Earlier this week, sitting in a Mill Lane lecture room at a careers talk, I listened to a frustrating hour of advice. The talk was about getting into the television industry and the speaker opened by telling us he was going to be brutally honest. This was fair enough. I’m well aware that the industry is a difficult uphill slog requiring long hours, dedication and perseverance, and is, of course, highly competitive. And it may have been the bad mood I was already in, but as his talk went on I couldn’t help but get increasingly irritated.

He flogged his company’s “extremely useful” networking events, which took place in London, moving onto their tailored CV workshops, which were also in London, and came with a price tag. He then sheepishly commented that “It wasn’t really like this when I was getting in” but that we should “expect to work long hours… unpaid”. He added that we might anticipate doing this for 18 months on average before moving up. The word “unpaid” then flew around several more times and I left in a mood fouler than the one with which I had come in.

I am a student originally from York, a city which, despite being perfectly nice, has one local radio station and one or two small magazines. Experience is scarce and often only available to those studying journalism or media courses. It costs me around £50-£70 (with a railcard) and takes over two hours to get to London. I am on a full bursary at Cambridge and have four siblings. There are no trust funds waiting for me, no rich benefactor who can pay for me to live on absolutely nothing in one of the world’s most expensive cities while I complete work experience.

And as I sat in the uncomfortable rows of Lecture Room 9 getting increasingly annoyed, I felt like shouting out at this man: ‘But what about money? What if you don’t live in London?’ Not being the type of person to interrupt people while they’re speaking, I just angrily waited it out. I was dejected, but really, I wasn’t surprised. This man was only telling the truth, regurgitating the unfortunate reality I have encountered time and time again, in many different conversations.

“Exploitative unpaid work is unfair but even worse is that it closes doors to those who don’t have the means to undertake it”

This moment of realisation had already dawned on me just a few weeks before, as I was talking on the phone to a man who worked on a BBC drama and paused awkwardly when I told him I lived up north. And it dawned again when I was reading Laura Bates’ new book this week, in which she asks a successful magazine journalist how she arrived at her position. Her response? That she was lucky enough to have a friend support her financially while she did unpaid work to get her foot in the door.

The young Paul McCartneys, John Lennons, and David Bowies once had the opportunity to reach the dizzying heights of musical fame in spite of their working-class backgrounds. In her youth, my mother was given money by Hull City Council to attend a National Youth Theatre summer course in London. Such things seem barely conceivable in 2016, where half of British Oscar winners and more than half of the leading print journalists are privately educated, in spite of the fact that only seven per cent of students attend independent schools. This is an age where those who want to attend drama schools face fees just to audition – often only to be rejected – and where we’ll turn over to the BBC drama The Night Manager and not think it unusual that three of the leading actors all went to the same prep school. 

The fault falls largely with those companies who run unpaid or severely underpaid schemes. But this state of affairs is also the consequence of a Conservative-led government which has ruthlessly slashed student support, reduced funding opportunities in the arts for young people, and promoted a cold, monetised vision of education in which, if something has no obvious fiscal value, it has no value at all.

Cambridge theatre has a class problem

Young people from less affluent backgrounds are increasingly faced with the reality that choosing to study or attempting to work in the arts and humanities is a huge gamble which they can’t afford to take, often finding themselves in schools where such subjects face budget cuts or are even totally removed from the curriculum. Their well-heeled, more fortunate counterparts, however, are able to chase up any studies or work that they so desire, confident in the knowledge that, should they be unsuccessful, they have a safety net to fall back upon. The exploitative nature of unpaid work is deeply unfair but perhaps even worse is that it closes the doors to so many who simply don’t have the means to undertake it, barring them from ever making their first steps. 

I don’t mean to say that I expect opportunities to be handed to me on a silver platter. I’m well aware that simply going to Cambridge lends me privileges others don’t get. But it is deeply frustrating to find that many of the roads into the creative industry have hefty tolls. For the poorer young person living outside of London, it increasingly seems that the pursuit of theatre, journalism, and the arts frequently lies out of reach, sold instead to those with deep enough pockets, and undoubtedly leaving a wealth of talent out in the cold