The Closure of BBC Television Centre

I was of course sad to see the programmes marking the closure of BBC Television Centre last night. The shows themselves were worthwhile – a well-chosen booking of Madness, a band who played all the big music shows made in the studios over the years, and who retain their popular appeal, plus a retrospective hosted by Michael Grade. But it was very odd that the latter programme allowed so many celebs, in among their reminiscences, to make a range of ill-informed and often rather stupid arguments against the closure of TVC.

Of course, it’s sad to see it go. Indeed, it’s hard to get one’s head around the idea of the BBC selling Television Centre: to many, including me, it long seemed that TVC was the BBC. For people of my age, the association was forged on Blue Peter, Going Live and Record Breakers, and of course in the Broom Cupboard. And there’s no end of broadcasting history stretching even further back. Even as it was winding down, I still felt it was a modestly important moment in my life when I first stepped into it in 2008 – albeit that was as an audience member, and that meeting to discuss making my brilliant idea for a programme will probably now happen somewhere else…

But the rag-bag of arguments put forward on BBC4 last night against its closure prompted me to think about TVC in the context of the BBC and television production more broadly. Seen in this light it’s clear that, however sad it might be, continuing with TVC in its present form simply couldn’t be sustained.

The “television factory” was always there to do a job
Ultimately, TVC is there to do a job, just like any other TV facility. That’s why it was built, and indeed that’s what it will continue to be used for. The vague arguments against closing it seemed to be:

• it has heritage and should therefore be kept going; well, the first part is true, and the listing of the building guarantees its continued existence, so the UK’s heritage systems have worked
• it’s a good building to make television programmes; not really true any more, as we’ll see
• BBC television production somehow needs to be all in one place; except it never has been, ever…

It’s important to understand that television production was designed into the very structure of TVC: it was thoroughly purpose-built. Unfortunately, that television production process was the process of the 1950s, when virtually all TV shows were made in the same way: either broadcast live or recorded as-live, in a multi-camera studio using video cameras after a period of rehearsal. Comedy, drama, light entertainment, cookery shows, you name it – it was all made in basically the same way.

Hardly any TV is made like that now: some sitcoms, panel shows, gameshows, magazine programming and a few other odds and ends. But significantly, drama had moved away from multi-camera setups mostly by the end of the 1980s (and entirely when The House of Elliot ended in 1994) and away from live broadcasting long before that – bar soaps, which TVC did not host anyway. Sitcoms have partly moved away from the setup as well, and those that stick with the traditional format can often only do so in a slightly ‘meta’ way (Miranda, Mrs Brown’s Boys – the latter not made in TVC, I know), with straight multi-camera sitcoms often derided as somehow unworthy (see My Family, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and others). The growth of independent TV production also hastened the move away from multi-camera production in the big traditional facilities. When Penelope Keith observed on BBC4 that Sport and Children’s had new homes but asked, “Where does what happened here go?” the answer is that what happened at TVC in terms of drama and comedy doesn’t happen like that any more anyway.

So for decades production at TVC has been somewhat in decline. In recent years it has reportedly become a bit of a ghost town, its work supplemented by hiring out its studios for independent network shows: famously on the day of the London bombings in 2005, Mock the Week and 8 out of 10 Cats were both due to record but only enough comedians for one show could make it to TVC – the panels were combined, the C4 show got made, and that week went un-mocked.

TV anoraks like me will have read many accounts from people involved in the technical side of TV production of just how difficult it is to make TV in a facility with 1950s methods hard-wired into it, and modern technology bodged into the old framework. It’s not for nothing that it is being closed for a thorough refurbishment before being reopened as a production facility in a couple of years’ time.

Into the modern world, out of west London

New Broadcasting House in Manchester being demolished last year

TV is made using modern technology, and technology changes. As an industry TV is grappling with the consequences of that (and this is not the place to get into debates about whether existing “channels” will become “content providers” with release dates rather than schedules), but in terms of production facilities there is a clear trend: older 1950s, 60s and 70s facilities are being shut down, and new ones built – indeed, TVC did well to hang on as long as it did. Pebble Mill in Birmingham ad New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road in Manchester (no end of BBC buildings seem to have been called New Broadcasting House at some point in their lives…) are now closed and demolished. In the independent sector, Granada’s Quay Street studio complex has shut, YTV in Leeds has closed in its old form though like TVC seems to be getting a new lease of life as an HD facility, and so on.

In the BBC specifically, there is of course a big of a shift out of London. The debate about whether it was right to shift entire departments north is for another day, but the BBC has always had strong regional centres and what’s happening now can be seen as boosting them: the facilities in Salford, Cardiff and Pacific Quay in Glasgow may be new, but there are long traditions of programme-making in those parts of the country; indeed, I was just as excited to do work experience a decade ago in New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road in Manchester as I later was to visit TVC – it’s where they made The 8:15 from Manchester! So BBC Television has always (well, ever since broadcasting was established across the whole of the UK) been about more than London.

Within London however, the BBC is undertaking a shift away from many of its old sites, and largely out of west London. But it’s important to remember that the BBC hasn’t always inhabited the west London locations it’s now associated with. North London used to be BBC territory far more than the west, although studios were dotted around everywhere: there was Alexandra Palace (in use for news until 1969, well after the opening of TVC, and the Open Univerity until the early 80s), Lime Grove (in use until 1991), Riverside Studios (in use until the early 1970s); plus central London for radio. Camden Palace, now Koko, was the BBC’s Radio Theatre from 1945 to 1972, succeeded by the Golders Green Hippodrome (used for television in the late 60s while the Shepherd’s Bush theatre was refurbished).

The move to west London happened in earnest post-war, and with the sale of TVC has now been largely undone. This is the culmination of developments arising from the technological shifts that moved TV production away from multi-camera by the 1990s. In the early 90s the BBC dispensed of its Television Theatre (which reverted to its previous identity, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire) and its Film Studios (again known as Ealing Studios and still a production facility) – the old divide between multi-camera video and single-camera filmed material having declined in importance. The BBC’s purpose-built rehearsal facility in Acton, the “Acton Hilton”,  has been demolished, after being relegated to storage use for many years (the move away from as-live multi-camera production also meant a move away from extensive rehearsal periods). Its archive on Windmill Road in Brentford was closed in 2011, albeit replaced by a purpose-built facility still out west in Uxbridge. Even the larger White City production and office complex is being wound down. Also, albeit not in west London, the World Service has moved out of Bush House.

