Television june14

June 2014

Amanda Craig: Why Game of Thrones is

The best show on TV

RTS All Party Parliamentary Group event

Tuesday 24 June 6:30pm for 6:45pm Committee Room 9 House of Commons

Future of funding for the BBC Claire Enders

Chief Executive, Enders Analysis

Lord Grade of Yarmouth Former BBC Chairman

Lis Howell

Director of Broadcasting, City University

Nick Ross

Radio and television presenter Rt Hon the Lord Fowler (Chair)

Booking:

www.rts.org.uk

Journal of The Royal Television Society June 2014 l Volume 51/6

From the CEO Our annual Student Awards attracted a great crowd of fledgling content makers and experienced TV professionals, including a number of heads of talent from the major broadcasters.

Thanks to everyone involved for making it such a memorable and hugely enjoyable afternoon.

I think everyone loved the new venue at the BFI on London’s iconic South Bank.

Congratulations to all the winners (who are listed on page 30 of this issue) and to their tutors – and heartfelt thanks to jury chair Pat Younge.

Talking of tomorrow’s talent, I am thrilled that we have received 190 applications for the first RTS Undergraduate Bursaries. Shortlisting of candidates will now begin.

It was a great pleasure to be invited

by RTS Wales Centre to attend their AGM and “Meet the CEOs”, a stimulating panel discussion with the heads of the three main broadcasters in Wales: the BBC’s Rhodri Talfan Davies, ITV’s Phil Henfrey and S4C’s Ian Jones.

The discussion was ably chaired by Tim Hartley, chair of the RTS Wales Centre.

Back in London our first Joint Public Lecture, held with the IET, was a tour de force by the brilliant Michael

Contents 5 6

Simone Pennant’s TV Diary

Simone Pennant wonders why some TV executives don’t appreciate the invisibility of BAME creatives

A epic that exceeds expectations

What makes Game of Thrones so compelling?

Author Amanda Craig deconstructs the appeal of a groundbreaking drama series

9 12

Cup fever

16

Role models for the perfect chairman

19

Our Friend in the Far East

The World Cup gives ITV and the BBC a chance to display their ‘crown jewels’. Owen Gibson inspects their line-ups

Why we need to embrace uncertainty

Michael Lynch says machine intelligence will reinvent TV – assuming we survive the coming crises that will be heightened by similar technologies, learns Steve Clarke

The BBC Trust needs to decide what kind of chairman it wants to recruit. Stefan Stern provides a survivors’ guide to picking a leader it can live with

Cavalier treatment of a business card can destroy your hard-won relationships in China, warns John McVay

Editor Steve Clarke smclarke_333@hotmail.com

Production, design and advertising Gordon Jamieson gordon.jamieson.01@gmail.com

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

Royal Television Society 3 Dorset Rise, London EC4Y 8EN T: 020 7822 2810 E: info@rts.org.uk W: wwwrts.org.uk

Lynch. Who else but Michael could put demonstrations of Google Glass and a Samsung watch into a context that drew on more than 200 years of scientific and social history?

Leadership is a topic never far from our collective radar, especially as the search for a successor to Chris Patten gathers pace. Don’t miss Stefan Stern’s gentle satire on the different species of company chairs.

Theresa Wise

20 22 24

Convergence in a box

27 30 32

Speed date the entertainment gurus

Richard Halton tells Torin Douglas why YouView is an essential part of British TV’s future

The new retail revolution

Will the internet empty out the UK’s crowded mall of TV shopping channels? asks Tara Conlan

30 days in the life of a new channel

London Live, the new multi-platform broadcasting operation serving the capital, has ignored much of TV’s established playbook, reports Steve Clarke

The broader the appeal of your format ideas, the better your chances with broadcasters, hears Matthew Bell

RTS Student Television Awards 2013

The awards ceremony on 16 May at the BFI, Southbank, London was hosted by comedian and actor Joel Dommett

TV design: apply within

Matthew Bell learns what it takes to fill the vacancies in TV’s design disciplines

Subscription rates UK £110 Overseas (surface £140) Overseas (airmail £165) Enquiries: publication@rts.org.uk

Printing ISSN 0308-454X Printer: FE Burman, 20 Crimscott St, London, SE1 STP

Legal notice © Royal Television Society 2014.

The views expressed in Television are not necessarily those of the RTS Registered Charity 313 728)

3

RTS NEWS National events RTS ALL PARTY PARLIAMENTARY GROUP EVENT Tuesday 24 June

Future of funding for the BBC

The BBC licence fee is coming up for renewal in 2016. Recent proposals to decriminalise non-payment of the fee has ensured that its future is coming under scrutiny. Our panel discuss its future, together with alternative funding models for the corporation.

Panellists: Claire Enders, Chief Executive, Enders Analysis; Lord Grade of Yarmouth, Former BBC Chairman; Lis Howell, Director of Broadcasting, City University; Nick Ross, Radio and television presenter.

Chair: Rt Hon the Lord Fowler.

6:30pm for 6:45pm Venue: Committee Room 9, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA ■ Jamie 020 7822 2821 ■ jamie@rts.org.uk RTS LONDON CONFERENCE Tuesday 9 September

Power, politics and the media Principal sponsor: STV Group.

