News

On Tuesday 30th June, departments and colleagues around the world came together to celebrate ITV Pride Day, the first of its kind.

With Pride parades cancelled up and down the country and around the world, ITV Pride, ITV’s LGBT+ colleague network, couldn’t celebrate Pride in the usual way of joining pride parades throughout the UK, and so decided to move the season of pride online.

And to mark the occasion ITV launched the shiny new ITV Pride LGBT+ pin badge. The pin, which is the ITV logo dressed in the colours of the pride flag, will hopefully become a familiar sight around ITV offices and on screen.

The day itself was celebrated with a number of interactive events for colleagues, including a Pride themed dance workout session with the fantastic Zumba instructor Fiona Ledgard, who provided high energy floor fillers by LGBTQ+ icons for us all to dance to.

Dr Ranj Singh, Ali Hannon and Ash Palmisciano came together with ITV Channel TV production journalist Liam McConkey to discuss labelling and intersectionality in LGBT+ Britain today. This event highlighted how important it is to support the LGBT+ community at this time, and gave advice to colleagues to help them feel more confident and comfortable in communicating with the LGBT+ community.

The evening saw our first virtual pride social event where ITV colleagues around the world came together to celebrate the day. From Jersey to Belfast, New York to Los Angeles, Sweden to The Netherlands and Germany to Australia, ITV Pride Day went global!

We even celebrated the season of Pride with our viewers. ITV Daytime’s Loose Women held their own ‘Pride Week’, Richard Arnold held his own Global Pride, and longtime ally Lorraine reflected the LGBT+ community on screen throughout Pride month. At the same time, the casts of Coronation Street & Emmerdale shared their messages of support for the LGBT+ community online, BritBox pulled together a fantastic collection of LGBT+ programming and the team at The Chase created a special set of Pride themed questions for their social media following.

Given that the current climate has us working from home and self isolating, ITV Pride has adapted with new ways of coming together. The network has weekly social lunch gatherings through video calls, where colleagues from around the regions come together to chat, getting away from their work from home station.

The network has come a long way from its formation back in 2012, the same year ITV became the first broadcaster to make it into the Stonewall Equality Index. We’ve launched LGBT+ training sessions for non-LGBT+ managers, introduced a Transitioning at Work Policy for colleagues, and we collaborate regularly with ITV’s other social networks Able, Balance, Embrace and The Women’s Network. At the beginning of 2019 we launched ITV Pridecast, our LGBT+ colleague podcast which was later rolled out to the public and is now global.

As the network has grown over the years we hope ITV Pride Day will also grow and become a permanent fixture in ITV’s calendar but we hope to make it even bigger and better next year! Watch this space.