So the sale of TVC is part of a much bigger shift, from London to the regions and from older facilities – however steeped in broadcasting history – to newer ones purpose-built for current production techniques. No doubt in thirty to fifty years’ time, these facilities will be looking out of date and debate will rage about their future.

The BBC’s flaghips, past present and future
For all that it had to be done, the sale of TVC does mean the BBC has vacated its flagship location. But the BBC has had more than one flagship location in the past: Broadcasting House and Alexandra Palace have also had that honour. The former is now the undisputed flagship once more – albeit that its new u-shaped architectural signature feature has initially become known as the place where BBC executives stand to resign – and nobody is making the case that the BBC should return to Alexandra Palace. TVC will also move to the status of historic location, like Ally Pally; MediaCityUK may well become the place where childhood memories of broadcasting are forged, with Blue Peter and other shows based there.

As for the future of TVC itself, its studios will mostly be refurbished as a modern facility, and then hired out to production companies including the BBC, which is leasing three of them and basing some of its office staff there too. In short, it won’t be too different, in its use as a production facility, from now. Space that is currently surplus to need will also get a use, with a heritage centre of some sort opening. From the way Danny Baker was going on last night you’d think the whole thing was being demolished and replaced with flats – although some of the newer buildings may not survive, the core of the facility has an assured future. One sad thing is that TC8, the studio long favoured for larger comedy and light entertainment shows, is probably not going to survive on account of its location away from the main block of studios.

Overall, it’s probably the right outcome for the place. Imagine if the BBC had just kept it going for its own sake, with huge amounts of it empty and unused, ever-less appropriate for the needs of modern TV production – sooner or later, it would have become a scandal and embarrassment, no doubt with Tory MPs queueing up to demand the disposal and demolition of the outdated white elephant. There’s a case for saying the BBC has been (perhaps unusually) clear-sighted in avoiding backing itself into that particular corner.

I last walked out of TVC into a snowy night in 2009 after a recording of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. That evening, Lauren Laverne and a camera crew were wandering around filming for a documentary celebrating a show then entering its eighth series; predictably, BBC4′s celebrations completely overlooked this particular long-running BBC comedy success. While it was right to celebrate the end of an era at TVC, and the programmes were overall enjoyable, nostalgia-fests of that sort seldom tell the entire story.

Note: I’m no BBC historian so sections of the above may include factual errors; polite corrections will be welcomed.

What should a calling card script do and what shouldn’t it do?

This year’s London Screenwriters’ Festival was hugely instructive in terms of both the craft and the business of being a screenwriter. I’ve got no track record at all in either, so I hadn’t intended to do any ‘advice’ type blog posts – I seldom write them, as there are plenty of people better qualified than me.

That said, looking back over my notes (almost 60 pages – typing them up took me a day and a half) it struck me that there are one or two things I’ve not read elsewhere, or at least not explicitly. This post covers one of them: spec scripts and calling card scripts. Much-discussed over the weekend, and not necessarily the same thing – any script that’s not been commissioned is written on spec, but that doesn’t mean any non-commissioned script is fit for use as a calling card script. Your early spec scripts probably just won’t be good enough to send out, and should be treated as learning exercises – the perils of sending stuff out too early, because either it’s not sufficiently developed or you’re not, were a recurring theme across many sessions.

But what about the calling card script? The script that shows what you can do and hopefully interests producers and agents in you. Conventional wisdom I’ve read and heard elsewhere starts from the premise that it won’t get made – it’s just there to get you noticed. That’s true (with vanishingly few exceptions). But some things that can be said to follow on from that aren’t so true: “write what you really want to, as it’ll never get made” can get you in trouble.

So here’s my conclusion, which wasn’t said explicitly by any of the speakers I heard, and one or two of them might even dispute it: but a calling card script should be commercial. It should not simply be a demonstration of storytelling and craft. It will be assessed by producers and agents as they would assess any other script: can they sell it, can they get it made? Even though formal events like the speed pitching at last weekend’s festival are essentially artificial and unusual events, the same yardstick will be applied: a project that elicits teeth-sucking and mutterings that it’s hard to get that kind of thing made is not useful, even if you’ve written the script really well.

TV series and serials are immediately more attractive than singles. Some genres and tones are more appealing than others, and it varies by channel. A brilliantly written script on an abhorrent topic would also probably be a bad idea. My 90-minute TV single will always be commercially problematic, no matter how good I can get it; a piece of hard sci-fi will also be hard to sell, albeit for subtly different reasons (niche genre, rather than format [EDIT see the comments below for more on this point]). “Ah,” you may say, “if it’s brilliant it’s brilliant, and it’ll get you somewhere no matter how difficult a sell it might first appear.” Maybe – but at the very least, you’ve made your job significantly harder, which you can ill afford in such a competitive environment. If you can’t get a script into someone’s hands or inbox, it doesn’t matter how well it showcases your talent and craft (on the up-side, it doesn’t so much matter if it’s rubbish, I suppose).

That said, a well-polished spec script that you don’t use as a calling card can still have its uses. Producers and agents, if they’re taken with your calling card script, may well ask to see a second piece of work, although this isn’t always crucial: Julian Friedmann insisted on one panel that he’d be willing to work with someone on the basis of a single script, if it was good enough; Rob Thorogood got his spec script produced by the BBC and when asked if he’d written anything else honestly answered no – but it didn’t matter, he still got his project made and it’s bloody good. But there were plenty of speakers who said they like to see a second sample, and it’s a common request from BBC Writersroom if they like the thing you’ve sent in. So I’m going to keep developing my 90-minute single as a credible writing sample, even though it’s the next project that will be ‘the’ calling card script: a TV pilot rather than something more tricky to sell. It’s still a story I’m keen to tell, of course – there’s never merit in trying to second-guess what people want and write it for the sake of your career rather than the story: if you’re not committed to writing it, your version will inevitably be tepid and unappealing. But there is merit in prioritising, from among all the ideas in your head or on your list of things to write, something that can be put in a commercially viable form.

