Behind the sparkle and allure of broadcasting, a new kind of slave trade is developing

We have done with the season to be jolly. Now it's time to be jolly nice to those who entertained us during the past year. The award season is with us. The Golden Globes and Emmies, Oscars and Baftas, will enhance the already obscene earning power of stars and celebrities.

You could say awards are another example of art imitating life. Nothing succeeds like success. And those who succeed get to reap the richest rewards, in recognition of their enterprise and endeavour. But actually, when British television gets around to handing out prizes, a very different moral is at work, the obnoxious moral of free-market ideology.

Let me persuade you to cast your eyes not at the stars, but what is behind them - the names buried in the end credits, which are so small and move so fast that you can never read them, even if you wanted to. These are the countless people who work like ants to make a costume drama like Cranford or Lark Rise to Candleford look so ravishing. The production values that put quality on our screen rely on the skills of innumerable artisans dedicated to crafts of camera, lighting, sound, wardrobe, make-up and set design. The heads of such departments do win awards. But around them toil seldom-sung heroes and heroines engaged in a real-life dramas - battling the strictures of free-market economics that are sounding the probable death knell of the in dustry. Indeed, I fear that behind the sparkle and allure of broadcasting, a new kind of slave trade is developing.

When I worked in television in the Eighties, you belonged to a union or a guild and worked decent hours for a decent wage. Nowadays, every time I do an interview for TV or take on an assignment of any kind in broadcasting, I find myself rubbing shoulders with eager young hopefuls doing what was once the work on the lowest rung on a career ladder, for absolutely no pay! All tell the same story: they are just doing this to gain a bit of experience, the better to get a real job.

On-the-job training was always favoured as the passport to the sequestered and peculiar world of television. Talent would out in a business where everyone had to learn by doing. As such, informal arrangements, ad hoc work experience, used to be a way of getting a foot in the door. It showed the initiative and enterprise necessary to succeed. It is now nothing but false promise. The process has become a routine piece of chicanery, giving programme-makers an endless supply of unwaged labour. This massages the bottom line of ever more independent production companies servicing the publishing houses that our TV networks have become.

Much to my surprise, I learn that it is not just in the area of news, current affairs and documentary-making that the inexorably cruel logic of free-market economics has been unleashed. Increasingly, it is threatening the quality of the old craft guilds of all those artisans who made British television the envy of the world and a source of justifiable national pride.

Most of these artisans work freelance, hired on individually negotiated, fixed contracts to work for underfunded productions, made to ridiculously short timescales. A costume designer, for example, will start work at six in the morning and carry on until 11 at night and be back at six the following morning. If you calculate the hourly rate, the pay is well below the minimum wage.

So the quality that hits the screen comes out of the pockets and through the sleep deprivation, sweat and hard labour of these once-proud workers. Yet, as the material rewards wither, job satisfaction - that old-fashioned invisible sustainer - is being driven to the edge of doom.

To complain is no longer an option. Those who do quickly find themselves replaced. And just to remind them of how little power they have, almost all of them will be shadowed by "trainees" who hopefully and willingly work for nothing.

Our schools and universities now teach media studies and churn out young people keen to work in television. But it gets harder and harder to achieve the transition from slavery to paid employment. None of this is an accident. It was all planned. The way was prepared by the ideological imperative of deregulation, opening the floodgates to independent production companies and competition. And the logic is working its way through the heritage of the entire broadcasting industry, as it is through the entire national economy.

It used to be a case of "Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington". Now you might want to reconsider advising any offspring to enter the ranks of the television industry, assuming you can see through the seduction of glitz and glamour.

Yet what happens to the national treasure that is British broadcasting, when only those who labour for free are left? When the old stagers are gone, will there still be glorious achievements to reward every year?

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