Jane Tranter’s first job as head of production for the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, was to sell Top Gear to the US.
So it seems appropriate that on the day we speak, as she prepares to return from Los Angeles to the UK to start her own production company, that Top Gear, or rather Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, are dominating the headlines once again.
Tranter says it was a “smart buy” for Amazon, which has signed up three series of the as-yet-unnamed show for its on-demand TV service, Amazon Prime.
“It’s going to have a stickiness to it and the brand recognition of those three names, even though they are not bringing the Top Gear title with them, will really do something, whatever the show turns out to be like.”
Tranter wonders if something will be lost in the mix when the three presenters no longer have their BBC paymasters to rebel against, and in the absence of the sort of public and regulatory scrutiny that only licence fee-funded content can generate.
“That was part of the dramatic theme of Top Gear, the baddest boy in class, there was a deliberate feeling of everybody straining at the leash,” she says.
“I don’t know if something will be missed when they can do whatever they want. It is going to be interesting to see what they make of it.”
The Amazon deal is a sign of how times have changed since Tranter, the BBC’s former head of fiction, an all-encompassing role that included drama, film, comedy and acquisitions, arrived in LA in 2009 with a brief to build Worldwide’s scripted and non-scripted business and deliver the best of the BBC to the US.
“It was before the explosion of cable, before Mad Men had totally bitten out here and before Downton Abbey [the ITV drama made by NBC Universal-owned Carnival Films] which opened the door to period and much more cable drama,” says Tranter.
For someone steeped in drama – Spooks, State of Play, Life on Mars, Bleak House – the Top Gear pitch was a novel experience, albeit a successful one, as the show is now in its fifth series on History. It is the corporation’s most valuable show, generating £50m a year for Worldwide. “Mark Thompson [the then BBC director general] said to me before I left the BBC, ‘OK Jane, go off, good luck, do what you need to but whatever you do don’t fuck up Top Gear,’” she remembers.
“I was determined to sell this thing but it was kind of embarrassing, the actual process of selling the show, because it’s fair to say no-one expected ‘from the producers of Little Dorrit, here comes Top Gear US.’”
The return of Doctor Who, in 2005, is Tranter’s most lasting legacy in her time in charge of BBC drama. It was produced in Cardiff, and she will return to south Wales with her new production company Bad Wolf, set up with her long-time colleague Julie Gardner, another key player in the return of Doctor Who.
It is an area that both women know well – south Wales was also home to Da Vinci’s Demons, BBC Worldwide’s historical fantasy drama series with Starz that enabled the building of the giant Bay Studios in Swansea.
The local creative industries have been transformed over the last decade, and Tranter’s new venture has the backing of the Welsh government, with a staggered loan depending on future performance. Tranter will move to Wales, with Gardner remaining in LA, so they’ve got both west coasts covered.
“Working in Wales reminds me enormously of working in New York,” says Tranter, in terms of the drive and the focus of the workforce, although she concedes: “I am probably the only person in the world who would make that comment.”
She returns to the UK with the future of her beloved BBC – “probably only a shrink would be able to work out why I feel so closely tied to that place” – up for grabs, its future funding and remit thrown into doubt by charter review and the government’s green paper on the future of the BBC.
Culture secretary John Whittingdale questioned whether the BBC should continue to strive to be “all things to all people” or whether it should focus on a more narrow range of services.
“He just left part of the sentence off,” says Tranter. “The BBC should not be ‘all things to all people, all the time’.
“That is a very different sentence and actually if you are a public service broadcaster and you are asking people to pay a licence fee the BBC should mean something to all people, it should be the people’s broadcaster. To think the BBC should be made for a cultural elite with a more narrowcast is patronising.
“One thing that really strikes me is how much time politicians have got to tell the BBC what programmes they should be making. You wouldn’t get Barack Obama doing that over here.”
The overhaul of the BBC is also likely to include a newly commercial in-house production department, freshly renamed BBC Studios and put under the auspices of former BBC1 controller Peter Salmon.
“I have got very strong views about BBC Studios and they may not be the BBC’s,” says Tranter. “What they need to look at is why was it once the most exciting place in the industry to work in and why is it not now.
“I always felt the BBC was a really cool place to work, where you could make the kind of programmes you couldn’t necessarily get your hands on anywhere else. For me it was just really exciting and energising and challenging and they need to put that feeling back.”
In more than six years at BBC Worldwide, Tranter is particularly proud of Getting On, HBO’s version of the Jo Brand hospital sitcom that aired in the UK on BBC4, and another UK adaptation, Criminal Justice.
Based on the BBC1 series by Peter Moffat which starred Ben Whishaw and Maxine Peake, the much anticipated adaptation was a passion project of the late James Gandolfini, who starred in the pilot and whose role has been taken by John Turturro.
“We first talked about doing a reformat of Criminal Justice in 2009 and at the end of July 2015 we are editing with another six months to go. If I could define my time out here by one piece it would be that one,” says Tranter.
“It’s been through so many twists and turns and ups and downs. Jim Gandolfini became a great friend and taught me so much about the pressures of being an enormous star and how that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your soul or your humanity. He was just the very best of us.”
A Doctor Who film is also in development by BBC Worldwide, dating as far back as 2011 or more, but appears unlikely to reach the big screen any time soon. Tranter declines to comment.
Showrunner Steven Moffat said earlier this year: “You can’t make a movie that damages the TV series. I’m sure there’s money to be made out of it but that’s not the point, is it? We are British, the BBC. We are there for the art.”
For now Tranter’s thoughts are turning to Bad Wolf and her new home in south Wales with her tenure at BBC Worldwide due to finish at the end of August.
The name Bad Wolf was taken from the title of one of the episodes of the first series of the new run of Doctor Who, and became a recurring warning sign to the Doctor in subsequent series.
“In a way when we look back we feel we were writing messages to ourselves across time that one day this would happen.”
Age 52
Education Kings College London (Eng Lit)
Career 1985 secretary, BBC radio drama department 1987 television floor manager, EastEnders, Bergerac, then assistant script editor, Casualty 1992 drama script editor then executive producer, Carlton Television 1997 head of drama serials, BBC 2000 controller of drama commissioning 2005 head of fiction 2009 executive vice-president of programming and production, BBC Worldwide