Booking will open soon Conference chairman: Rob Woodward, Chief Executive, STV; Keynote speakers: Chase Carey, President and COO, 21st Century Fox; The Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport; JB Perrette, President, Discovery Networks International Speakers: Sir Peter Bazalgette, President, RTS; Jeremy Darroch, Chief Executive, BSkyB; Michael Foster Tony Hall, Director-General, BBC; John Hardie, Chief Executive, ITN;

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James Harding, Director, News and Current Affairs, BBC; Lorraine Heggessey, Executive Chair, Boom Pictures; Steve Hewlett, Writer, Broad­ caster and Media Consultant; Kevin Lygo, Managing Director, ITV Studios; James Purnell, Director of Strategy and Digital, BBC; Stewart Purvis CBE, Professor of TV Journalism, City University; Jim Ryan, Senior Vice-President and Chief Strategy Officer, Liberty Global; John Ryley, Head of Sky News, BSkyB; Kirsty Wark, Broadcaster.

Venue: Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG

Your guide to upcoming national and regional events

Northern Ireland Centre: Divis transmitter visit

NORTH EAST & THE BORDER ■ Jill Graham ■ jill.graham@blueyonder.co.uk NORTH WEST Thursday 26 June

Liverpool locations tour

Local events BRISTOL ■ Andy Batten Foster ■ andrewbattenfoster@hotmail. co.uk DEVON & CORNWALL ■ Contact TBC EAST ANGLIA ■ Contact TBC LONDON ■ Daniel Cherowbrier ■ daniel@cherowbrier.co.uk MIDLANDS Wednesday 30 April ■ Jayne Greene 07792 776585 ■ jayne@ijmmedia.co.uk

Pick-up point: TBC ■ Rachel Pinkney 07966 230639 ■ rachelpinkney@yahoo.co.uk NORTHERN IRELAND Date TBC

Visit to the Divis transmitter Tour of the facilities and mast

by Arqiva. The date and time will be confirmed shortly. Please register your interest at: RTSNI@rts.org.uk Venue: Divis transmitter ■ John Mitchell ■ mitch.mvbroadcast@ btinternet.com REPUBLIC OF IRELAND ■ Charles Byrne (00353) 87251 3092 ■ byrnecd@iol.ie

Thames Valley Centre: NCR N-530 Bombe Enigma Decryption Machine

SCOTLAND ■ James Wilson: 07899 761167 ■ james.wilson@ cityofglasgowcollege.ac.uk SOUTHERN ■ Gordon Cooper ■ gordonjcooper@gmail.com THAMES VALLEY Wednesday 2 July

Enigma

Presentation by Alan Watson on the Enigma machine and its historical importance in cryptography. A summer evening BBQ lecture. Please book via info@rtstvc.org.uk.

6:30pm for 7:00pm Venue: Pincents Manor, Pincents Lane, Calcot, Reading RG31 4UH ■ Penny Westlake ■ info@rtstvc.org.uk WALES June/July – date TBC

Visit to Comux UK Network Operations Centre Venue: Comux, Birmingham Science Park, Aston B7 4BB ■ Hywel Wiliam 0798 000 7841 ■ hwyel@aim.uk.com YORKSHIRE Friday 27 June

Programme Awards New awards – including one voted for by guests on the night – for this, the 10th year Venue: Royal Armouries Museum, Armouries Drive, Leeds LS10 1LT ■ Lisa Holdsworth 07790 145280 ■ lisa@allonewordpoductions. co.uk

June 2014 www.rts.org.uk Television

TV diary Simone Pennant wonders if the reason some TV executives don’t appreciate the invisibility of BAME creatives and talent is because they don’t have time to watch even their own output

M

onday It’s 6:30am and I am putting the finishing touches to the TV Collective’s fortnightly newsletter that goes out to our 60,000 members.

This afternoon I have a meeting with Ravensbourne – a state-of-theart college based in the Greenwich Digital Peninsula. We have already worked together on a series of “Online Conversations” featuring Pat Younge and Lenny Henry. Channel 4’s Stuart Cosgrove has just confirmed he will be our next guest. Great news.

■ Tuesday BBC One’s Points of View is filming me this afternoon so I just have time to get to my hairdresser.

Morris, my loctician, heard me on the radio discussing withholding the TV licence fee and totally agrees. I don’t think it will come to that, as I’m feeling optimistic about July’s DCMS roundtable part 2.

Filming is about to start. Note to self… Points of View usually TXs just before Songs of Praise so have to convince this audience about the importance of diversity.

I’m hoping Tony Hall and Danny Cohen watch Points of View, although I know that many TV execs don’t have time to watch even their own output. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. They don’t get to see how invisible BAME people are.

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

■ Wednesday We’ve have been oversubscribed for our “Careers Breakfast” with the BBC Academy. This is a unique opportunity for members to get first-hand career and training advice from the BBC’s Donna Taberer and talent guru Simon Wright.

It goes really well. I’m keen to repeat the success and feeling super energised as I walk into my meeting with the Head of Talent at Dragonfly.

Tonight I’m chairing a meeting with the most influential BAME talent working in TV today. We discuss the implications of Lenny Henry’s paper on ring-fenced BAME funding and, after a very animated discussion, it’s agreed that we support it. Afterwards, we pile into the nearest bar for a long quick one.

■ Thursday Morning meeting at the Beeb.

Following the huge success of BBC Academy “Expert Women”, it has asked us to get involved with “Expert BAMEs”. This is a great project as it ties in with our aims to support diverse talent.

There have been a number of initiatives targeted at BAME communities and they rarely result in sustainable change, so I’m keen to discuss how we can make this one different.

Lunch at the BFI with Jo Welch from Creative Skillset, whose report ignited Lenny Henry’s call to action.

