the times | Saturday January 1 2022 31
Comment
American streamers and British producers has shifted
dramatically. In 2016, Netflix’s content budget was
$6.9 billion, the BBC’s was £1.9 billion ($2.3 billion)
and ITV’s £1 billion ($1.2 billion). In 2021, Netflix’s was
$17 billion, the BBC’s was £1.4 billion and ITV’s
£1.1 billion.
The balance of power will shift further towards the
streamers as the content wars drive spending higher.
In 2022, the streamers’ budgets are together expected
to rise to $115 billion.
The flood of money is great for British talent and
technicians but it is pushing up costs for British
producers. The BBC reckons that prices have risen by
30 to 50 per cent in the past five years. Others
put the figure higher. Gabrielle Tana,
who produced The Dig, a film about the discovery
of an Anglo-Saxon ship buried at Sutton Hoo, says
that the cost of making a movie has risen by a
quarter in two years. “I’m in pre-production for
a very British story that we’re going to shoot in
the spring. Right now it’s hard to crew up.”
Working in London is particularly tough.
Steve McQueen, an Oscar-winning British
director, made only three of his five-part
series of films on the West Indian
experience in Britain in London, where the
stories were set; the final two films had to be
made in Wolverhampton because the cost of
production in the capital is so high.
It’s not just technical skills and studio
space that are hard to come by; the
streamers are also winning over stars.
by a streaming algorithm to maximise their target
audience globally.” He promised that in the
forthcoming white paper on broadcasting the
government would require public-service broadcasters
to produce more “distinctively British” content.
The film and TV business, whether inside or outside
the BBC, is gunning for a big increase in the licence
fee. More money for the BBC means more money for
productions, and there’s also a concern about the
growing cultural dominance of internet giants —
though people in the business are unwilling to voice it
publicly, for they know on which side their bread is
buttered these days. Scepticism about the cultural
value of the streamers’ content thus creates a rare
sympathy between the government and the generally
leftish world of film and television.
Certainly, the rootlessness that Whittingdale points
to shows up in some of the streamers’ programmes.
Netflix’s Sex Education, for instance, was filmed in
Wales, though you wouldn’t know it from anything
other than the landscape. The students at “Moordale
Secondary School” have accents from all over the UK,
play American football, don’t wear uniform and use
Breakfast Club-style lockers. “There is a bit of both
worlds, decidedly, in the series,” Gillian Anderson, its
star, told Radio Times, “and the hope is that the
Americans won’t notice.”
Yet by no means all streaming products suffer from
this sense of dislocation. After all, the global market is
made up of lots of local markets, composed of people
who want programmes that speak to them. That is
why one of the ways in which the streamers are
competing with each other is to invest more in local
content. Disney, which is running to catch up with
Netflix, is estimated to have a budget of $23 billion for
2022, bigger even than its rival. It recently announced
a slate of original British content.I
f programmes aimed at Britons are written with a
tin ear they will fail, especially when they touch on
subjects close to the natives’ hearts. The Crown has
perfect cultural pitch and manifests a degree of
historical specificity that asks quite a lot of foreign
audiences. The series probably benefited from the
distance that US money gave it from the British
establishment: it’s hard to imagine the BBC taking so
many risks in its relationship with the monarchy.
Not that the BBC could have afforded it, anyway.
The Crown is rumoured to cost $13 million an episode;
whether or not that’s true, the production values
suggest a budget way out of the corporation’s league.
Spreading the money thick makes a difference to the
quality of the programming. Gabrielle Tana says of
The Dig: “Netflix enabled us to make it the way we did.
We had two weeks’ extra shooting, fabulous heads of
department, and could pay them well.” It also gave the
film a global platform. “More people probably saw it
because it was on Netflix,” added Tana.
One of the arguments for public funding is that
commercial producers lack originality. That may be
true of the movie business, which is churning out an
endless series of indistinguishable superhero films. But
the streamers’ business model, points out Steve
Knight, is different. “In the movies, if something works
they have to keep doing it. The streamers have to
attract new subscribers, so it’s not enough to keep
doing the same thing. They have to try something
different.” That’s what induced Netflix to try to sell a
story of early 20th-century Brummie gangsters
around the world, and thus Peaky Blinders became a
global phenomenon.