There’s all sorts of other good advice about writing these scripts, and what might be commercially appealing: have an answer to the question of which channel it would suit, pitch it to appropriate agents and producers, and so on – but that stuff’s out there in abundance already. There was an excellent session on what the different channels are looking for, and when the video is out you should watch it if you’re on the delegates’ network. And there are of course arguments for writing what you really want to, and they should never be lost from sight: it will hopefully be distinctively yours, and put your voice across. But it will almost certainly be truly useful only if it can be pitched and sold.

 

Why doesn’t Outcasts work?

I rather like Outcasts, and I’m looking forward to stepping into Forthaven again when the next episode is broadcast. Nonetheless, the BBC has activated the contingency plan that exists for all new primetime shows, and decided to shift it to a graveyard slot: implicitly, they have declared it has failed and will not be recommissioned. And for all that I quite enjoy watching the show, I can’t help but feel they’re probably right to take that decision. So, why hasn’t it worked as well as everyone involved must have hoped?

There’s a lot goingfor Outcasts. I suspect the reasons I’m look forward to the next episode are to do with the lush photography – taking full advantage of the HD format – the excellent production design and special effects, the effective use of the South African location to create a foreign-looking world, and the strong cast. The world is well-sketched in its look and feel. So what’s the problem? No doubt many people within the BBC will be asking the same question right now. My thinking keeps coming back to two possible issues: one is that the stakes simply aren’t high enough; the other is that the rules of the world are not fully explained. The two are related.

Let’s look at the stakes first of all. The basic premise of the show rests on a single jeopardy: can a small human colony ensure the continued survival human race in a hostile, or at least uncertain, environment far from Earth? It’s a good premise in as far as it goes, but a lot of the time we are simply told about this: dialogue explains that the birth rate is low, many plant varieties are failing to grow and so on. But the meat of the drama is seldom directly related to this: yes, the ACs often provide the main plots and their existence arises from this jeopardy, but the stories are more often a matter of far more simple conflict: can group A (the humans) get along with group B (the ACs)? In fact, Forthaven seems pretty secure: it’s been established for a good few years by the time we join the story, is clearly quite large, can withstand big setbacks like the big whiteout in episode three, and apparently enjoys political stability. There seems to be no immediate threat of failure.

Combine that with the second problem – that the ‘rules of the world’ are not properly set out – and you have a recipe for muddy rather than compelling drama. By rules of the world I don’t simply mean what the laws say on Forthaven, rather I mean the framework within which the characters interact with each other: why and how are the police force and the scientific corp apparently run by the same person, why can a police officer get such easy access to the President and give him a telling off, where do these people sit within the apparently large society of Forthaven, how come the mathematical prodigy is allowed to run a pirate radio station, what does everyone else do for a living, how does the economy work, and, yes, what do the laws of Forthaven say? What sort of world is this, in other words?

Combine the two, and you’re left with a drama that’s not far removed from The Bill: Fleur and Cass chasing ACs around Forthaven feels not unlike June Ackland and Tony Stamp chasing toerags round the Jasmine Allen. At other times, the rather mild political powerplay involving the President could just as easily be an episode of a boardroom drama such as The Power Game. Both are great programmes, and recipes for highly effective drama, but with Outcasts the viewer has been sold a sci-fi show of some sort, and that’s not what we seem to be getting.

It’s also telling to consider what options seem not to have been pursued. Forthaven could have been portrayed as a frontier town and the show presented as a Western in space, but this seems to have been eschewed. Much of the drama takes place beyond the fence – we spend relatively little time on the streets of Forthaven and involved with the wider society there (indeed, it’s a remarkably small cast for a show of such potentially massive scope).

So there are many elements to the storytelling, some explored and some not… but none seems to dominate. Is this a sci-fi / action-adventure show, a character piece, a cop-style effort or a political drama? It seems to try to be each at different times. Perhaps a clearer focus on the issue of what world we are being shown would have enhanced the programme. The characters are rather good – they’re clearly distinct, and it’s clear enough where they’re coming from… But few are compelling. Perhaps if the stakes were higher, and the characters presented with tougher decisions to make and hurdles to climb over, they would engage us a bit more. I can’t really tell whether any character is on a particular arc: will Fleur become a monster, betraying the values she holds dear in the name of protecting them, as was suggested to great effect at the end of the first episode? Will there be a big pay-off to Stella’s reunion with her daughter? I didn’t quite feel as punched in the guts as I perhaps should when Lily rejected her mother at the end of episode two. And what is the point of Julius Berger? We’re repeatedly told he’s trouble, but all he does is wander round being sanctimonious and enigmatic, his motives unclear. All of this could have a great pay-off of course, but half-way through the series he seems annoying more than anything else. But if there’s a problem with the characters it seems to be not that they’re not well-drawn enough, but that they’re not being put in sufficiently gripping plots to allow them to come properly into relief.

Outcasts also exhibits many of the small flaws that blight primetime BBC drama: there is some clunky dialogue (“It’s not the future I’m worried about…” is fine; it doesn’t need finishing with, “it’s the past,” – we get it!); the plotting too often relies on implausibly high levels of stupidity and low levels of security (dangerous prisoners escape with remarkable ease, people who are clearly at risk from a madman on the loose are not given any protection, the same madman wanders unchallenged into the President’s office); and it’s very earnest, with almost no humour arising naturally from the characters, which is simply not convincing as a depiction of human relationships, on another planet or otherwise. But you can say all that of many much more successful shows on BBC One – the problems that have scuppered Outcasts seem to be more structural.

Comparisons with other shows are illuminating. The most obvious comparison seems to be Battlestar Galactica: humanity is reduced to a small group, removed from its homeworld, contending with a new race of human-like beings, with a baby apparently the key to the survival of both and an ambiguous scientist / agent provocateur knocking around whose motives seem unclear. But the contrasts are significant: for one thing, BSG presents two clear sources of jeopardy: the humans’ internal struggles, and a military threat from a hostile enemy – without the latter source of jeopardy and conflict, Outcasts instantly feels tamer. It’s also notable that the rules and relationships in BSG are instantly clear: the crew of Galactica function like any ship’s crew, a dynamic with which the audience is immediately familiar, while the role of the president and civilian authorities are again set out clearly, rooted in contemporary structures (the US presidency first and foremost) and ruthlessly exploited for drama. Outcasts lacks clarity over these institutions and relationships, and so is unable to produce convincing drama from them.