Next, it’s a coaching session with an aspiring producer/director who feels like he has already reached the

glass ceiling. I am hoping this talented individual doesn’t join the 2,000 BAME people who have already left our industry. We spend the next hour creating an action plan.

It’s important for me, as a qualified career coach, that my clients leave with workable tools to navigate obstacles, whether perceived or real.

■ Friday 9:00am: The TV Collective website has gone into meltdown since we began supporting the Henry campaign. Sadly for me, the success of the campaign means the website keeps having technical hiccups.

The TV Collective is sustained mainly by volunteers and committed individuals, so I have to find a website designer who will work for free and fast.

I spend the rest of the day catching up with the day-to-day tasks of updating the site and our 10,000 followers within our social networks.

Get an invitation to be panellist at Broadcast’s Creative Week – featuring: DJ Films Producer Damian Jones; Michelle Matherson, ITV Talent Executive; and Skillset Deputy Chief Executive Kate O’Connor.

6:00pm: I’m just about to get ready for a screening when my childminder cancels. Naturally, I’m gutted as I won’t be able to attend, but there’s a small part of me that’s grateful I’ll finally get a chance to veg out in my onesie with a large mug of herbal tea.

Simone Pennant runs The TV Collective.

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Drama

What makes Game of Thrones so compelling?

Author Amanda Craig deconstructs the appeal of a groundbreaking drama series

An epic that exceeds expectations

W

hat is the secret to the extraordinary appeal of Game of Thrones?

Describing it as “Dynasty with dragons� does not get close to its fascination, even for people who normally dislike fantasy.

Its originality starts, as so often with HBO dramas, with the opening credit sequence.

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To a score that opens with a metallic clash, an animated map charts an imaginary world: family crests (or sigils) rise and fall in mechanical sequence. The Celtic-based rhythms and harmonies, played on electronic violins and cello, speak of heroism, but also dread, cruelty, melancholy, mystery and cynicism.

It ought to be cheesy but, half-way through the theme tune, an extra beat unbalances everything.

It is this unbalancing of expectations that signals the disturbing and original drama to come.

Fantasy has always struggled to be taken seriously. Its inspiration stems not just from the classical texts of Greece and Rome, but the bloody and beautiful Norse sagas consistently overlooked by the establishment ever since the Norman conquest.

Tolkien did much to drag these back into view, but his Middle Earth reflects

conventional morality, and an idealisation of the medieval way of life.

Part of the power of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the way it subverts a genre easy to parody.

We expect medieval costume, bad hair and Manichean morality; we do not expect incest, rape, the slaughter of favourite characters and a reflection of our banking crisis.

Least of all do we expect characters to speak and behave as if they were in

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

a work of realist fiction – and one that is deeply, disturbingly involving.

Martin’s world, violent, highly sexualised, corrupt and cross-hatched with melancholy self-awareness, gives us a grotesquely suggestive reflection of our own age.

I confess, I was prepared to dislike the series when its first episode began to preview. Beheadings, the undead and excessive nudity are not usually my kind of thing.

However, the moment the child Bran Stark was pushed off a tower to conceal an incestuous affair, I was hooked.

Since then, it has become a weekly treat, and one of the rare forms of entertainment that my family can discuss across the generations with equal enthusiasm.

It has something for everyone, from the teenage boy addicted to computer games to the grandmother confronting her own mortality.

The game of thrones is complex but the penalties for losing are absolute: as one of its most compelling characters, Cersei, says: “It’s win or die.”

As an audience, we are given near-omniscience concerning what is happening to a multiplicity of protagonists, but in the TV series this is balanced by what we must find out about the past.

Martin learnt from Tolkien the power of a backstory stretching far into pre-history, gradually revealed.

Viewers have to work out characters’ motivations. As a result, some, such as Jaime Lannister, grow from villainy into a more nuanced hero.

This is one reason why its audience is not just 14-year-old boys. We expect moral ambiguity from literary fiction and art movies, but not in a blockbuster fantasy.

The families slug it out in the teeth of approaching Armageddon, which only a 700-foot wall of ice, stone and magic, guarded by the Knights of the Black Watch, has kept out.

This wall, reminiscent of both Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China, is one of Martin’s many strokes of imaginative genius, alongside the universal apprehension that the inhabitants in the north of any country are characteristically different from those of its south.

Yet, whatever the setting, each protagonist grapples with the gulf between trust and betrayal, myth and reality.

Now in its fourth season, the series has depicted scenes of exquisite natu-

ral and architectural beauty, SFX wonders such as dragons, and numerous rapes, orgies, beheadings, mutilations, murders and a castration.

The violence is startling, and the amount of nudity and sexual suggestion verges on the pornographic.

Some have been upset by the rapes, especially where the TV adaptation has, as in a recent scene between Jaime and Cersei Lannister, varied from the books, but there is also a more palatable message: women are entitled to respect and self-determination.

Increasingly, we are also seeing female characters, from Diana Rigg’s Queen of Thorns to young Arya Stark, murder male aggressors.

The only question is when, not if, even gentle characters such as Sansa Stark will become killers.

Although its world is riddled with misogyny, Game of Thrones is striking in giving equal weight to its male and female characters.

Despite some great fantasy being written by women such as Ursula Le Guin and Robin Hobb, the genre largely features male protagonists: Peter Jackson actually had to invent female characters when filming The Hobbit.

