It’s all kicking off at the BBC: 450 staff have lost their job, journalists are being taken off specific programmes to work in centralised teams and the production of in-depth filmmaking is also being slashed.

Part of me thinks, why should I care? I don’t get my news from the BBC, I pick and choose what I want to read from various outlets – and in that sense I’m stereotypical for someone of my ‘demographic’: young, working class and black.

But I do care because the BBC – and more specifically the Victoria Derbyshire programme – gave me a break in 2016 that changed my life, and now the show has been axed.

I’d grown up surrounded by gun and knife crime – when I was just nine I saw my cousin stabbed and murdered, which left me severely traumatised. By 2016, I was living in temporary accommodation after fleeing domestic violence.

Then, one day, I was walking along the road with my friend, Sarah, a freelance journalist, when we saw a man carrying something in his hand. Assuming it was a gun, I pushed Sarah off the road into an alley away from any danger. It wasn’t until he got closer that we could see the guy was actually holding a small, black piece of gym equipment, not a weapon.

The incident really left us shaken and the fact that I had immediately thought ‘gun’ when I saw something in that man’s hand made me realise just how severely I was suffering from PTSD. Our experience also left us with the sense that the constant violence that surrounds us – even when we were just walking down the street – was traumatising a whole community. It prompted Sarah and I to work on short film together about post traumatic stress disorder and gang violence.

We pitched it to the editors of the Victoria Derybshire show and never expected in a million years that they would say yes, but they did. I also never expected to go on to make another two films for the show. But that’s what happened.

And I didn’t just get to ‘make’ films, I ended up reporting on them too, putting my face on camera and into millions of homes.

The programme didn’t just change my life though, it had an impact on the lives other people I know. A year after my first film, I made another on temporary housing and domestic violence victims, after telling the team that I’d been stuck in temporary housing for over four years.

Instead of being dismissed as a moaner (‘yes, but you’ve got a roof over your head’ is something I’ve heard a lot), I was taken seriously.

After the film’s transmission, people started getting in touch with me and I helped a number of women get better accommodation. I also learned that if your name is on the BBC news website as a reporter, councils are often much nicer to you.

It showed me how important and life changing journalism can be. How it highlights the issues that matter to people ‘like me’ –  people from poorer families, who might not have attended school, and who might have lots of problems with mental health, housing and just keeping their heads above water. The very people journalists should be talking to, but aren’t.

Since then I’ve helped the show on numerous occasions to find guests for discussions that no one else on BBC news makes the time to have.

When the story broke about the cuts and the show being axed, I couldn’t believe it.

People like me don’t usually watch BBC news programmes because we don’t connect with them but the Victoria Derbyshire show was – and is – different. They regularly included working class voices in the coverage and lots of stories that impact mostly on women.

Their coverage of knife crime has been much more considered than most, too. They’ve let parents speak out about it, and had brilliant engagement on social media – another place the BBC fails with young, black (and white) people.

And what a reward they’ve been given for all that. Victoria and her team had to suffer the indignity of learning of the programme’s demise from an article in The Times – with gossip flying round before it was even made official. They are all extraordinarily hard working journalists who have behaved with dignity and grace under fire.

So I am going to write to the BBC and ask them to reconsider their decision. I doubt they’ll read it – I’m only a young, working class, black woman from Brixton, after all – but I need to do something before they remove the best grassroots news programme there is off air.

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