Independent Television Production in the UK: From Cottage Industry to Big Business

By David Lee

This book is the first authoritative account of the UK’s independent television production sector, following the creation of Channel 4 in 1982. It examines the rise of a global industry, increasingly interconnected through format development, distribution, ancillary sales and rights. Drawing on case studies, interviews and policy analysis; the author considers the cultural politics behind the growth of the ‘indies’, the labour conditions for workers in this sector, and some of the key television programmes that have been created within it. Filling an important gap in our understanding, this book constitutes a comprehensive account of this vital cultural industry for students, academics and researchers working in the areas of the cultural and creative industries, media and cultural policy and television studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319716701

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2018

David LeeIndependent Television Production in the UKhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71670-1_1

1. Introduction: Situating Independent Television in the Cultural Economy

David Lee¹ 

(1)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Independent television production companies (or ‘indies’ as they are commonly known) have become the central means for delivering audiovisual content to broadcasters, in both commercial and public service broadcasting (PSB) environments.¹ In the UK, the independent television production sector (ITPS) is one of the most economically significant cultural industries, producing content across a wide and growing range of media and platforms. From humble origins, over the last three decades, the indies have been transformed from a cottage industry to a global media industry.² This remains an under-researched media industries sector, although there have been a number of important local studies carried out since the late 1980s (Lee 2011, 2012a, b; Sparks 1989; Zoellner 2009).

This book aims to provide a comprehensive account of the history and culture of the ITPS in the UK, and is based on interviews and extensive fieldwork with production staff working in the sector.³ It is motivated by a set of interrelated research themes that intersect throughout. Broadly, these fall into three areas: the political economic transformation of the indie sector since the early 1980s; the dynamics of creative labour within the industry; and the cultural value of the media content produced by the ITPS. In addressing these key themes, the book is structured in a broadly chronological and thematic fashion, focusing in turn on industry transformation, working conditions and creative output. In so doing, it aims to connect a political-economic account of a specific media industry with a production of culture perspective, a challenge increasingly being taken up by researchers in the field of media production studies (Paterson et al. 2016a, b). These themes are outlined in more detail below.

Broadcasting Transformation

Firstly, this book is concerned with providing a political-economic analysis of ongoing and deep transformations of the British indie sector, and broadcasting more generally. This analysis is provided in detail in Part 1 of the book, which explores the political-economic transformations within British independent broadcasting from the early 1980s onwards. Chapter 2 offers an account of the history of the British indies and Channel 4, and examines the emergence of the indie sector in the UK. It considers the relationship between the creation of Channel 4 in 1982 and the early British independent production companies. Chapter 3 takes this story further and investigates the emergence of creative industries policy in the late 1990s, the rise of the ‘super-indies’ and the current wave of mergers and consolidation that has swept through the industry in recent years.

Television production in the UK has undergone a series of profound changes. These changes are economic, technological and cultural, and represent a clear challenge to broadcast television’s cultural hegemony in a period of increasingly diverse and rich, cross-platform digital media content. Economically, the means of funding broadcasting is threatened by disruptive technological innovation. In the commercial sector, broadcasting has traditionally relied upon television advertising to fund production and generate profit. However, multi-channel television means that there are fewer viewers watching specific channels, leading to a dramatic fall in advertising rates (BARB 2016; Ofcom 2004).

Technologically, the rise of the Internet, and high-bandwidth download capacity, means that fewer people are watching live television, further impacting the advertising revenues that commercial broadcasters can command. However, the rise of television apps, the accelerating uptake of time-shift viewing of media (up from just over 6% in 2010 to 13.2% of all media consumption in 2015) and the growth of subscription viewing via services such as Netflix and Amazon have all increased exponentially (BARB 2016).

Public service broadcasting is also facing intense challenges. For the BBC, funding cuts since the turn of the 21st century have been intense and ongoing (Lee-Wright 2010; Martinson 2015). This has led to job cuts across all departments and to new institutional developments in response, such as the creation of BBC Studios. This latter development, with its requirement for competitive tendering for all new and ongoing commissions, has accelerated the hollowing out of the corporation’s internal production capacity (D’Arma 2017; Harvey 2015a). Overall, the BBC is moving increasingly towards a broadcaster-publisher role, akin to Channel 4, driving the commercial growth of the ITPS even more rapidly.

