Luther star Idris Elba will tell MPs on Monday that a lack of diversity across British television is causing talented performers to be thrown on the scrapheap, and accuse the industry’s executives of not living in the real world.

The 43-year-old Londoner, who made his name as drug kingpin Stringer Bell in the hit US crime series The Wire, is due to make a speech in Westminster, saying that television is at risk of not properly reflecting society and indicating that black actors are struggling to progress in the UK, compared with the US.

“People in the TV world often aren’t the same as people in the real world. And there’s an even bigger gap between people who make TV, and people who watch TV. I should know, I live in the TV world. And although there’s a lot of reality TV, TV hasn’t caught up with reality,” Elba will say, adding: “Change is coming, but it’s taking its sweet time.”

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The actor is due to deliver his speech at a meeting organised by Channel 4, speaking at an event which will be attended by over 100 MPs, including the culture minister, Ed Vaizey, as well as senior television executives.

Citing his own example, Elba will tell his audience that that he had to move to the US having seen a glass ceiling for black actors in Britain, saying “I was very close to hitting my forehead on it”. The actor will argue that he was never going to be given a lead role if he stayed in Britain, where he would have been trapped playing “best friends” and “cop sidekick parts” and concluded he would have to go to the US if he wanted to be given starring roles in big dramas.

He will also say: “But when you don’t reflect the real world, too much talent gets trashed. Thrown on the scrapheap. Talent is everywhere, opportunity isn’t. And talent can’t reach opportunity.”



The performer’s earliest acting credits in the UK included parts in the Channel 5 soap opera Family Affairs and ITV’s London’s Burning. After his stint in The Wire, he won a series of lead roles, playing Nelson Mandela in the acclaimed film Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom and Luther in the BBC1 crime drama of the same name.

Referring to his own experience, Elba will say: “I knew I wasn’t going to land a lead role. I knew there wasn’t enough imagination in the industry for me to be seen as a lead. In other words, if I wanted to star in a British drama like Luther, then I’d have to go to a country like America. And the other thing was, because I never saw myself on TV, I stopped watching TV. Instead I decided to just go out and become TV.”

He thanked Prince Charles, saying he got his initial break in the creative industries after the Prince’s Trust subsidised his first audition for the National Music Youth Theatre. “They gave me £1,500, because you had to subsidise yourself; there were hardly any black kids there, none of us could afford it. But Prince Charles let me in”, he said. Elba said he probably wouldn’t have made it without the charitable organisation.

The criticism follows similar accusations from the former Homeland star David Harewood. He suggested, a few years ago, that he probably would not have been handed the “authoritative” role of head of intelligence David Estes in the hit US series if the show had been produced in the UK.

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Sophie Okonedo, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Hotel Rwanda, has also said that she is offered more work from the US than in the UK. In 2014, she told the Guardian: “I do notice that – over the last year – I’ve had maybe two scripts from England and tens and tens from America. The balance is ridiculous. I’m still struggling [in the UK] in a way that my white counterparts at the same level wouldn’t have quite the same struggle.

“People who started with me would have their own series by now, and I’m still fighting to get the second lead or whatever. I think I’m at a certain level and have a good range, so why isn’t my inbox of English scripts busting at the seams in the same way as my American one is? There’s something amiss there.”

However, in a recent interview with the Radio Times, another actor who starred in The Wire, Clarke Peters, who is American but has lived in the UK since the 1970s, questioned whether the US offers more opportunities for black talent. He said that eventually black British actors heading to the US were going to “wake up and go: ‘You know, this is the same nonsense over here as it is there’”.

In 2014, Elba and Sir Lenny Henry were among signatories on a letter to broadcasters calling for money to be ringfenced for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) programmes. Last year Henry said TV had taken baby steps in improving its record on diversity, but did not think quotas were the answer.