Game of Thrones, by contrast, has dozens of outstanding female leads, from Catelyn Stark and Cersei Lannister, as two very different kinds of mother, to the female knight, Brienne, the sinister Red Witch, the scheming Margaery Tyrrell and, above all, the posh, charismatic Daenerys Targaryen, whose journey from bartered teenage bride to fierce “mother of dragons” is likely to be part of the final, climactic battle.

In this environment, the love of parents for children and children for parents is invoked to justify both heroism and torture, although virility, fertility and bloodlines are everything in a society obsessed by family heritage.

Only Peter Dinklage, superb as Tyrion Lannister, has the intelligence, compassion and courage to save his country – but is typically despised by everyone, from his father down, because he is a dwarf.

He has become the first vertically challenged actor ever to be widely fancied by a female audience, despite living in the least politically correct society imaginable.

The striking beauty of the lead actors is at variance with the way it is the underdogs – the young, the disabled, �

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� the plain, the poor and the dispossessed – who seem most likely to survive, thanks to a tiny number of compassionate and courageous deeds.

Though who knows? Martin’s world is so contrary that its own characters find it hard to believe that witches, dragons or giants still exist until they see them with their own eyes.

A repeated source of both humour and horror is the gulf between myth and reality, especially where class hatred usually sees the commoners worst the high-borns through low, common-sense brutality.

The blood, torture, suffering and executions are sickeningly detailed.

When Daenerys is advised that “sometimes it is better to answer injustice with mercy” her response is: “No, I will answer injustice with justice.”

She crucifies the masters of the city she has just conquered in precisely the same way that they crucified their slaves’ children; with the screams of her opponents echoing below her, she is serenely triumphant.

HBO’s high production values include such obsessive attention to detail that only in stills could audi-

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IT IS POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT, AND IT IS ALSO ART. NOTHING LIKE IT HAS EVER BEEN ON TV ences see how each noble family has its own “sigil” worked into its clothes.

But the luscious camerawork, the superb cast, the script that shifts between the fantastically foulmouthed and speeches with an almost Shakespearean depth as characters discuss death, vengeance, religion, family love and honour are all part of a whole that feels real because it is never predictable.

It is popular entertainment, and it is also art. Nothing like it has ever been on TV. Game of Thrones also plays with the fact that, although readers of the books have advance knowledge of the plot, the series itself is unfinished.

Nobody but the author knows how it will end. Martin has us all waiting, much as JK Rowling did, as his plot

raises some and throws down others.

The adaptation depicts a world that is fully realised in all its familiarity and strangeness, vulgarity and sophistication and – though not an allegory – its financial, social and political predicaments are tempting metaphors for ours.

Sharing complex plotlines with The Killing and showing the ruthless acquisition of power we see in House of Cards, this is fantasy for grown-ups.

But Game of Thrones also relishes TV as a medium in a way that seems completely alien to British television drama. It never feels small-scale or whimsical. Every culture will find something of itself within it, and its plotting is consistently impressive.

If Martin has drawn on many myths and legends, he has created more. He has also learnt something in America that we now seem unable to remember. Don’t just kill your darlings: keep your audience guessing who these are.

Amanda Craig is the author of six novels, including A Vicious Circle and, most recently, Hearts and Minds (Abacus £8.99) and is a columnist and literary critic. www.amandacraig.com

June 2014 www.rts.org.uk Television

Cup fever

T

he last time the World Cup was held in Brazil, victory for Uruguay was such a shock to the hosts that it plunged an entire nation into mourning. Sixty-four years later, those two South American nations won’t be the only near neighbours to resume a bitter rivalry.

In contrast to four years ago in South Africa, when the BBC was based in Cape Town and ITV’s studio was in Johannesburg, the two British broadcasters are operating in Fifa-built studios next door to one another, with views of Copacabana Beach.

Although they begin the World Cup as rivals – sharing 64 matches equally between them and going head to head only for the final – in truth, far more unites the broadcasters than separates them.

For both the BBC and ITV, big live football matches are a rare chance to turn the clock back to the days before pay-TV transformed the sports broadcasting landscape.

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

Television sport

The World Cup gives ITV and the BBC a rare chance to display their ‘crown jewels’.

Owen Gibson inspects their line-ups “It’s a healthy degree of competition,” ITV’s main anchor, Adrian Chiles, says of his former BBC colleagues, who will be led by Gary Lineker.

“We all know each other. Their studio is right next to ours. I wouldn’t compare us against them. We’ve got a different offering. I do it differently to

2014 IS THE FIRST 24/7 WORLD CUP

Thierry Henry, part of the BBC presenting team Gary and people will decide which they like more.

“You could put anyone, a first-timer, presenting an England game and you’d get a 20-million audience. I know my place.”

The presence of the World Cup on the so-called “crown jewels” list of events protected for free-to-air television under government legislation means that for a month football dominates the BBC and ITV schedules, with Sky Sports and BT Sport relegated to a supporting role.

“This is a one-off occasion, it’s a pinnacle moment. Therefore, it’s all the more special for it to be available on the two top network channels.

That’s why it has such an impact,” says BBC Director of Sport Barbara Slater of the peculiar joy and pain of England’s odyssey through major tournament football since 1966.

“It’s standout, and it’s universal in its appeal because everyone is experiencing it at the same time.”

Even with the surfeit of high-octane, live sport on television, filling endless �

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Getty Images

A bluffer’s guide to Brazil 2014

Do say ‘England can play without fear’ – Expectations have been lowered from their usual stratospheric levels.

Free of the baggage of the past, the hope is that England’s youngsters can take their opportunities where they find them.