There are other possible comparisons: both Survivors and underrated US show Jericho presented communities of humans battling for survival after the normal infrastructure of human civilisation has been taken away from them. Again, in both the rules of the world – or lack of – were instantly clear and the source of much of the drama as different characters react to them in different ways. In Outcasts the drama has to come, as we have seen, from more ‘normal’-feeling cop or political-type obstacles for the characters.

Overall, it’s a real shame that Outcasts hasn’t been more successful: a compelling, adult science fiction series would have been a real asset to BBC One (will the promising-sounding fourth series of Torchwood finally deliver this in the summer, after the triumph of Children of Earth?). And Outcasts is certainly not awful: it’s about as good as The Deep, which again was watchable enough on its own merits… but given the amounts of talent and money involved, perhaps not quite good enough. It was telling that The Deep was in five episodes, clearly intended to be stripped across a week like Children of Earth, The Silence and the Criminal Days and Five Days serials, but presumably decreed not to be strong enough to merit it. And that’s the problem for Outcasts: it’s decent, but as a flagship drama for BBC One it invited judgment against very high standards, which it hasn’t been able to meet. For all that, a lot of the bile hurled at it by critics has been simply unjustified, and will probably dissuade the BBC from attempting any new sci-fi type projects for a long time to come, which would be a deeply unfair result.

TV review: Vexed by Howard Overman

BBC 2 has made a rare stab at drama with the new cop show Vexed. It’s gone down surprisingly badly, with some reviewers hailing it as representing all that is worst about British television. Which illustrates the sad truth that most TV reviewers are not especially interested in, or knowledgable about, TV drama. Vexed is a real winner, that seems to be picking up some word of mouth support… unfortunately it seems unlikely that it will be back for a second series.

Vexed is a chalk’n'cheese buddy cop show, and there’s no point pretending it’s massively original, but it is incredibly well-done. Toby Stephens’ Jack is the opposite of “those maverick cops with their averageflasks and boring unorthodox ways”: for him, the job of solving crime doesn’t dominate his life, it gets in its way. Lucy Punch’s altogether more professional Kate is capable of being just as bad, under his influence. Both the leads are great, and Kate in particular has enough pathos to keep the show grounded.

In may ways this is far more a modern version of The Sweeney than Life On Mars ever managed: it’s centred around a buddy relationship and gloriously unprofessional, un-pc policing. It balances that with the thick slab of knowing humour that’s essential to make that sort of thing work these days: its mix of humour, excitement and actual mystery (not the most puzzling mysteries ever seen, but more effective at keeping me guessing about the villain than LoM, or more highbrow efforts like Five Days) is expertly judged by writer Howard Overman.

Sadly, the production company responsible for the show, Greenlit, has just gone out of business and media reports suggest there may be some wrangling over who owns the rights to what. I hope that doesn’t prevent the BBC from commissioning more episodes, and that they are smart enough to ignore the bizarrely negative reviews. But between critical reaction and legal problems, the odds seem to be stacked against any more episodes being made than the three currently being shown.

Be sure to catch up with the first two episodes on iPlayer; the final episode airs on Sunday, 9pm, BBC2.

Second Coming or Looming Apocalypse? A panel discussion at the BFI on UK TV drama

[EDIT September 2010: video from this event is now available on the BFI website.]

Throughout May and June, the BFI has been running an extremely worthwhile season on UK TV drama, with screenings of a selection of the most compelling pieces made over the last decade and a bit, including some not available on DVD. Many were rather awkwardly scheduled for me to get to, but the war-based duo of The Mark Of Cain and Warriors that opened the season were a particular treat to see on the big screen.

The season climaxed last Monday with a sold-out panel discussion of writers, producers and commentators, chaired by Mark Lawson. That panel in full:

Tony Marchant
Jimmy McGovern
Donna Franceschild
Gub Neal
Nicola Shindler
Ben Stephenson (BBC Controller, Drama Commissioning)
David Butcher (Radio Times)

The panel picked up on some of the themes in Mark Duguid‘s  thoughtful talk opening the season on election night. The season has presented TV as a writer-driven medium (though there’s an argument to be had about the respective roles of writers and producers in TV, whereas film can be said to be director-driven and theatre more clearly writer-driven… though more on that later), and Duguid slightly apologetically described it as focusing on “authored” drama – no apology needed in my view, and the issue of “authored” versus “Holby” type drama raised its head in the discussion.

To summarise the premise of the season rather crudely: if the period from c.1960 up to the mid-80s represented a “golden age” of TV, as a certain atavistic strain of thought commonly holds, it is possible at least to identify a second generation of writers who emerged from that time onwards, arguably really making their mark on the small screen from the mid-90s. Whether you can call that a second “golden age” is at least as moot as the debate about whether there really was a first “golden age”.

A few key distinctions between the first and second generations of writers, and the television industry in which they worked, can be drawn. The first generation – including Dennis Potter, Troy Kennedy Martin and my particular favourite, Jack Rosenthal – were drawn from a range of backgrounds, sometimes theatre, sometimes journalism, sometimes other fields totally, not least because television drama as such did not exist in their youth; the second, by contrast, grew up with television. And while TV drama was viewed initially in terms of theatre, from the studio-bound nature of its production to the titles of the various anthology series of one-off plays (Armchair Theatre, Play for Today etc.), by the 1990s the language and techniques took their cues from film (Screen One, Film On Four etc.).

