30 Saturday January 1 2022 | the timesComment
credit in 2019 generated £6.1 billion of
spending that would not otherwise
have happened. This isn’t just boosting
jobs, it’s helping exports. According to
Enders Analysis, a media consultancy,
Britain’s audio-visual exports doubled in
the five years to 2019, to more than £2
billion. That should give tourism a boost.
According to research commissioned by the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 15
countries, two thirds of people who have visited
Britain were motivated partly by seeing British
landmarks or locations on film or TV.
But the audio-visual business is not just an industry.
It’s also a part of our culture, perhaps the most
important one these days. By telling us stories about
our past and our present it shapes the way we think of
ourselves. Films and TV dramas provide us with a way
to celebrate our achievements and reflect on our
problems. They are as important to 21st-century
Britain as novels were to the 19th century. And it’s not
just us that we need to think about when we consider
the material we’re producing today: future generations
will look to film and TV to understand what our
society was like, just as we read Dickens and Eliot to
understand Victorian Britain.
There are good reasons to worry about the cultural
impact of the streaming boom. Increasingly, the big
decisions about what British viewers see on TV are
made in Los Angeles and New York. That’s a function
of what’s happened to money and to viewing figures.
In the past five years the balance of power betweenThe gold rush
is global but
Britain, the
location of
choice for TV
and film outside
North America,
is getting an
outsize share
“
Britain’s great
TV and film
boom has left
the BBC behind
weekend essay
Billions of pounds are being spent in this country by
the US giants of the industry but the future is looking
ever bleaker for broadcasters who rely on taxation or
advertising rather than subscription, says Emma Duncan
H
ertfordshire, not a county redolent of
glamour, is swiftly becoming the Hollywood
of Europe. Three vast studio complexes are
being built or are at the planning stage there
— Sky’s 28-acre development at Elstree; a
£700 million investment by Sunset Studios, which
produced La La Land and Zoolander, at Broxbourne;
and a 91-acre site at Hertswood, next to the Sky
complex. This spring, the county will see an invasion
of orcs, trolls and hobbits: according to Variety, the
film industry’s bible, Amazon has chosen Bovingdon
airfield, a mile-long strip between Chesham and
Hemel Hempstead that was once home to General
Eisenhower’s personal B-17, as one of the two main
locations for its TV adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
Bray Studios near Maidenhead will be the other.
The announcement in August that Amazon was
shifting production of The Lord of the Rings from New
Zealand to Britain was a big vote of confidence for
British TV and film production. Budgets tend to be
closely guarded secrets but the New Zealanders let slip
that the first series cost $465 million, which would
almost certainly make it the most expensive series
ever made. “It’s like a Honda factory coming to the
UK,” says Ben Roberts, chief executive of the British
Film Institute.
The money flooding into television is the result of a
boom in production by US streaming companies.
Disney+, Netflix, Amazon and Apple are the main
ones available in this country. They’re changing what
we watch and how we watch it: a decade after
streaming services got off the ground here, two thirds
of households subscribe to at least one. The nation
settles down to choose its evening’s entertainment
with a menu from which it can select pretty much
anything from anywhere.
What the streamers make and where they make it is
also having an economic and cultural impact. It’s
leading to an unprecedented boom in the film and TV
business but it’s also creating difficulties for British
broadcasters. Although Britain has a long history of
making good television, power in the business lies
with those that are not just producers but also
distributors of content — and they’re American. Just
as America dominates the movie and tech businesses,
so it has come to dominate television.
Like most big economic changes of the past few
decades, this one can be traced back to the internet.
Because in the digital world people can watch what
they like when they like, viewers are prepared to fork
out for subscriptions to streaming services. Covid,
which trapped people on their sofas, gave digital
entertainment a further boost. Growing demand has
led to a flood of investment as a result of competitionbetween the streaming companies and the film
studios that have moved into the increasingly lucrative
TV business.
The gold rush is global but Britain, the location of
choice for film and TV production outside North
America, is getting an outsize share. After a slump
during lockdown, spending on high-end TV
production in this country bounced back to £4.14
billion between October 2020 and September this
year, nearly twice what it was for the same period
in 2018-19 and ten times what it was in 2013.
Some £1.8 billion was spent on films in 2020-
21, a bit less than before the pandemic,
because movie production takes longer to
gear up. In some cases — The Crown
and Bridgerton — Britain was the
obvious choice; in others — Sex
Education and The Lord of the Rings —
less so.
Growth is set to continue, for the
boom in demand for British services
has led to a shortage of facilities,
which has led to a flood of investment
in the business. Around the home
counties — the film business isn’t going
to do much for levelling up — studios
are expanding and new ones being built.
As well as the new complexes in
Hertfordshire there are numerous plans for
new and expanded studios. Among them,
Pinewood Group, which owns Shepperton
Studios in Surrey, where Netflix is based, is doubling
the size of the facility; Eastbrook Studios is developing
facilities in Dagenham, east London, at a cost of $300
million.
Part of the appeal of filming in Britain is the skilled
workforce. It’s not so much the high-end talent, such
as Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown, Jesse
Armstrong, creator of Succession, and Steve Knight,
creator of Peaky Blinders, that make Britain an
attractive location — Hollywood has always shipped
in British creatives — as the depth of technical skill.
Britain has great film crews, editors and special effects
technicians; and, from a producer’s point of view,
British unions are attractively weak. The threat of a
strike in Hollywood has enhanced the appeal of
working in this country. “LA and New York are heavily
unionised,” says a British producer working with an
American studio. “Our unions are pretty toothless.”
The government is lending a hand, too. The
industry gets a tax break worth more than £1 billion a
year. As an industrial policy, this looks to have been
pretty successful. According to Screen Business, a
report for the BFI published this year, £1.1 billion of taxcr
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