‘Another coffee, please’ – Some matches, including England’s opener against Italy, don’t kick off until 11:00pm British Summer Time.

‘History favours Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay’ – No European country has ever won the World Cup on South American soil.

Don’t say ‘Is that stadium finished?’ – Fifa faced a race against time to ensure organisers finished and fitted out the 12 stadia in time for the opening match on 12 June.

‘Is this the new golden generation?’

– It might be England’s second-­ youngest squad ever, but we’re supposed to be downplaying expectations, remember?

‘Where’s Sepp Blatter?’ – Wisely, Fifa’s controversial president has opted not to make his customary appearance on the pitch, given the prospect of protests targeting Fifa.

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Maracanã Stadium, Rio de Janeiro � channels that drive triple-play offerings and big subscription businesses, there remains something especially alluring about a World Cup. Ian Wright, one of ITV’s pundits, waxes lyrical about the evocative nostalgia of beaming in a World Cup from the other side of the globe and the memories that are made as a result.

“The first World Cups I remember are from the 1970s. The colours and the kits and the players all looked magnificent,” he recalls.

Yet the contest also offers the opportunity to look forward. Both ITV and the BBC are heavily pushing their “second screen” experiences and talking up the extent to which this will be the first World Cup when social

media has been truly mainstream.

“Some want to live and breathe it, immerse themselves for six weeks across every platform. Others are your main eventers, if you like, and come in for the big matches,” says Slater, who dubs 2014 “the first 24/7 World Cup”.

“The modern offering provides for everybody, however you want to consume it – whatever, whenever or on any device,” she adds.

The BBC’s “World Cup live” service allows users to follow the live action with a mix of commentary from either BBC Television or Radio 5 Live, plus text updates garnered from Twitter and elsewhere around the web.

For matches to which the BBC has the rights, a video player presents the

Fifa

BIG, LIVE FOOTBALL MATCHES ARE A RARE CHANCE TO TURN THE CLOCK BACK TO… BEFORE PAY-TV

live action and allows fans to catch up on highlights so far, as well as to follow particular players around the pitch.

As with Sky’s pioneering second-­ screen app, developed throughout last season’s Premier League campaign, specific viewing experiences designed to be followed on a tablet or smart phone are becoming smoother and more sophisticated.

As well as its own “second-screen” offering, ITV is trumpeting the fact that it is replaying key highlights of latenight matches on its online player and providing a podcast hosted by Alan Davies.

With some games kicking off at 11:00pm BST, the BBC is also supplying audiences with short, 15-minute

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

highlights programmes to download via iPlayer while travelling to work or school.

This time around, deciding which broadcaster would air which England matches (normally a fraught affair) fell fairly neatly into place.

The BBC got England’s opener – the “rumble in the jungle” against Italy in the steamy Amazonian city of Manaus.

That was less attractive to ITV due to the late kick-off. Instead, it plumped for the commercial certainty of England’s second and third games against Uruguay and Costa Rica, respectively.

As both kick off during UK primetime, ITV has been able to sell advertising slots up front at a premium.

Should England progress beyond the

first round, the BBC has rights to the first knockout match.

Both broadcasters report an upsurge in interest surrounding matches not involving England in recent World Cup tournaments. This suggests the world of football is becoming a smaller place.

Many famous faces from the English Premier League and other European leagues regularly shown by Sky and BT Sport will be playing in Brazil.

Almost as traditional as penalty shoot-out heartache for England are the familiar accusations that the licencefee-funded BBC overspends when it comes to major sporting events.

This time, Slater got her retaliation in first by announcing that its staff across TV, radio and online has shrunk to 272 – down from 295 in 2010 – but they will produce 50% more content. ITV is taking around 120 staff to Brazil.

Both broadcasters have said they want to do all they can to convey the colour and culture of a Brazilian World Cup to viewers at home.

They also both sweated on the last-minute nature of preparations, which saw organisers racing to install broadcasting infrastructure before the tournament kicked off.

ITV’s line-up includes Roy Keane, Fabio Cannavaro, Lee Dixon, Gus Poyet, Patrick Vieira, Glenn Hoddle and Ian Wright. Andros Townsend, the Tottenham winger who played a key role in getting England to the finals, but then missed out on the final squad through injury, will join his namesake Andy, the eloquent former PFA Chairman, Clarke Carlisle, and Martin O’Neill.

The BBC has added some Gallic flair in the shape of Thierry Henry, together with fellow debutants Phil Neville and Rio Ferdinand, to its Match of the Day roster of Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer, Robbie Savage et al.

At the other end of the scale, Alan Hansen will hang up his BBC punditry jumper for good following the final.

The one thing neither broadcaster can do is predict how Roy Hodgson’s young side will perform.

But, along with the rest of the football nation, both will be desperately hoping they can at least emerge from the group stages.

England’s quarter-final loss to Italy in Euro 2012 was the year’s third-most watched programme in a top 10 dominated by big sporting events.

Audiences peaked at 23 million as the side exited, inevitably, on penalties.

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Why we need to embrace uncertainty

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rediction may be very difficult, particularly about the future – but put technology entrepreneur Dr Mike Lynch on stage at the Royal Society and you are guaranteed a mind-stretching performance.

The Cambridge-educated scientist, described as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates (Lynch’s wealth is estimated to be in the order of £500m) provided a typically stimulating address.