Culturally, television is also facing a challenge to its dominance. Technological innovations through the Internet, computer games, social networking and other forms of multimedia content are attracting growing numbers of people. For example, television shows such as Coronation Street could command audiences of 27 million at their peak (Barker 2005). However, year on year, television viewing figures are down, as new forms of delivering and receiving content proliferate, and as new forms of entertainment appeal to more people. Now, it is extremely rare for any televised event or programme to be watched by more than 10 million people (BARB 2016). As Anstead has noted:

The media market has become atomized, not only because many homes have many more than the five terrestrial channels, but also because of the development of DVDs, computer games and the Internet. (2007)

However, if we consider television in a ‘post-broadcast’ context then consumption is growing exponentially. As Freedman shows using international data, television viewing is increasing, although in some cases it is not clear how much of that viewing is taking place online or across non-television platforms (Freedman 2015). A recent survey of television audiences in the UK claims that the average viewer watched 3 hours, 51 minutes a day in 2015, 5% more than in 2005 (Thinkbox 2016). The phenomenal success of BBC iPlayer, an internet-based application which allows viewers to watch the majority of BBC programmes online for up to a month after being broadcast, is emblematic of this shift. Launched in 2007 with the promise of ‘making the unmissable, unmissable’, uptake has been remarkable. In February 2017, it received an average of 9.9 million daily requests with a total of 277 million requests for television content across the month (in comparison to 11.2 million requests for the whole month of January 2008) (BBC 2017).

Independents’ Transformation

The transformation of broadcasting has been mirrored by the equally rapid transformations within the independent sector, which have been gathering pace over recent years. The indie sector, which emerged because of the creation of Channel 4 in 1982, was initially made up of many small to medium-sized companies, predominantly based in London. These fledgling companies were run by small, largely permanent ‘skeleton’ teams (often the owners and a production manager), and they expanded or shrunk in size according to the demands of productions. Their creative labour was generally carried out by mobile, freelance workers undertaking key production roles such as producer/director, researcher, assistant producer, camera operator, sound recorder and film editor. These companies were extremely vulnerable to the shifting tastes of commissioning editors within the broadcasting companies (especially Channel 4, which provided most indie commissions), and there was a high turnover of companies, with business survival rates often low.

This early period witnessed a series of innovations across the televisual form, in areas including news, current affairs, documentary, drama and talk television. Such innovations were the product of the combination of a unique set of factors, including early Channel 4’s commissioning and programme strategy, the restless creative spirit of the early indies, and the historical and political climate of the time. The widespread commercialisation of broadcasting in the 1990s, however, led to the restructuration of the indies, with the decline of the ‘cottage industry’ ecology and, in its place, the rise of the so-called ‘super-indies’ such as Endemol and RDF. These companies were much larger and they focused intently on the development of returning series, formats and reality television shows (by formats, I refer to factual series based around a clear narrative and structural schema). More recently, because of changes to ownership rules (outlined in Chap. 3), we can see the entrance of new global players, such as Viacom, investing in British broadcasting for the first time. They want to see the UK as a ‘creative hub for generating great content that can be shown around the world’ (Viacom 2015). Currently, the BBC must commission at least 25% of its content from ‘qualifying independents’—defined as a company that is ‘(i) not employed by a broadcaster; (ii) does not have a shareholding greater than 25% in a UK broadcaster; or (iii) in which no single UK broadcaster has a shareholding greater than 25% or any two or more UK broadcasters have an aggregate shareholding greater than 50%’ (Ofcom 2015a, b: 11). However, the rapid growth of foreign ownership of UK indies has caused many commentators to claim that the rules for what constitutes a ‘qualifying independent’ should change in order to protect ‘true’ indies in the UK (Harvey 2015a, b). It is in this context that David Abram, chief executive of Channel 4, declared in the 2014 MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival: ‘Our independent sector, built up and nurtured over decades, is being snapped up almost wholesale and acquired by global networks and sold by private equity investors’ (Douglas 2016).

Broadly, then, Chaps. 2 and 3 detail an ongoing transformation in the ecology of the independent television industry, from a relatively small production sector made up almost wholly of micro and small companies, to the sector as it is today, dominated by ‘super-indies’ and ‘mega-indies’ (Elwes 2015)—global audiovisual companies employing large numbers of people and producing content across many platforms and territories, answerable to investors and shareholders and focused on profit. Alongside these changes, it is important to recognise the underlying patterns of neoliberal media and cultural policy during this period (Freedman 2008; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2015a, b; Schlesinger 2009).

