TV is broadcasting. We have the honour and duty to make shows for all audiences – to be broad, not niche. And the biggest audiences are, unsurprisingly, working class.

It’s no accident that some of the biggest talents combining creative excellence with broad audience reach are from working class backgrounds. Ant and Dec, Sally Wainwright, Peter Kay, Steve Knight, Paul Abbott, James Graham, Big Zuu, Guz Khan, Lisa McGee, Rap Man, Sophie Willan and the late lamented Caroline Aherne all have a direct line to an audience which loves and trusts them.

My parents both left school without qualifications and worked in retail (Mum in a local chemist, Dad as a window display manager with a side-hustle running a market stall). We didn’t have a house filled with books, but a home that loved TV. Coronation Street was a twice weekly appointment to view. When Brookside landed on C4, it was as urgent as it was down to earth, Boys from the Blackstuff felt angry and revelatory, and then in my 20s Our Friends in North was the most important drama series for a generation. These weren’t series about the working class; they were by and of working-class experience. Yosser Hughes’ loss echoed my uncle John, laid off by the Glasgow shipyards. My grandma’s house was like Hilda Ogden’s and Hilda’s grief over losing Stan made my Mum cry remembering own lost father.

So why are so many people who make and commission TV from such privileged backgrounds? Why aren’t working class voices succeeding? How can we serve our audiences when we don’t know or understand their lives and experiences?

There are three main reasons for driving change. Commercially, it is vital we reach as many people as possible for TV to thrive. Culturally, broadcasting still has the power to bring society together, telling stories of our shared experiences and our points of difference.

Finally, the industry is missing out if the levers of power aren’t accessible to people from working class backgrounds. The privileged individuals who dominate the industry’s positions of control might be talented, but they can’t be the only ones good enough to run the show.

We must also combat imposter syndrome. Many people from modest backgrounds struggle with the confident and entitled culture of TV. For years, I was petrified of pitch meetings or interviews (I froze in a formal board for a commissioner job in my 30s and didn’t get the job). Deep down, I didn’t feel I belonged next to people speaking with such authority and superiority. It wasn’t until I was running BBC documentaries and was meeting the peers I had previously put on a pedestal that I realised that their ideas, judgement and execution were no better than mine. I haven’t had my imposter syndrome since.

And at the beginning of my career, I was lucky. I got to Cambridge from my non-selective school. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it was a passport that enabled first employers to trust me.

So echoing James’ brilliant MacTaggart,we need a manifesto for change.

We need to start with education. David Olusoga has spoken about our generation, of the 1950s to 1970s, as a golden window of social mobility. But the full university grants which were crucial to that ended in the 1990s, and the numbers of kids from the lowest socioeconomic groups at university have dwindled since.

We need Government to reprioritise arts education, allowing more working-class kids to study arts subjects without stigmatising comments about ‘worthless degrees’. UK creativity is one of our major growth areas and exports. As a nation of storytellers, some of our greatest narratives are from and of working-class experience.

At Banijay, we have repurposed our Brightbulb New Entrants programme from a graduate scheme into a springboard for those who would otherwise struggle to get into our industry. Scripted has particularly low working-class representation behind the camera, so Kudos is working with Steve Knight to set up an initiative in Birmingham providing an intensive production course for local people from underrepresented backgrounds. Dragonfly has, with BBC support, instigated a scheme on Ambulance where talented individuals from broader social groups are trained and accelerated through the ranks. And Tiger Aspect, again with BBC support, run a paid entry level production training scheme on Man Like Mobeen in the West Midlands. These are a start but they are not enough.

We need to stop automatically hiring people we know and start broadening our talent pool. As the industry goes through the current, painful reset, it is more imperative than ever that those from working-class backgrounds are retained and trained. There are many great initiatives at broadcasters to widen the pool of commissioners but those from lower socio-economic backgrounds now need to rise through the ranks and lead. Crucially we need to look beyond ‘confidence’ and ‘entitlement’ as markers of ability.

We need to build excellence in the nations and regions. It’s harder for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to move to London and sustain themselves without parental support for rent. Bases of excellence across UK are imperative to grow the pipeline of talent. We need broadcasters to see nations quotas as a call for scale and excellence; Peaky Blinders, Derry Girls, Happy Valley are all of, and from, their regions.

My love of stories and characters came through watching Corrie with my mum. When I became a programme maker, my mum was the best critic of the shows I made. When I ran BBC2, she’d give me feedback on our latest new commissions in my weekly phone call home (she was an early fan of Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing and loved Alma’s Not Normal). She died last year. Had she been given my opportunities, she’d have been running BBC2 – but she was working-class and left school without qualifications, so the doors to our world were closed to her. For the good of society and the health of our industry, we can’t let that happen to future generations.