Riz Ahmed, 2017

“When we fail to represent, people switch off.”

Riz Ahmed gave this warning in a 2017 diversity lecture at the House of Commons organized with Channel 4. He began from the shared role of politicians and actors as storytellers who represent people. Audiences, he argued, look for evidence that they belong, are seen, and are valued. When culture and politics repeatedly fail that test, people may disengage from television, elections, and shared institutions, sometimes retreating toward narratives that offer belonging through resentment or extremism.

Representation in this account is not a cosmetic favor to an audience. It is part of civic infrastructure. Stories help define who counts as a neighbor, hero, expert, victim, or citizen. If a group appears only through threat or stereotype, members must negotiate a public imagination that has already narrowed their possible roles. More varied storytelling can interrupt that pattern and give society a larger vocabulary for understanding its own population.

No television program can by itself explain radicalization or repair democratic alienation. Economic exclusion, discrimination, foreign policy, policing, education, and online networks also matter. Representation can become tokenism when institutions add visible performers without sharing writing authority, budgets, ownership, or executive power. A person should not be forced to see every aspect of themselves reflected in popular culture before receiving equal rights and public services.

Measure representation across the full chain of storytelling. Who commissions, writes, performs, edits, markets, reviews, and owns the work? Examine not only presence but range: can people from a community be ordinary, funny, flawed, powerful, loved, and internally diverse? Create feedback routes that do not make one performer responsible for an entire population. Ahmed’s sentence is a warning about attention, but also about relationship. People stay engaged when institutions demonstrate repeatedly that their experiences can influence the common story. Trust also depends on continuity. A single acclaimed series followed by years of absence can feel like an exception the industry has already moved past. Track commissions, retention, promotion, and cancellations over time, and ask whether underrepresented creators receive the same room to learn from an imperfect first project. Schools and public broadcasters can widen access to the skills and platforms through which stories are made. Representation becomes a relationship when audiences see not only themselves, but evidence that their attention and criticism can help shape what the institution does next. That continuity turns inclusion from a promotional season into evidence that the shared story can keep responding to the people it claims to represent.