I do wonder how the transition between production techniques in television at around the same time interacted with this arguable generational shift. At the start of the 1980s, TV drama was still commonly made as it had been in the 1950s, that is in the studio on videotape tape using a multi-camera setup, with film inserts for location sequences; by 1990, a shift was well underway to single-camera shooting on film, and the remaining videotape-based dramas (such as Rumpole of the Bailey, the original run of Doctor Who, and finally The House of Elliot) now look distinctly odd to the modern eye. Did this shift in technologies encourage the change to more filmic idioms, or was it accelerated by them? Or is it an evidential phenomenon, that makes the “generations” look more different than they actually were, and disguises a picture of greater continuity – or at least more gradual transition – than the “generations” idea suggests? After all, Rosenthal remained active until his death in 2004, and we would undoubtedly have had more from Potter had he lived longer (whether we wanted it or not). Unfortunately I only thought of this after Duguid’s talk ended and it was too late to ask the question!

My own digressions aside, these were some of the themes framing the discussion among the panellists, which drew out some of the challenges facing UK TV drama. Most depressingly, a lack of funding, even relative to ten years ago, was always lurking not far from the surface. There is simply less drama being made and, as Nicola Shindler and Gub Neal reflected, funding it is getting ever-harder: budgets do not cover the costs of production in the way they once did, and it’s now necessary to find multiple partners to fund a project, much more like in film.

Historical drama served as an illustration for this: internationally the bottom has fallen out of the market completely, and only the BBC is making it. BBC4′s low budget historical dramas, Ben Stephenson suggested, show there are other ways of doing it than the traditional expensive approach, though they are, “mostly about dead celebrities,” sniped Mark Lawson. Stephenson’s reply wasn’t wholly unreasonable: when something is a success unfortunately it becomes a fashion, and he is now looking to ring the changes in BBC4′s drama output. Even so, Tony Marchant argued there should be more guerilla TV, including cheaper period stuff; he did one in 2009 (was he talking about Garrow’s Law?) for half the normal budget.

The comparison with the US was also inevitably made, which Duguid’s opening talk and several of the panel discussions after various individual screenings pre-empted admirably. Pure economics make it impossible for the UK to compete in terms of quantity, and it’s abundantly clear from this season that the best of British can easily compete with the best of American for quality. Moreover, while the US is great at producing 13 and 26-part series, single dramas, two-parters or short serials are pretty much unheard of in the States, save for pilots that don’t get picked up.

A more interesting comparison emerged, however: while commissioners in the UK have had an obsession with “high concept” pieces in recent years (which Nicola Shindler claimed was ebbing… though one or two others on the panel seemed less sure), US drama has been “low concept, high character” – in other words, all about stories and characters, not concept. Shindler should probably be heeded, however – she is, after all, highly successful at getting things commissioned. An interesting illustration was provided regarding Life on Mars as well: although commissioned as a high concept piece (“a 70s cop show like The Sweeney”), it was successful because viewers fell in love with the characters. Perhaps it was because of a perceived need to respond to this that its resolution  failed to do justice to either the concept or the characters, instead falling messily between the two stools.

Another accusation levelled at commissioners has been the perceived tendency to push scripts into genre, particularly thrillers, in order to make them more saleable. Handily, the man who commissions all the BBC’s drama was present, and refuted it – perhaps predictably, but also quite fiercely. Ben Stephenson flatly denied that he had ever, or would ever, push a writer to change a script into a thriller to get it commissioned. Donna Franceschild later suggested it’s a more subtle process than that: writers and producers compromise their work and their vision in order to second guess the market. This prompted a speech from Stephenson that – to his credit, I felt – can only be described as impassioned, arguing that a passionate writer is at the heart of all successful drama, and compromising the central vision will ultimately undermine the quality of the script (my heavy paraphrase but, I believe, a fair one).

The role of the writer, and the writer’s route into television, also came under scrutiny. Tony Marchant picked up, unprompted, on the BBC’s use of continuing drama, such as Casualty and Holby City, as an entry-point for young writers: the phrase “sausage machine” was used and the accusation that “your voice is lost” was levelled. Stephenson made a semi-effective defence of it, arguing it’s right for some writers, but other ways are needed for others – though curiously he cited Eastenders as a success story, not Casualty/Holby as raised by Marchant. One suggestion – from Marchant and picked up by ABW in the audience – was for a revival of studio drama, which could be cheap and provide a route in. Nicola Shindler was very dismissive of the idea – saying it would be going backwards, was not television, and people wouldn’t like it – though a better solution did not emerge.

Another question from the floor raised the issue of writers coming into TV from theatre. Jimmy McGovern offered a rather fascinating response: “This is going to sound awful, but theatre is the worst experience possible for writing television.” He offered the justification that theatre does not teach writers about structure and storytelling – even though McGovern (alongside Russell T Davies, Tony Marchant and other “second generation”-ers) started out in theatre. But McGovern does say fairly consistently that he learnt all he knows about writing TV on Brookside; theatre writers, he maintained, carry a card in their pocket that says “Licence to Bore.” So there you go.

McGovern’s contributions were characteristically dry and thoughtful, despite their absence in this account up to now. It emerged during the discussion that all three writers on the panel (McGovern, Marchant, Francheschild) are lapsed Catholics. McGovern advised parents, if they want their children to grow up to be writers, to raise them as Catholics: “you learn from an early age about the examination of conscience,” and therefore about motivation, which is crucial for successful drama. I was also struck by his observation that an hour is the perfect length for TV drama. Then again, “a BBC hour is 33% more than an ITV hour…” so you have to make more programme, for less money!

Overall, it was hard to know what to take from the discussion and the season more broadly. While the programmes presented demonstrated beyond doubt the strength of UK TV drama, its future looks inescapably bleak. Innovative forms of audio-visual storytelling, whether through a return to studio methods or through online productions like Girl Number Nine (and it was curious that the internet was not mentioned at all in the discussion beyond passing iPlayer references), may provide some respite, but it is hard not to feel that UK TV drama is shrinking back to a largely BBC-oriented core of a modest amount of authored drama, plus the landfill of Holby, Doctors etc. and that there will soon be precious little TV work for new writers to break into.

Disclaimer: any errors or inaccuracies in describing the discussion are entirely mine, and hopefully some video from the session will be made available by the BFI soon.