Streamers are using great local material that
indigenous producers have ignored. Apple is televising
Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, the first book in a
tremendous series of funny, gloomy, spy thrillers,
deeply rooted in London and the British character,
and proof that creative humans prepared to take risks
are at the company’s helm. Jackson Lamb, played by
Gary Oldman, is one of literature’s most unattractive
heroes. Any algorithm that came up with such a foul-
mouthed, flatulent protagonist would have been
swiftly binned as defective.
In this new world, the BBC and ITV are struggling
to find their place. The distribution channel which
they used to own in this country, broadcasting, is
evaporating and they have failed to win a place among
the giants that dominate the new one. As the war
between the streamers intensifies they will be further
marginalised. ITV will probably end up as just another
producer, and as the BBC’s reach shrinks it will have to
find a different role and develop new arguments to
justify the licence fee.
This is the best of times and the worst of times in
television. For those watching and making television,
it’s the best; for the broadcasters, the worst.b
a
fName any big British actor, writer or director and
they’re likely to be working for one of the streaming
companies. As costs rise, the BBC is commissioning
less original content and using more old stuff. Repeats
on BBC1 have increased by 22 per cent over five years.
The combination of less original programming with
unlimited choice elsewhere is making it hard to retain
viewers. Broadcast TV viewing is down by a quarter
over the past decade and by two-thirds among young
people. Even taking into account the numbers
watching through video-on-demand services, things
aren’t looking good. The percentage of British adults
who use BBC TV each week has fallen from 81 per
cent to 76 per cent since 2017, according to the
National Audit Office.
The BBC and ITV are still making some great
programmes but these days viewers often find them
through streaming services. The BBC’s drama The
Salisbury Poisonings, for instance, was fourth in
Netflix’s top ten shows in the UK in Christmas week.
When Netflix screens other producers’ programmes,
the benefits largely go to Netflix. The performance of
ITV’s share price is a measure of what the markets
think of a company that relies on advertising and
programme sales rather than subscription. ITV’s share
price is half what it was five years ago; Netflix’s has
risen five-fold over that period.
The BBC and ITV have tried to compete with the
streamers by collaborating to create their own
streaming service, Britbox, but it hasn’t got off the
ground. It has half a million subscribers in the UK and
two million globally. Netflix has about 13 million in the
UK and more than 200 million globally.
The BBC’s revenue from the licence fee is falling,
and as the alternatives to the BBC proliferate, so
resistance to paying a tax that costs each household as
much as subscriptions to Netflix and Disney+ put
together seems to be on the rise. According to recent
polling, most people think the licence fee should be
scrapped. Evasion is estimated to be up from 5 per
cent to 7.25 per cent since 2014.
The BBC’s future depends on the licence fee, which
the government determines every seven years. A new
settlement is due early next year. The signs are that the
government will freeze the licence fee temporarily on
the grounds that people are struggling with higher
prices in too many areas of life. That will push the
longer-term decision a couple of years into the
future, leaving the BBC with all to play for.
The BBC’s best card is that it is vital to British
culture. Its chairman, Richard Sharp, told the
conference of the Voice of the Listener &
Viewer in November that the programmes
the streamers make “very rarely reflect or add
to our cultural story... We run the risk that,
in ten years’ time, the UK might no longer
have a player that can reflect, respond to the
needs of, and speak directly to its people.”
The government shares this concern.
John Whittingdale, the media
minister, said in a speech to the
Royal Television Society’s
convention in September that
many of the programmes the
streamers make “have no real
identity, no genuine sense of
place. Some of them look like
they’ve been cleverly generatedOlivia Colman in The
Crown, which also starred
Josh O’Connor and Emma
Corrin as Charles and
Diana, top right. Inset,
Gillian Anderson in Sex
Education. Below, Gary
Oldman playing
Jackson LambDES WILLIE; LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX VIA AP; APPLE TV