Three-year plan PBS Masterpiece

taking a bigger part in financing the show, then I am now turning to potential European partners –the big broadcasters, the big distributors – to see if there’s a way we can create a partnership to fund a programme without a UK broadcaster, which is kind of unheard of.”

One costume drama already in the pipeline is Tom Jones, produced with Mammoth Screen and ITV, which came to Masterpiece as a script during lockdown, with scriptwriter Gwyneth Hughes’ adaptation having elevated Tom’s love interest, Sofia.

This is a model Masterpiece is likely to repeat in the coming years, she added. It is currently working more closely with PBS sales arm PBS Distribution, which also runs the PBS Masterpiece Prime streaming channel on Amazon’s Prime Video and needs content.

It also means that along with US linear rights, PBS now requires SVoD, home entertainment and other related rights for North America.

“The nature of the partnership is completely changing for us,” said Simpson, adding that one of the reasons she attended Content London was to meet other European broadcasters, producers and distributors.

“If we’re not able to rely on a UK broadcaster

“We need more money to get some of these costume dramas like Tom Jones funded, so we’re beginning to look at some new potential partnerships that way,” said Simpson. “There’s a lot of interest in UK-based English-language productions, so this is just another way for those entities to have more of that.”

Masterpiece is already a partner in Europeanfunded dramas, having participated in the European Alliance’s adventure series adaptation Around the World in 80 Days. “We are looking to do the next one together, which is Race to the Poles,” said Simpson. “We might have to step up a little bit more, as things become more and more expensive.

“I can see that we are probably not going to get our costume dramas unless we are the lead funder in them,” Simpson said, looking ahead at the funding environment over the next couple of years.

Simpson also talked about the possibility of bringing more non-English-language fare to Masterpiece in the coming years. One such success was NRK-led Norwegian drama Atlantic Crossing, which aired on Masterpiece in April 2021, plugging a gap left by several Masterpiece productions that had to shut down during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, people were “driven to find other material and they watched a lot of foreignlanguage [programmes] and just got used to it,” said Simpson.

“It wasn’t difficult for our audience, so that makes me think that, with the right project, the right story, maybe in our future we might have a foreign-language costume drama. Royalty might travel well into the Masterpiece world, so that might be something for us.”