Carol Vorderman calls TV industry ‘a mess’ at Edinburgh TV Festival

In the Alternative MacTaggart lecture, she also spoke about her unusual route into television – after her mother applied for her to work on Channel 4’s Countdown when it started production in Leeds.

But she said that in the years that followed, it has not become easier for working class people to break into the industry.

“Working class people feel they are not represented, their situation is not represented, the lack of opportunities and lack of money and jobs is not represented,” she told the audience.

Vorderman, who also spoke about the challenges of being one of the poorest students at the University of Cambridge, grew up in a single-parent home in Wales.

Despite working in the television industry for more than 40 years, she said she had found her voice on social media.

It is “no longer the new kid, more like the badly behaved uncle”, and platforms like TikTok and X have “changed our society and its rules”, she said.

That could lead to the TV industry becoming obsolete, Vorderman warned.

“What it gives everyone, in towns and cities outside the wealthy south-east, the opportunity to do, is to see and hear views they recognise, in language they recognise.

“No longer is there the need to go through the filter of a producer, or a commissioning editor, or someone who has never been to my town or my city or my region, who has no idea how people like me live and the worries we have,” she said.