The Lost BSB Archive – programmes nobody watched

The BFI’s annual Missing Believed Wiped Event took place at the National Film Theatre last night – somewhat belatedly as this was really 2009′s event. The phenomenon of lost television is rather fascinating: as well as the tantalising fascination of things that were once in existence and are now lost, the business of any missing cultural artefact provides an interesting insight into the values of the people who made and destroyed them, and the institutions and processes around this. There’s also something fascinating about misjudgment and error – and there’s plenty of those in this particular story.

We’re all familiar with the story of missing television from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, right? Until the late 1950s it wasn’t really practical to record television programmes at all, and between then and the late ’70s the BBC and the ITV companies had no real archive policies. Most programmes that survived were through copies made for foreign sales, and by the late ’70s many such copies were being routinely destroyed – they were expensive to store and of apparently no further commercial value. Some programmes survived through token efforts at archive preservation, and others still through more haphazard routes. A growing appreciation of television as an important cultural form rather than something ephemeral and worthless, plus the prospect of home video giving new value to old shows, meant that by the late 1970s sensible retention and archiving policies generally existed in the major national broadcasters.

All was not rosy in the garden of television archiving, however. It’s worth remembering that it’s still hard to re-live television output from past times even in the era of surviving shows, as continuity material was not (possibly still is not) routinely kept for the archive for many years. This means that programmes from the 1980s and even 1990s like (I think) Pebble Mill At One and the Children’s BBC Broom Cupboard segments are largely absent from the archive. In the early 1990s the old problem of storage space reared its head within the BBC again, which opted to junk all bar a few samples of the masters of many children’s shows, most famously Rentaghost. Happily the error was soon realised and copies were returned to the archive from UK Gold. And I won’t even mention The Adventure Game or Play School.

Home video and the proliferation of television channels have, to some extent, mitigated against further catastrophic archive losses. But not entirely: although terrestrial television was reasonably well-served by its archive policies from the late ’70s onwards, the emergent satellite broadcasters in the late 1980s and early 1990s had no such safeguards. This was therefore one of the most fascinating aspects of the Missing Believed Wiped event: while previously lost TV appearances by The Who, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd and Procul Harum, the newly-recovered sole surviving episode of Ronnie Barker’s sitcom His Lordship Entertains and a previously lost Til Death Do Us Part were all well worth the price of admission, the less well-known story of what happened to the archive of British Satellite Broadcasting was particularly fascinating.

I just about remember the original advertising for BSB and its ‘squarials’ (was the slogan “it’s fair to be square” or something like that?) – I’d have been eight at the time. There was never any question of us getting satellite TV -in fact I didn’t live in a multi-channel household until 2006 – so the whole thing was mysterious and unknown to me. BSB’s story was arguably one of complacency and poor management: they spent far more than Sky when setting up, launched later, and arguably produced better programmes. But when the market did its usual thing and produced a monopoly instead of competition, it was largely to Sky’s benefit, despite Murdoch’s organisation also being on the brink of financial collapse. The BSB operation was largely shut down and its staff made redundant; most of its archive rested with the production companies, perhaps most notably Noel Gay and John Gau.

Exactly what then happened to the material is far from clear, and even Ian Greaves’ presentation at the MBW event was unable to go into much detail. Noel Gay certainly claim that their archive has all been wiped, although reports persist of copies of programmes being made available on specific request. Either way, the BFI’s line (taking its cue from Kaleidoscope, the TV preservation organisation) is that the archive is believed to have been junked; certainly they have not been able to catalogue or recover any of it.

Well, so what? BSB was broadcasting for all of nine months in 1990 – surely very little programming was actually made, even less of it of any merit? And effecdtively these must have been programmes seen on their transmission by, well, basically nobody – how important can they be? Well, yes and no: BSB was making about five hours of material a day, and over nine months that adds up. Some of what was made, particularly in the arena of comedy, was rather significant however: it included the first TV work of Armando Ianucci and Chris Morris, as well as shows from Keith Allen, performances from the likes of John Hegley and the controversial (and mostly un-broadcast) sitcom Heil Honey, I’m Home. Such an archive would have a certain amount of commercial value today. Indeed one of the chief reasons for its loss may be that it was never catalogued by performer, so someone looking for clips of, say, early Chris Morris, would not have been able to find then with any great ease.

The one major exception is the sci-fi soap Jupiter Moon, which not only survives intact but is available on DVD. It was intended as BSB’s evening soap, and 150 episodes were made (only about 75% aired before the merger with Sky): if you can see past the staid sets, variable acting and dubious production values, the storytelling is actually rather good. I’m still resisting the temptation to buy all the DVD sets and watch the 120 episodes I’ve yet to see – trouble is I’d never get anything done if I did.

Beyond this overview, I really need to defer to people more expert, of whom there are many. A recovery exercise to reconstruct the archive as far as possible is underway. Artists and producers are being contacted to ask if they have their own copies of shows, and an appeal for surviving home recordings has been launched.  Frustratingly, I cannot find one single web resource that outlines what’s missing, who made it and where it might still exist. A list of recoveries in 2008-9 is available on page 5 of this document but it’s the sort of thing you’d think would benefit from a blog or other small site. If you do happen to have any material, Ian Greaves is the person to contact via bsb at kaleidoscopepublishing co uk. Although satellite TV material from 1990 might seem fairly recent and modern, it’s worth reflecting it’s now twenty years old – older than many of the lost 1960s material was when it was discovered to have been destroyed in the mid-70s. I hope more material from this archive emerges during its twentieth anniversary year, and might even find its way to DVD.

Shameless writers

I had a bit of a treat last night: the BFI’s season on radical drama neared its end with a preview screening of episode 4 of the new series of Shameless, followed by a discussion with Paul Abbott, Bryan Elsley, veteran producer Kenith Trodd and newly-appointed Head of Drama at Channel 4, Camilla Campbell (also a veteran of No Angels, Sugar Rush and Skins, so regular readers of the blog will know I was impressed!).

A quick word on Shameless first of all: the episode was excellent, and several prominent characters, including a Gallagher, appear to have been written out by the mid-point of the series. I’ll say no more. A trailer for the new series of Skins was also shown, which seems to promise the heady mix of outrageous behaviour and characters being put mercilessly through the wringer that we’ve now come to expect from the show. Paul Abbott joked, “I paid 25 quid for that as a porn DVD, and now Channel 4 are showing it!” He continued to laugh at this for quite some time.