His hour-long lecture managed to name check: a pioneer of nuclear physics; an obscure 18th-Century English clergyman, who, he said, is transforming software; Shakespeare; and even EastEnders, in what was the RTS’s first partnership with the IET. At the heart of Lynch’s talk was one very simple, if unpalatable idea: the difficulty human beings have in coming to terms with uncertainty sparked by the explosive pace of technological change.

Lynch highlighted the veteran Harvard biologist EO Wilson’s belief that “we have the emotions of the Palaeolithic, the institutions of the medieval and the technology of the gods”.

He added: “The emotions of the Palaeolithic means we actually still have love, hate, fear, greed, jealousy and anxiety, just as you would find in human art, from Shakespeare to EastEnders.”

However, there is a critical malfunc-

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RTS/IET Public Lecture

Michael Lynch says machine intelligence will reinvent TV – assuming we survive the coming crises that will be heightened by similar technologies, learns Steve Clarke tion: “What we are seeing in the world is the effect of these tectonic plates moving at different speeds, and they start to rub up against one another where they can’t adapt to the changes.”

Lynch advised his listeners to welcome technological change despite what he acknowledged is its terrifying speed.

Developments at technology companies make uncertainty a fact of life.

Not that it has ever been any different, said the founder of UK software giant Autonomy. Famously, he lives in a Georgian pile in rural Suffolk where, superficially, very little seems to have changed in the past 200 years.

“The one thing I hope you take away with you tonight is that we have to

embrace uncertainty,” stressed Lynch.

“You may be a little bit scared of it but, actually, the determinism that we thought we had before was an illusion.”

He had taken the title of his lecture (“Prediction is very difficult, particularly about the future”) from a quote normally attributed to the Nobel prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr – although some claim Mark Twain was responsible for coining the wisecrack.

Lynch reminded his audience that Bohr was crucial to the development of quantum mechanics. Without Bohr’s ideas, he claimed, there would be no mobile devices, let alone television.

The first thing about predictions is that they nearly always prophesy doom. They also have a “fundamental tendency to overestimate the change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term”.

The 2000 dotcom boom is one example. “Most of the predictions came true, it just took a little bit longer,” Lynch recalled. “Now is the period of greatest change, because we are hitting some pretty fundamental singularities in the changes that are happening.”

He added: “The most important influence on predicting technological change is history – because technological change always relies on a combination of technology and people.”

Near Lynch’s home in Suffolk are 11th-Century church towers; but,

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alongside the Romanesque architecture, home workers have access to high-speed broadband.

“If you have a talented software programmer sitting in a Suffolk village, they can be a 100 times as productive as the median software programmer…

“The ability to get information flow to and from the human brain has been going up exponentially.”

In the 21st Century the upside is that a creative software producer or the inventor of a hot new TV format can monetise their IP globally.

Lynch turned to the impact of technology during the euro crisis and the 2008 financial meltdown.

One of its consequences has been “volatility in the system, because political institutions cannot keep up with the speed of the trading system”.

Nowadays, legal institutions cannot stay on top of the terabytes of data that modern companies generate.

And yet the human need to communicate remains. Facebook was created, argued Lynch, when a lot of young people from all over the world who did not know one another found themselves working in Silicon Valley. Thus social networking was born.

“It is important to use the interaction of technology to find opportunity,” suggested Lunch. “But it is getting more difficult due to the complexity of the modern world and the interconnections that go across nation states.”

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

Paul Hampartsoumian

Dr Michael Lynch and his assistant demonstrating Google Glass

He added: “Today the financial system moves so fast that no one can see it in totality… We’ve got a system that is completely out of control and it’s getting faster.

“For those of you from the IET, it’s a classic, non-linear, multi-path feedback system where no one has actually thought about stability.

“For those of you from the RTS, it’s just crazy.”

With few controls to ensure stability, volatility is set to become commonplace: “We find ourselves slightly in a pact with the devil, where the only solution – because humans aren’t fast enough – is to turn back to the technology.”

Lynch wondered whether we are prepared to trust the financial system to even faster computers.

With smart-phone computing power doubling every 12 months, storage capacity growing exponentially and always-on connectivity a reality, a long-heralded achievement is finally taking shape. “Machine intelligence,” said Lynch, “has been won inch by inch and it’s been a really hard slog...

“Speech recognition has been slowly developing since the 1970s… We’re finally getting to the point where it’s starting to become very useful and very powerful. This is going to change everything…”

“If computers are monitoring pictures produced by CCTV cameras and they can understand what they are �

MY SHORT THOUGHT ON PRIVACY IS THAT IT’S GONE. SO GET OVER IT Lynch believes we are seeing the end of privacy – and, perhaps, hypocrisy as well: ‘The short thought on privacy is that it’s gone, so get over it [laughter]. You might not like it.’

He continued: ‘If you take a teenager and offer them something like the chance to win concert tickets, they will tell you vast amounts about what they are doing.

‘They don’t worry about privacy in the same way. It’s a cultural difference. The ability of the machines of intelligence to pick together all the different bits of info means that privacy is going to be a different thing in the future.

‘I get hate mail when I say that sort of thing. I am not saying it is a good thing or a bad thing.

‘The important thing to understand is, it’s going to change a lot of things.

‘One of the things that human beings have is hypocrisy. We like to say we do one thing; actually, we do another.

‘The height of hypocrisy was Victorian London, when one in six houses was reputedly a brothel, but you had the greatest flowering of the family being idealised in literature and art.

‘In the modern world, it’s going to be harder to keep the two separate.’

13

QUESTION & ANSWER What is your biggest fear at the moment?

I think there are two major issues… The first one is stability in the financial system. There’s so many vested interests that don’t understand what’s going on.

