With teacher recruitment at crisis levels, eastern Europe’s borders in turmoil, and welfare reform threatening to pull the country into militant armies of haves and have-nots, it might seem wilfully niche to choose to write here about the Emmys. But my theme is really an important British industry – television – winning success abroad even though it is being undermined by a weird and dogmatic attempt by the government to rein it in at home.
Last Sunday, America’s Primetime Emmy awards were happily generous to two shows, both from HBO. The Outstanding Drama award, as well as an avalanche of others, went to Game of Thrones. Veep, my comedy show about the vice-president-who-becomes-president, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, won Outstanding Comedy, as well as awards for the writing and the cast. I’m mentioning all this, not to toot any trumpets, but to point out that both these shows benefit from a huge input of British talent. Veep is a very British show. It’s written by British writers, uses British directors, is scored by British musicians, and is edited and post-produced by British editors, sound designers and effects supervisors. The vast bulk of the work done on Veep is done in the UK. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones is based mainly in studios and locations in Belfast, with a mostly British cast and a regiment of skilled British crew members working on the fantasy show’s distinctive look.
It should therefore be a cause for celebration that the two shows voted by the American TV industry as most outstanding have such deep UK origins. As I pointed out in my recent MacTaggart Lecture in Edinburgh, the British television industry is in a uniquely strong position at the moment.
It has clout and recognition abroad and it wins, through the voice of the BBC, an international respect and influence that far exceeds the cost to run it. Our TV is part of a media and communications industry that makes up nearly 8% of our GDP. That’s more than the car, oil and gas industries combined. Add to that the fact that more international television is coming here to be filmed. Places such as Cardiff are not just the base for Doctor Who, but also host the filming of major US TV shows such as Da Vinci’s Demons. Fox also shot the latest season of 24 in London, and Outlander for Starz films is based in Glasgow. In all, it is estimated US TV production in the UK contributes well over £200m a year into the economy.
You’d think that the UK TV industry would be one supported and respected by politicians looking to keep the economy growing. George Osborne spent last week in China selling the stuffing out of other British businesses, loud and proud, but a more ignominious fate was reserved for our TV industry. This took the form of civil servants seen scuttling into Whitehall buildings carelessly flashing in front of the cameras highly confidential documents about the selling-off of Channel 4 while, in public, ministers from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport denied they were ever considering any such thing.
While our glorious car, oil and weapons systems industries get bigged up by ministers abroad, at home there’s a choreographed attack on the BBC by Conservative MPs, possibly mounted on the basis that they get asked difficult questions on Newsnight and Radio 4’s Today programme.
There are also warnings that the corporation’s scale and ambition might be cut back, and a root-and-branch “review” of the BBC has been set up. The government says it wants a fair debate, but stuffs its panel of experts with mostly business and management figures who have in the past been critical of the BBC and the licence fee. I don’t mind them being on it, but I do mind the woeful partiality of the process when it doesn’t also seek, in equal measure, the views of programme-makers and seasoned production figures. You can’t have a root-and-branch review if you only talk to one branch.
John Whittingdale, the culture secretary, protests that there’s no campaign to rein in the BBC. But then he protested there was no campaign to sell off C4 either. At the Royal Television Society conference two weeks ago, he protested it was not his intention to tell the BBC what programmes it should make and when it should put them out, before telling the BBC that its main news shouldn’t be broadcast at 10pm and maybe Strictly Come Dancing shouldn’t be shown on Saturday night. It’s a common political device, this one, to deny you’re going to do something and then proceed as if the act of denial is sufficient excuse for you then to go on and do it.
It’s difficult to know why all this is happening, especially in the absence of any sound economic rationale. The protests of the DCMS that they’re not attacking the BBC are, for example, knocked sideways by something a Downing Street adviser confessed in frustration to me a week ago. He said: “The trouble is we can’t put anything out there without having to get past BBC News first.” As if having to deal with what is universally acknowledged to be the best, fairest and most professional news service in the world was a monstrous inconvenience for any government.
Here, I think, is the heart of the problem. The government is annoyed that the BBC exists, that it’s successful and that it’s popular. The same goes for C4. It dresses up its attack on these bodies as some form of efficiency drive, while in reality it undermines confidence in them, batters their morale and lays so many question-marks against their future that real damage is being done to their ability to play a full role in the international market.
At the very time when any sane economist, financial adviser or management expert would urge bolstering and expanding our evidently successful TV industry, the government seeks to belittle and cheapen it. It’s a mad financial strategy, and an urgent warning to us not to believe those headlines that say that barmy economics is the monopoly of Jeremy Corbyn.
In truth, we’re good at TV. HBO, which swept the board at the Emmys, is very open about taking the BBC as its inspiration. While the other US networks churned out television by committee and commercial pressure, HBO wanted to capture quality and looked at how the BBC nurtured writers and programme-makers, and gave them freedom to push at boundaries and to aim high.
In an international market, it’s no longer an option just to sit back and wait for foreign production to come to us. We have to take our own TV talent and content and sell it abroad. The competition is no longer between the BBC, ITV, C4 and Sky, but between all UK output and the rest of the world.
If the government really wants British television to maximise its profits and become world-beating, it needs to abandon talk of cuts, reining in, trimming back, curtailing and selling off. Instead, it needs to let the talent know it has its full support to unleash its potential around the world. The alternative just isn’t good business.
