Some of Britain’s best-loved and most watched programmes, including EastEnders and Coronation Street, are to be monitored for their ethnic, gender and sexual orientation diversity as part of a new scheme to be rolled out eventually across the whole of British television. The BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky are all taking part in Project Diamond, a scheme which will gather data on the gender, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation and gender identity of all key staff working in television production, from the actors to the sound technicians. All of the information will be fed into an encrypted computer system which will anonymise the data and allow trends to be monitored. The organisation behind Project Diamond, the Creative Diversity Network (CDN) has said that initial data will present a broad picture analysis, but it hopes to be able to monitor individual shows within time, The Guardian has reported. The BBC’s flagship soap opera EastEnders, which depicts life in the East End of London, came under fire two years ago when it was noted that its cast of characters were almost twice as white as, and considerably younger than, the real population of East London. At the time Diane Coyle, the