Indeed, it was worth the price of admission for the bons mots from Abbott alone. Most strikingly: “If you wouldn’t watch it, don’t fucking write it.” This heartfelt advice, and some of the comments concerning continuing drama from  other panellists, remind me that I really must get round to writing about the BBC’s use of continuing drama as the entry-point for new writers. But that’s for another day: last night I particularly enjoyed Abbot’s “You don’t write from your heart, you write from your spleen, so you go >>spleeuurrggh<<!”

The discussion that followed the screening was absorbing. What follows covers only a part of it.

The session was chaired by Jonathan Powell, whose questions to Bryan Elsley in particular seemed to attempt to put words in his mouth, only to be greeted with a polite “not really, no.” So, is there an agenda with Skins to depict an unrepresented section of society? “Not really, no…”

We know Skins’ writers are young: the youngest is 19 for this series, although she has been contributing material since age 17. Elsley made an interesting point about the generation gap on the show, which depicts both teenagers and their parents. I’m firmly in that gap in between, my teenage years long gone but nowhere near having teenage kids; perhaps refreshingly, people in their late 20s and 30s seem to be wholly absent from the writing team as well as cast.

Kenith Trodd, who sadly was not the inspiration for the TV Comic robotic villains of the 1960s, but has instead been producing television since around that time, including much work with Dennis Potter and others, had many interesting reflections. Among the first was: “The name of John Birt has to figure here as someone who screwed things up…” Since the 1990s, as Trodd sees it, the BBC in particular has become much more institutionalised, and producers and writers enjoy far less creative latitude in TV drama. “It haunts me still,” he later observed, that in the mid-80s he heard Dennis Potter lightly remark, “Everything is now for sale.” At the time, he didn’t understand what Potter meant. He sees Abbott as a “survivor” from this past era, having started on coronation Street in 1983 and co-created Children’s Ward in 1988 (not 1998 as the programme carelessly claimed).

Powell suggested that the development of the independent sector was important, dynamic and stimulating. Abbott, however, exhibited distaste for it: it had led merely to a proliferation of “little businesses.” He later expanded on this: in 1994 there were ten A-list writers and five independent production companies; now there are twelve A-list writers and 50 or so production companies. He despaired of how quickly conversations move from being conducted in creative terms to being conducted in commercial terms, where the creator is held to account by business standards; he sees a “total contradiction between business and creativity”.

Powell amplified this with an interesting perspective: the TV “food chain” will see a body of 70 or more episodes as something that “will make money forever”. Is this a pressure Bryan feels on Skins, to crank out as many episodes as possible? Not really, no: interestingly, the youth of the cast and writing team makes it impossible to make more than ten episodes a year. This is partly down to the inexperience of the writers meaning that more time needs to be taken over crafting the scripts, but also because they and the cast have to go to school as well.

Elsley then spoke very frankly about Casualty, a programme for which he used to write. When it was 12 episodes a year, it was “premier drama” and a privilege to work on it. Now, at 48 episodes a year, he feels it cannot honestly be called premier drama, and states unambiguously that its quality has suffered.

The position and esteem of writers then came under some discussion. Camilla ventured that Channel 4 and the BBC feel very different, and Channel 4 will pay more heed to new writers and giving creators their head, a point on which she was politely bullish. Did Bryan, Jonathan wondered, feel part of an agenda to blaze a trail and restore the esteem of writers by making them more integral to production via a “showrunner” model? Not really, no: both Elsley and Abbott pointedly said they did not endorse a “showrunner” model, even though they have both often been described as operating one.

Rather, both advocated that writers should be more aware of production considerations – not necessarily the same as being the producer. More responsible writing, Abbott suggested, could lead to first drafts emerging to the standard that many writers only manage with the third draft. Elsley too described himself merely as “a writer who has an interest in production”.

These views may or may not be held widely by others in the industry; they certainly jar at times with the conventional wisdom often held out to new writers. I might try to write more on that another time, but for now let’s conclude with some interesting facts about Shameless past and future. Abbott wrote Shameless seven years before Channel 4 commissioned it, for Screen Two, but felt he didn’t get it right. He spent the next seven years working at it, to get the tone and feel that are now so familiar and seem so effortless.

Abbott also confided that he was terrified of the following day, when he would be flying to LA to cast the US version of Shameless, which starts filming in January with John Wells. The lack of a benefits system like ours makes the American proposition rather different: as Abbott casually put it, “there’s no skagging.” Whatever happens in the US, the UK version of the series, pared back to eight episodes next year, will run for a massive 22 in 2011. It’s quite a challenge for Abbott and his young writers – it will be great to see them tackle it.

Dramatic day at the office?

I’m not sure this proves very much, but I was surprised to have a conversation the other evening – at the BAFTA premiere event for this, in fact – in which it proved a bit controversial. It’s this: most TV drama is workplace drama.

This isn’t simply about the setting or format: the cops ‘n’ docs shows are superficially all workplace dramas, after all. But the definition goes much wider than that.

There is, after all, a limited number of ways in which conflict can be generated; and no conflict means no drama (conventionally speaking, anyway). Sex, romance and other aspects of personal relations are a massive source; material self interest is another; and the demands of a job or vocation are also a huge source.

So, where the conflict comes from is key. Soaps are not workplace dramas: the characters interact by virtue of inhabiting the same precinct, and conflict arises from that interaction on its own. But beyond soaps, I reckon you can call a lot of things workplace drama: the conflict arises from the need to do the job.

I’m going to go into my DVD collection at random and get a few titles now. OK, here’s what came out.

The Sopranos is a workplace drama: the conflict arises from Tony trying to be a successful mob boss and successful family man at the same time (neatly here, there is clearly demonstrable internal and external conflict along these lines as, for instance, Tony at first tries to keep his profession secret from his daughter, and also unburdens himself to his therapist).