Although there are some voices now – people such as Andy Haldane at the Bank of England – that kind of get it, this it is not being dealt with fast enough.

There will be another shock at some point. We need to be ready for that.

The second is… [former Royal Society President] Martin Rees wrote a book called Our Final Century, which suggested there’s a Moore’s law of terrorism.

In the 1890s if you wanted to cause a lot of trouble you had to mass a huge army on the border, which took weeks and everybody saw it coming.

Technology has now got to the point where if you want to change world policy you can crash two airliners into the World Trade Center… That cost about $200,000 and required about 100 people.

As technology moves on, you’re going to be able to do some pretty bad things with three people.

Q A

We’re frightened because we think artificial intelligence will replace us. Is that fair?

Technology creates its own set of problems, such as cyber security… The information overload problem… I think machine intelligence will get to the point where it gets better and better at filtering it for you.

The danger of that is you [might] lose serendipity, which is a very important part of how newspapers and some scheduling on the BBC works, where it used to do wonderful things such as putting something rather clever on after EastEnders…

I am more worried about who drives the agenda…

Most days we spend too much time replying to our emails, which is completely wrong...

14

Getty Images

Q A

LYNCH’S TWO BIG FEARS: ■ OUT-OF-CONTROL FINANCE SYSTEM ■ MOORE’S LAW OF TERRORISM It is very important to take back control of the agenda from the ­technology.

Q

Britain has been a fantastically creative and inventive place.

Where do we stand on the world stage today?

The fascinating thing about the UK is that the science base and the engineering base are phenomenal. Our top universities are as good as anywhere in the world.

The difficulty is that, generally, we haven’t converted that in recent years into economic impact in the way we should have. It’s getting a lot better.

There are a series of structural reasons for that, which largely are getting fixed… The Government is trying very hard.

The sad fact is, if you go to Silicon Valley and you’re feeling a bit lonely on Saturday night, you can fill the bar with Brits – and they’re all heads of engineering. That’s got to change…

I do think there is a role for the Government in the AstraZeneca [takeover bid that Pfizer withdrew from shortly after this lecture].

What you’ve got there is amazing science and suddenly it’s [at risk of] disappearing. UK taxpayers created that science base by funding universities and research councils. The Government should not be backward in making it impossible for Pfizer to strip that IP.

A

Pfizer should legally agree that it is not going to move the IP offshore. It should also have to agree up front about the R&D spend in the UK… Americans are not backward in doing this themselves. We need to say, “Look, we have a great asset here, we’re very happy for you to come and buy it, but you’ve got to do it on these terms.”

Q

Google bought British neuroscience company DeepMind for £240m last year.

How is the Government going to keep [science], particularly neuroscience, in the UK – or is it better off in the hands of the Big Five US tech companies?

In an ideal world, if that company was as good as Google says it is, it would have been wonderful if it had had the finance to grow in the UK and become a very large company here.

We have a lot of good start-ups [in the UK]… The trouble is, the UK capital markets don’t work well for tech businesses. There is one technology company in the FTSE 100…

The Government and the London Stock Exchange need to work very closely together so that we can list those companies in the UK… My career in the UK has been about starting at the beginning as a start-up and knocking down the barriers.

A

The post-lecture meal at the BT Tower was hosted by BT

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

Dr Michael Lynch OBE FREng, technology entrepreneur and founder of Invoke Capital, gave the RTS/IET Joint Public Lecture at London’s Royal Society on 13 May. The evening was chaired by Tim Davie, CEO of BBC Worldwide and BBC Director, Global.

Public domain

number she was able to buy tickets to see the film.

Most impressive of all was Lynch’s use of an iPhone to create a small but perfectly formed 3D digital dinosaur, place it on a table and interact with the creature.

He emphasised that artificial intelligence means devices can immediately comprehend what they “see”, rather than relying on search engines to provide a simulacrum of intelligence.

“There is a completely different way of using information when these things become intelligent,” said Lynch.

Moreover: “Just through movement a phone camera can work out a 3D model of the world around it… So not only can you create a 3D object, but you can put that into a 3D world and interact with it completely automatically…

“Imagine a new concept of TV where it is 3D in whatever context...” and creators can visually insert “non-existent digital things into the real world, where they can interact perfectly” as if they were real. “The possibilities of that are really quite phenomenal.”

It was hard to disagree. Where TV and film-makers eventually take this technology is anyone’s guess.

But existing regulatory structures look, well, medieval by comparison.

Paul Hampartsoumian

� seeing, “the whole world changes… It also opens up all sorts of creative possibilities.”

He added: “Once they can do that, they can all be connected up and bring together very large amounts of data.”

This has implications for content creators and broadcasters, who to date have defied the Cassandras: far from facing extinction, linear TV is in rude health.

“The reality is that, while I don’t think television will die – in the same way that radio hasn’t died – I do think there are new creative forms coming along,” said Lynch. “They will allow creativity to be expressed in very interesting ways.”

To show what he was getting at, Lynch was joined on stage by an assistant. She demonstrated the potential of wearable smart devices in the form of Google Glass and a Samsung watch.

But first there was a caveat from Lynch: “I warn you that what I am going to show you is the equivalent of looking at a TV set in the 1940s. It’s going to be fuzzy and clunky, but one thing we can be absolutely sure about is that it is going to get a lot better quickly…

“If is for you [TV practitioners] to start to think about the creativity that you can put behind this.”

