Renowned journalist and TV presenter Jeremy Paxman - best known for asking the same question a dozen times - has highlighted the desperate struggle of the middle-class white man in the television industry.
In a interview at the Edinburgh festival, Paxman, who reportedly gets by on a £1.1 million salary, suggests that any men trying to break into TV should "give up all hope" and that being a white middle-class male was "the worst thing" you could be in the industry.
He is right of course. It is hard to spot a middle-class white male fronting the shows on our box these days. Except on Newsnight. Oh - and BBC News, Channel 4 News, ITV News, Question Time, The Daily Politics, The One Show, University Challenge, Have I Got News For You, Mock The Week, Would I Lie To You, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, The Graham Norton Show, The Sunday Night Project, The X-Factor, Eggheads, Rogue Traders, Masterchef, Match of the Day, Top Gear, etc.
And as for the management - well white men are all but obsolete. As long as you overlook Mark Thompson, Mark Byford, Andy Duncan, John Smith, Mark Sharman, Jeremy Darroch, James Murdoch, etc.
He is not the first high profile TV figure to raise the issue. Back in 2002 Michael Beurk (during a rant on a channel 5 show that gave celebs a chance to rant) similarly claimed that "all the big jobs in broadcasting are held by women" and that a "shift" in the balance of power between the sexes had gone too far.
A few years later TV astronomer Patrick Moore told the world how he yearned for the good old days when men read the news, went as far as to say he had stop watching Star Trek because they "went PC" by making "women commanders" and then pulled out all the stops by blaming women for the rise of everything from soap operas to quizzes.
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