Creative Labour

Secondly, the book seeks to investigate the conditions of cultural labour within independent television production. This connects the volume to ongoing and urgent debates around cultural work and questions of social justice in cultural labour (Banks 2007, 2017; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2013; Oakley and O’Brien 2016). This analysis is undertaken in Part 2 of the book. Chapter 4 provides an overview of contemporary academic debates on creative labour, with an explicit focus on television production. It seeks to connect this body of research to broader debates within the cultural and creative industries about ‘good work’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2013), craft (Banks 2010; Lee 2012a; Luckman 2015) and precarity (Ross 2004), while also linking industry changes to social and political change. Chapter 5 offers a synthesis of my research on labour in the British indies, based on interviews with workers that were carried out in 2005–6 and whom I re-interviewed in 2016–17.

In this part, the book focuses on the nature of creative work in the sector, within the context of industry transformation, driven in turn by wider economic and social transformations. Theoretically, it is concerned with investigating the nature of contemporary cultural work in this industry, where such labour is often highly casualised and deregulated; where careers are managed through dense social networks; and where creative occupations have become psychological sites of intense affective investment and self-actualisation. Here, the book aims to connect global sociological changes that have occurred in the last 30 years, including flexible accumulation (Harvey 1990), reflexive modernisation (Beck et al. 1994) and individualisation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), to comprehensive industry transformation within broadcasting. It explores the effect of these transformations on individuals working in this sector, their ability to do creative work, and their subjective attitudes to this work.

In returning to interview the same subjects ten years on, the research was driven by the relatively simple desire to find out what had happened to them in the intervening period. Had they thrived? How had the working culture changed over that time? Had some left the industry? If so, why? There are very few longitudinal research studies of creative workers over this kind of period, although to undertake such has long been a concern for media industries researchers (Oakley 2004a; Paterson 2001; Zwaan et al. 2010). Such research requires the use of life narrative interviews, and the results, recounted in Chaps. 5 and 6, provide an instructive case study on the psychosocial pressures and impact of living life in the commercial cultural industries.

Cultural Value

Thirdly, this book is fundamentally concerned with the cultural value of the creative content produced by the ITPS. This is explored in Part 3, which examines the relationship between creativity and the production context within the independent sector, using a chronological approach to look at early innovations in form and content, and more recent shifts towards intense commercialisation and consolidation. Chapter 7 provides an analysis of how British indies have revolutionised the form and narrative structure of factual television, drawing on a case study analysis of three ground-breaking factual series from the 1980s onwards. This chapter thus takes the culture produced by the indie sector seriously and employs a critical and materialist analysis of independent television content, understanding it as emerging from particular social and economic contexts. The long-standing relationship between craft and commerce is considered, as is the shift towards formatting and commercialisation that began in the 1990s. Chapter 8 returns to the production context in relation to cultural value, and considers new developments in content and production culture in light of intense commercialisation, consolidation and internationalisation of ownership. Drawing on interviews and secondary research with key players in the independent sector in the UK and internationally, it reflects on the dynamics of change in the sector, as independents adapt to the opportunities and challenges of this environment.

The Ongoing Significance of Television

Despite the context of transformation and adaptation outlined above, television remains of huge cultural significance. This is mirrored in its consumption; regardless of declining audiences, television is still enormously popular. Its significance can also be seen in the way that shows such as Big Brother become sources of national discourse and media speculation (e.g. Coleman 2006; Kilborn 2003). It is further reflected in the fact that ‘fakery’ scandals around television production are so high profile (Kilborn 2003: 150; Sanders 2003: 53–62). And crucially, in terms of the focus of this book, it is also evident in the fact that independent television production is one of the largest areas of cultural employment in the UK, employing over 27,000 people (Skillset 2016).⁴

Furthermore, it is likely that much of the content that delivers big audiences will continue to be made by production staff within companies that operate with the economies of scale necessary to employ individuals who have the requisite production skills, and to afford the equipment and technology that ensures the production quality that many audiences expect. The means of distribution may be changing radically and rapidly, but the desire for high-quality content remains.

