Playwright James Graham said the television industry should start treating class the same way it treats other personal characteristics such as race or sexual orientation.

Citing a report that found that only 8 percent of those employed in the British film and television industry are working-class, Graham warned that programme makers are losing touch with viewers.

The creator of “Sherwood” and “Dear England” said that being part of the working class in Britain is not just about an individual’s income or their parents’ job. Rather, it is “a culture, similar to growing up in a particular faith or nationality”.

Yet, according to Graham, social background is rarely mentioned in diversity data about who is employed in the television industry and the writers responsible for their shows.

Graham, 42, said he benefited from watching working-class films on television with his family in the 1980s and 1990s, but he fears that experience may be lost.

“When you see a person or character on screen who looks or sounds like you, whose experiences, dilemmas or joys mirror your own … you feel more seen,” he said. “It’s a catharsis for the audience. A validation.”

The playwright made these remarks in his MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The lecture is an annual assessment of the state of the British television industry and is delivered by a different well-known figure each year.

Graham’s show Sherwood, set in the same Nottinghamshire mining villages where he grew up, returns to screens over the bank holiday weekend.

He thanked the BBC for agreeing to broadcast episodes of Sherwood weekly, rather than releasing the whole series at once on iPlayer, saying it would allow the series to become “a collective experience, not just an atomised, solitary, private experience”, with weekly national conversations on the themes covered in the show, such as levelling up, spy cops, unions and industrial strikes.

One problem that hurts working-class representation on television is the precarious and low-paying nature of many of these jobs. The industry has been hit hard by a recent downturn in the advertising industry, as well as streaming companies pulling out of big-budget shows after years of oversupply during the “peak TV” era of the late 2010s.

Graham acknowledged that class is difficult to measure and that “easier to define areas of diversity” such as ethnic representation can “awaken the activist in us.”

He said another problem was that Britons tend to criticise successful workers: “It’s not just about the money. You don’t stop being a worker once you get a pay rise. I wouldn’t offer it either – and I’m sorry if that sounds exclusionary or imprisoning – would it? become it, the moment you might fall below a certain level.”

Graham said a key part of the solution lay in bolstering the finances of public service broadcasters – BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and S4C – which invest in shows that Netflix would not approach: “They are the equivalent of state schools – the equalising force; the subsidised national theatre equivalent of public funds to take some of the commercial pressure off, to make non-commercial decisions, to find, train and amplify voices that on paper may not yet have such an easy, wide audience – but one day they will.”

He said his American colleagues were baffled by the “complacence” in Britain about the financial future of public service broadcasters: “They wish they had a BBC. We will miss them if they ever disappear.”

He also said that classic British television dramas and documentaries should be included in the new national curriculum alongside Shakespeare’s plays.

He said there is a risk that children addicted to short TikTok clips will no longer be able to consume hour-long dramas with complicated narratives.

“The ability to focus on one thing may be a skill that young people are losing in this distraction-ridden economy,” he said.