A career in TV: love affair or abusive relationship?

This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the immense structural challenges of working life in the UK TV sector, and the wider societal implications of the growing crisis faced by many freelance workers in the last two years.

Drawing on new interviews and survey data acquired in 2024, this paper explores the experience of a screen career in terms of a romance: a love affair with one’s working life and aspirations that is initially exhilarating, self-sacrificing and passionate, and encourages a growing self-identity inextricably linked with the beloved career. But this carries a corresponding risk of disillusionment, personal loss and ultimately bereavement if the the relationship proves unsustainable. Several interviewees refer to their career not in terms of love, but as an abusive relationship: amazing and addictive when it is working, but toxic and destructive when it isn’t.

The paper teases out the ‘love what you do’ trope, the emphasis on ‘passion’ in entry level aspirations, and the sense throughout of a love affair with a career that asks for much sacrifice, and stakes a strong claim to an individual’s self-identity, but pre-conditions entry level workers to the symbolic violence of unpaid work and self-exploitation; the aspirational passion of entry level may soon give way to a passion of a different sort, in its more Latinate sense of suffering. While some can eventually move on positively to other careers, the fundamental linking of work and self-identity is clearly articulated – in a way that can make career exit a profoundly traumatic separation.