To conclude, Chap. 9 reflects on the future of independent television production in a swiftly changing digital environment, and in the context of policy shifts connected to PSB and ownership that are significantly impacting the shape and structure of the indie sector. In considering the possible futures for independent television under the current conditions, this final chapter makes a case for greater protection of PSB against the forces of consolidation and format emulation, so prevalent in the indie sector today.

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Footnotes

1

For example, in the UK, indies now account for over 60% of all television production for the four main public service broadcasters, BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 (PACT 2015).

2

Revenues from the UK independent sector grew to just over £3 billion in 2013 (PACT 2014).

3

In this book, I use the term ‘independent television’ to refer to the sector that emerged with the creation of Channel 4 in 1982, and the creation of a media ecology of small to medium-sized companies which ensued at that time. There is a longer history of independent television in Britain, which stretches back to the creation of the ITV network and the regional broadcasters that produced content for it (see Johnson and Turnock 2005; Potter 1990) but this is beyond the scope of this book.

4

With a further estimated 19,350 working in terrestrial television, according to the latest census figures (Skillset 2016).

Part I

Independent Transformations. The Politics of Independence: Contextualising Independent Television Production in the UK

The first two chapters of this book provide a historical and political context for the evolution of the independent television industry from its origins to its present form. This evolution has taken place within specific ideological and social contexts, during a period of intense social transformation. In outlining this history, these two chapters cover a period of over 50 years, from the background to the formation of Independent Television (ITV) in 1955, through to the Digital Economy Act 2010, and the ensuing rapid consolidation and commercialisation of the independent sector. This involves analysing a number of key historical and political moments in the evolution of the independent broadcasting sector. These include the formation of the sector with the creation of ITV and the Independent Television Authority (ITA) (which became the Independent Broadcasting Association, or IBA, in 1972); the creation of Channel 4 and the emergence of the creative ecology of ‘indies’ that this produced; the significance of New Labour’s policy focus on the ‘creative industries’; and the process of rapid consolidation, commercialisation and concentration that is taking place in the sector, characterised in particular by regulatory changes to intellectual property rights for producers, and the emergence of the ‘super-indies’.¹ Throughout this period, issues around public sector broadcasting are continuous, and have played a pivotal role.²

Independent broadcasting has developed in this country under two key competing ideological influences: the values of public service broadcasting and the values of commercialisation. When tracing this sector’s history, one can see clear evidence of the influence of democratic concerns about the public sphere, increased choice and diversity and a greater range of programming and quality. Thus, the emergence of the sector is deeply imbricated in the wider political debate around public service broadcasting. However, at the same time the evolution of independent broadcasting (and the political decisions that paved the way for its existence) is inextricably connected to political and corporate strategies for commercial gain, competitive advantage and economic growth. Although these two positions are not necessarily incompatible, the tension between them is still very much in evidence today within political and public discourse.

Using a mixture of policy documents, empirical data and historical research, a picture emerges of an industry in a state of constant flux from its inception. The independent television industry in the contemporary sense emerged with the launch of Channel 4 in 1982. At this point, the indie sector was very much a cottage industry peopled by ‘one-man bands’. They were a disparate group, as Jeremy Isaacs (first chief executive of Channel 4) recalls:

Some were individuals, natural freelances, touting a particular one-off idea that interested them to work on. Others were would-be entrepreneurs, looking to make substantial numbers of programmes, to build on that, to see their business grow. (1989: 108)

Today, it is a far more professionalised affair, experiencing rapid growth and commercialisation (Ofcom 2015a, b; PACT 2015; Mediatique 2005; Harvey 2015a, b; Doyle and Paterson 2008). This is a sector undergoing radical structural change as a result of consolidation, concentration and digitalisation, as convergence looks set to transform the consumption and the production of audiovisual material.

To provide a coherent political economic narrative for the evolution of the Independent Television Production Sector (ITPS), the chapters are structured in chronological order, with each encompassing an ideological and political era that was central to the sector’s formation. Following the Second World War, there was significant political and public demand for independent television, which took the form of ITV, and laid the ground for the creation of the ITPS. However, the sector we see today, made up of small to medium-sized companies operating on a commissioned project basis for the broadcasters, is one that only emerged in the 1980s with the launch of Channel 4. Chapter 2 explores the political story behind the creation of Channel 4, and its catalytic effect on the broadcasting industry. Chapter 3 then examines