From The X Factor’s showdown with The Voice to cookery wars between The Great British Bake Off and Britain’s Best Bakery, viewers are increasingly finding the TV schedule awash with copycat shows.
Scan the recent programming lineups of the main UK broadcasters, and you’ll find a wealth of “me-too” offerings. ITV’s Britain’s Best Gardens and BBC2’s The Big Allotment Challenge. BBC1’s The Big Painting Challenge and Channel 4’s Watercolour Challenge. BBC1’s Countryfile and ITV’s Countrywise.
It’s hard to miss the similarities between the ill-fated travelogue The Wonder of Britain – fronted for ITV by the newly poached Julia Bradbury – and BBC4’s expedition series Wainwright Walks, presented by, er, Julia Bradbury.
And how about Sky1’s Bring The Noise, a music and comedy show, which has pulled in former The X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger and The Voice coach Ricky Wilson to help give it a running start with viewers?
“TV is all about fads and fashions,” says Ben Preston, editor of the Radio Times. “When something like X Factor takes flight you know there are fraught meetings at the BBC for a talent format of their own. In the end they bought The Voice. I think it is absolutely legitimate and what smart television companies do. Sniff the air, the zeitgeist, and surf the wave of viewer interest.”
Copycatting has a long tradition in the TV industry and has even been given the parody treatment in the BBC2 satire W1A – a brainstorming session saw ideas for shows including Britain’s Tastiest Village and Family Face Off – but there are those who seriously ask whether the current apparent glut represents a new conservatism creeping into UK programme commissioning.
A number of TV industry executives maintain that this conservatism may somewhat paradoxically stem from the competition-fuelling rise of the US on-demand rivals such as Netflix and Amazon, which are investing billions of dollars into programming.
Their argument runs that with the control of the living room no longer in the hands of the few broadcasters that for decades effectively owned the traditional TV schedule, programme commissioners have become more risk-averse, opting to more frequently serve up copies of their rivals’ hits to keep audiences rather than perhaps launch genuinely new, unproven formats and risk seeing eyeballs shift to their new competitors.
However, Wayne Garvie, chief creative officer of international production at Sony Pictures Television, argues that broadcasters do not overly rely on tit-for-tat style programming. “There is no more or less copying of shows now than there has been,” he says. “It is rare a copycat does as well, or better, than the original show. If you are a broadcaster in this era where it is difficult to get cut-through, you’re not going to get it doing a pale version of another show. You want to be a leader, not a follower. And just because two people are making different shows but the subject area is similar doesn’t necessarily make it right to brand it a copycat.”
Sony Pictures Television is working with Netflix on its first UK commission, the £100m epic royal drama The Crown, and Garvie says that the arrival of the deep-pocketed on-demand services is underpinning a creative surge in programming.
“The impact of the rise of cable drama and now Netflix and Amazon has been a positive thing,” he says. “There has been a positive shift in what people expect and [commissioners] are prepared to do. There is more money around and more commissioning of idiosyncratic content, and that is influencing traditional broadcasters.”
The reason that broadcasters can freely rip off rivals shows is largely down to the late Hughie Green, the creator and presenter of talent contest Opportunity Knocks.
In the 1980s Green unsuccessfully launched a legal action for copyright infringement by a rip-off of his show in New Zealand. His loss also set the legal precedent in the UK.
“Strictly speaking there is nothing stopping anyone copying the concept of a TV programme,” says Akash Sachdeva, intellectual property and media lawyer at Cooley. “If a show is expressed in a different way it is not likely to infringe copyright, even if you were to assume some form of copyright might exist in the first place.”
But while broadcasters have the legal freedom to ruthlessly mine rivals’ ideas, does that mean they should? Is it best for audiences and, intrinsically linked and equally crucially, advertisers that spend £4.1bn on TV commercials annually?
“Copycat shows tend to be of successful originals and be of a high quality which attract sizable audiences,” says Phil Hall, head of trading and investment at Mediacom UK. “That is exactly what our advertisers want. ‘Copycat’ sounds pejorative when I don’t think the shows are a bad thing. All programmes live and die by the numbers of viewers that watch them. Successful broadcasters have a bedrock of reliable shows which bring in audiences, and they may be conservative, but you then have the luxury of launching new and more challenging formats.”
For viewers the fragmentation of the TV viewing market has been empowering, making it perilous for broadcasters to rely on a surfeit of facsimile fare. “You don’t just have five channels any more and that means there is huge pressure to be competitive and surf the wave,” says Preston. “Viewers get bored. They vote with their remote.”