This Life is about a set of 20something lawyers… but it’s not workplace drama. It’s the classic houseshare drama – the conflict arises from the characters’ personal relationships, and work considerations occasionally intrude on them, not the other way round. Similarly, No Angels, despite being touted as starring “naughty Northern nurses” it is really about a group of friends who share a house, and happen to work together as nurses – its creator Toby Whithouse explicitly defended it in such terms against criticism from the Royal College of Nursing. Another Whithouse Creation, Being Human, is also really a houseshare drama, and was first conceived as such – the characters were housemates long before they were supernatural beings.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: classic workplace drama. The conflict comes from Buffy’s vocation; take that away, and you’ve not got a show.

Cracker: like Casualty, this is a riff on “physician, heal thyself”; accordingly, it’s a workplace drama – the healing vocation is central to generating the conflict.

Shameless: you could argue that the characters are essentially engaged in scrounging and scamming, and the conflict arises from it, therefore it’s a workplace drama. But that would really be stretching it; it’s a family drama, much like Only Fools and Horses (the dodgy dealing usually generates the comedy, but not so often the substance of the plots other than the frothiest).

Blackpool: conflict arises from Ripley’s business ambitions – clearly a workplace drama.

Class Act: the characters are pretty dedicated to scamming as a way of preserving their lifestyles, so this probably is a workplace drama.

Taking a few non-randomly chosen examples (OK, I’ll admit the Sopranos and This Life choices weren’t really random – the others were, though): Grange Hill is clearly a workplace drama, as the conflict arises from school life – they don’t get paid for it, but going to school is what the kids do dans la vie (the French idiom is probably much more useful and descriptive, actually!). Byker Grove, by contrast, is not one: the kids know each other via the Grove, and are very seldom seen at school. The Wire is obviously a workplace drama – not just for the cops, but for the drug dealers. Star Trek is a workplace drama (Doctor Who isn’t – I can’t honestly argue saving the universe is somehow the Doctor’s vocation).

Does it matter? Perhaps it’s a useful way for the writer to think about what sort of show they’re writing without getting dragged into rigid cop/doc/scifi/etc. genre categorisation, while still keeping things accessible for a reader. Perhaps also it provides a focus on what matters to the characters. Or perhaps it’s just stating the obvious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_Act_(TV_series)

Stephen Fry’s armpit

The announcement of Karen Gillan’s casting in Doctor Who effectively announces that filming is due to start shortly on the first full Moffat series, we are less than a year away from its broadcast, and that’s an exciting thought.

I’m also reminded of one of the best magazine columns I’ve ever read, also from the pen of the Moff. It’s from a few years ago, before David Tennant had even made his full on-screen debut. I particularly sympathise with the views on hugging – confronted by a looming Stephen Fry, I imagine I would have done much the same…

hug in a moff

Nostalgia’s not what it used to be

Every so often I put a post on here that may well be of literally no interest to anyone but me. Be warned: this is one.

Fact: after Google, the second-most used search device on the internet is YouTube. Partly, no doubt because it’s so addictive: I find it hard to go on there and look up just one video. Among its many possible functions, perhaps the greatest is to re-visit your past: for those of us who were smal children in the 1980s (or earlier) the likes of old kids TV shows often maintain a rarity value – footage from the time can be hard to find any other way, and the amount on YouTube can still be small, but is growing.

But this isn’t just about old telly. Unlike for those raised in the 1970s, we have a possible archive of camcorder footage out there. In fact – my God! – it’s just crossed my mind to go and look for old primary school plays. I’m not sure I dare…  Hang on.

Phew!

Right, yes, camcorder footage: specifically, from places you were taken on days out! Almost certainly there will be a few places you went to regularly, or semi-regularly, right? Well, here’s one I went to as a small child. (don’t worry – it’s not all pink)

Dinting Railway Centre – now long-since closed, which makes the nostalgia trip even more complete: I can’t have been since I was, at the absolute oldest, eight years old. The above clips must have been shot when I was three, so it’s maybe a bit unlikely to see myself among them. But the one below is from a couple of years later:

No sign of me or my brother, but there’s all sorts of things I like about that one in particular. Firstly, the miniature railway – my God, I remember that! And it did seem frighteningly fast when you were sat on one of those little trains, I can tell you.

This was shot on a completely typical day: I remember the two engines Tiny and Nunlow. I went in the cab of Tiny, which was exciting – it was small enough not to be terrifying to a tiny child. But Nunlow was my favourite because it was green.

I also like how the restoration of the locomotive Bahamas has clearly progressed very slowly since the previous clip: it mostly seems to be sitting in much the same set of bits, in much the same place as two years previously.

Plus there’s the obvious things: hairstyles, fashions… Watching this, you almost expect Anneka Rice to come into land in a helicopter. But it all seems very fresh and immediate because it was shot on videotape: both clips must have been shot on what was expensive kit at the time.

Rather sadly, Dinting Railway Centre – though my brother and I always called it simply “Dinting” without realising Dinting is an actual place in its own right – is now derelict, as you might be able to tell from Google maps:

The smudgy triangle at the bottom is where the platforms used to be, that you see the trains trundling in and out of. The white-roofed building on the right is the shed Bahamas was being restored outside, and seems to be the only building still standing. The larger shed has been completely demolished – I suspect the track-bed that can still just about be seen running past the Bahamas shed runs into where it used to stand. The miniature railway was in the area north of the Bahamas shed, which was on raised ground, now apparently completely overgrown. The railway tracks you can still see are the normal rail network, and still in use – services run along them into Manchester Piccadilly.

But what the hell, let’s finish with some old kids’ TV. Many of the old Broom Cupboard links no longer exist: they were considered to be between-programmes continuity, and so were not recorded by the BBC (the same goes for the daytime magazine slot Pebble Mill).

Here’s Debbie Flint filling in for Philip Schofield: I have no memory of Debbie Flint at all, but I do remember the time before Neighbours was on immediately after CBBC, of which this is an example.

Blimey – Jossy’s Giants, eh? Not actually filmed in Newcastle, but in Stalybridge – only about five miles away from Dinting, as it happens. Plus you can still see from this Blue Peter were doing reports on film, not videotape. Makes it seem ancient, doesn’t it? Mind you, at 23 years, I suppose it is.

I think Debbie Flint was mentioned in the Tribe of Toffs song John Kettley is a Weatherman. As was Simon Parkin – remember him?

OK. Enough now.