from the report concerned media guidelines. Channel 4’s Disability Code of Portrayal (2023) was praised for its tone, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s Media Guidelines for their moral clarity. Yet participants across all panels stressed their limits: too often generic, regulatory in spirit, and too rarely co-authored with those they claim to represent.

What emerged is a sense that guidelines often operate as performative governance. They signal responsibility but rarely redistribute it. A document can be principled, even progressive in its language, while remaining detached from the messier realities of production. This does not mean guidance is without value. When it sparks argument in a writers’ room or helps a director hold ground in an editorial debate, it can be a scaffold for better practice. But without links to budgets, authorship and commissioning authority, guidelines soothe the institution more than they transform it. As Sarita Malik (2002) has argued, diversity initiatives can function as institutional alibis, offering symbolic reassurance while leaving underlying power relations largely intact.

The provocation here is to make guidelines binding practice. They should be co-authored with the communities concerned, tied to budget lines (e.g. ring-fencing funds for disabled access and consultancy), and used as greenlight checkpoints with published compliance data. Only then do they shift from symbolic performance to structural redistribution.

Intersectionality

Across the panels, one frustration recurred: television prefers its diversity neat. Even industry monitoring cannot see connections: Creative Diversity Network (CDN)’s Diamond reporting counts categories separately so a disabled writer of colour is double-counted but never recognised as such. Until intersectional data is collected and made public, commissioning will continue to treat layered lives as exceptional. The report captures this clearly. Participants described how single-axis stories are legible to funders and schedulers, while intersectional ones are treated as messy or implausible. Complexity is erased not to exclude, but to manage.

What is lost is not only authenticity but possibility. When disabled characters are never also shown as parents or professionals, when working-class stories are never also queer or migrant, television silently trains audiences to see layered lives as unlikely. Nearly half the UK identifies as working-class, yet only 8% of the television workforce does (Holt-White et al., 2024), treating class, especially when combined with race, disability, or migration, as an anomaly rather than an everyday reality. This disparity underlines how commissioning templates resist layered representation. The remedy is simple but radical: measure and commission on intersections, not just categories. An intersectional audit of writers’ rooms, for instance, would show where class, race and disability converge, and where they are consistently filtered out.

Conclusion: Beyond milestones, towards continuities

The Sir Lenny Henry Centre’s report underlines what many have long known: authentic portrayal will not be secured by visibility alone. Milestones matter but they are not enough. A drama celebrated as a ‘first’ can mark a real achievement while still leaving commissioning logics untouched.

Continuity, not spectacle, is the work ahead. Breakthroughs have symbolic value, but unless they are followed by sustained commissioning and shared authorship, they risk becoming moments of containment. For scholars, the equivalent of ‘continuity over firsts’ is to pivot our methods from counting milestones to auditing commissioning power over time: tracking who repeats, who advances and which genres are normalised for whom. These concerns also underpin my UKRI-funded project What’s on? Rethinking Class in the Television Industry, which takes an intersectional lens on class and examines how it is constructed and negotiated across production cultures, television texts, and audience engagements.

To treat authentic portrayal as ordinary – part of television’s everyday grammar – would mean funding a disabled rom-com or a Black fantasy series with the same confidence routinely extended to middle-class thrillers. It would mean treating laughter on Alma’s sofa not as a rare gift but as something television should know how to stage every day. Here Sarah Asante’s (2025) question feels crucial: ‘Who gets to tell this story, and are they best placed to do so?’ The answer is not identity alone, nor craft alone, but the braid between them. Lived experience without authorship risks tokenism; craft without lived experience risks distortion. Authentic portrayal emerges when experience, craft, and structural authority are treated as equal and interdependent.