Mobeen Azhar: The start I needed and the future we crave

My first job in journalism wasn’t in London. I began work on a tiny local paper in Batley before I’d ever set eyes on the old BBC building in Manchester. The BBC Religion & Ethics department took a chance on me, despite my lack of TV pedigree.

I don’t come from a TV family. What I do know is how to talk to people and that has always won me favours and opened doors. The BBC is committed to representing its audiences and the fact that I have brown skin and can speak South Asian languages meant a space existed for me in the Religion and Ethics Department back in 2004. There was a very specific context that allowed me to entree to a world that had until then felt unreachable.

This was only possible because the BBC has had a meaningful footprint outside London for a long time. It’s exactly why we need to safeguard regional creativity in 2025 and beyond.

The BBC’s Across the UK strategy has been a vital intervention. By shifting commissioning power and production spend out of London, it has opened doors. We risk losing that momentum if we don’t secure a funding model for the BBC that is fit for the audiences it serves.

This month, Secretary of State Lisa Nandy made headlines by calling the licence fee “unsustainable.” So what is the plan? The BBC, with all its faults, is the lifeblood of so much of the UK’s creative industries. It is the backbone of our broadcast industry. It doesn’t just make content. It trains talent. It sustains freelancers. It commissions from independent production companies that wouldn’t survive without it.

Reducing – or as some demand – abolishing the licence fee won’t just shrink the BBC. It will starve the ecosystem the government says it wants to grow.

As my career has moved on, I’ve been lucky enough to work with exceptional talent like Farah Qayum. Her connection to Bradford has qualified her to make powerful programmes that wouldn’t exist without her perspective. I first saw her work as a casting producer who was delivering beyond her role.

Today she is a force of nature in the industry. She can deliver a programme rooted in Bradford or anywhere else in the world, but without her specialist knowledge and regional anchoring I doubt she would have caught the attention of more traditional TV types.

Farah’s perspective is a creative asset. But talent needs structure. It needs opportunity. It needs sustainable investment.

Could the BBC drama Virdee have been written by someone who didn’t grow up in Bradford? I doubt it. Amit Dhand’s British Asian perspective, rarely seen in primetime, gave Virdee its heart: family dynamics, interfaith marriage, community discord, and a vivid, cinematic vision of Bradford. Amit was partly driven to bring Bradford to the screen after an Asian teenager told him no-one would be interested: “We’re invisible.”

So often, young people in the regions don’t know careers in set design, costume, or edit producing are an option. We must nurture this pipeline of talent.

This is entirely political and requires leadership that has vision, moral backbone and ideological rooting. True public service broadcasting must be safeguarded because it is good for society. People, and not the market, must be the priority.

Next week’s Creative Cities Convention, taking place this year in Bradford, the UK City of Culture for 2025, features a line-up that proves creativity isn’t confined to postcodes. If we want the next generation to build careers in the region, we need policy, commitment, and sustainable funding.

Resilience and talent can only take you so far. At some point, someone has to open the door.

Mobeen Azhar is the a presenter, journalist, filmmaker and host of the Creative Cities Convention, 7-8 May at the National Science & Media Museum, Bradford