The audience saw a family portrait suddenly burst into life in vivid 3D via Google Glass. Lynch’s assistant then used her Glass to interact with a poster advertising a Tom Cruise film.

Reviews of the movie were displayed in a fraction of a second and in less time than it takes to dial a phone

BAYES’ THEOREM IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT IDEA DRIVING THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION Those familiar with Lynch’s work will know that he made his name (and fortune) inventing software that enables computers to search and understand unstructured data.

Much of his inspiration came from an obscure, 18th-Century Presbyterian minister and mathe­ matician called Thomas Bayes, whose theories about probability have been taken up by the software industry.

‘For those of you in television, you ought to make a programme about this guy,’ advised Lynch. ‘He is going to be to the next century what the physicists were to the last century.’

Lynch said: ‘Bayes’ Theorem turns out the single most important idea driving the information revolution and machine intelligence.

‘It acknowledges that you can have objective science, but when it comes to recognising something or understanding that it’s subjective as you experience it, the science has been very good at dealing with the objective but it hasn’t bridged the subjective. Bayes found that bridge 250 years ago.’

15

All cartoons: Russell Herneman

Role models for the perfect chairman BBC

The BBC Trust needs to decide what kind of chairman it wants to recruit. Stefan Stern provides a survivors’ guide to picking a leader it can live with

16

U

nexpectedly, a vacancy has arisen.

Major heart surgery has brought a premature close to Lord Patten’s chairmanship of the BBC Trust. The timing is unfortunate, to say the least.

The BBC has the small matter of a Scottish referendum and a finely balanced general election to get through, followed by charter renewal in 2016.

While Vice-Chairman Diane Coyle steps up on a temporary basis, a permanent answer has to be found to Lord Beaverbrook’s famous question: “Who is in charge of the clattering train?”

Given the corporation’s less than happy experience of using headhunters in 2012, when the recommended replacement for outgoing Director-­ General Mark Thompson lasted all of 54 days in post, it could be that the Government will use informal networks to find a successor to Chris Patten. Several familiar names are already being mentioned in the press.

We will not add to that speculation here. But it is a good idea to ask: what sort of chairman are you looking for?

They come in a variety of shapes and sizes – horses for courses, as it were.

The ultimate choice comes down to recognising what sort of organisation you are and what state you are in. That

will all go towards influencing the final decision.

So here is Television’s guide to finding the right sort of chairman.

The Teflon chairman

Chief executives come and go, but the Teflon chairman is for all time. You may not know his name, you may never have seen him in the papers or on television. But quietly, resolutely, he is sitting there at the head of the top table.

The shareholders trust him. The media respect him. This may be partly because he never gives any interviews and almost nothing is known about him.

In a takeover battle he is steady under fire, purposeful, solid. And successful.

But when troubles come he is even less visible than usual. He courageously allows the CEO to front up and take the flak. If he considers it necessary, he will, with regret and after much soul-searching, throw the CEO under the next passing bus.

And, in the same breath, welcome a carefully chosen successor to the company.

It is not always obvious what the Teflon chairman is actually doing. But what little he does he achieves with minimal effort and maximum impact.

And, best of all, nothing ever sticks to him. He is sitting calmly by his phone now, waiting for the next attractive offer to come in.

The politico chairman

Some chairmen may not have had an active career in business.

Their claim to fame comes from

THE TEFLON CHAIRMAN IS FOR ALL TIME… WHEN TROUBLE COMES HE IS EVEN LESS VISIBLE THAN USUAL elsewhere – the rather different world of politics.

While business people often find Westminster bewildering and unsatisfactory, the traffic in the other direction flows more smoothly.

Cabinet ministers are used to pressure, media scrutiny and taking big decisions. This, in theory, makes them a natural for the boardroom.

They also bring connections and a grounded realism about the art of the possible.

In practice, however, there is a limit

to how much you really want to import the trickiest moves from the politician’s playbook into a commercial enterprise.

The politico chairman can be a meddler. They may see themselves as a skilful diplomat. But they can come across as merely slippery and hard to trust.

And, as a former practising politician, they will have made enemies.

They will bear grudges and may, in turn, be the object of resentment and envy.

In the right circumstances, a chairman with a black belt in the dark arts of politics may be a wise choice.

At other times, it would be precisely the opposite. A risk too far, then? You might say that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

The executive chairman

After enough years as a chief executive, some choose to make the step up to the job of chairman.

Corporate governance orthodoxy holds that a CEO should not become chair of the same company, but there is nothing to stop them becoming a chairman elsewhere.

This is not without risk, however. Of course, former CEOs may be decisive and forthright; natural leaders, in fact.

But being a chair is a rather different role.

The CEO should be running the company. The chairman runs the �

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

17

The swaggering chair can start a party in an empty room and give everybody an enjoyable ride – for a while. Just remember to keep an eye on the books, and to count the spoons.

The chairwoman

THE SWAGGERING CHAIR HAS PANACHE, A READY WIT AND AN EYE FOR A HEADLINE… HE CAN START A PARTY IN AN EMPTY ROOM � board. The executive chair, on the other hand, does tend to see himself as the Man In Charge.

He may have earned his reputation for being an effective leader and businessman.

But he should not be undermining the real CEO by intruding too far into the decision-making process.

In short, if you are going to appoint an executive chair you need a CEO with few ego problems, someone who is prepared to lean heavily on the chairman for advice, guidance and support in decision-making.

This is fine when things are going well. But when they don’t, an executive chair and CEO can expect to fall together.

He can be impatient, is not really a detail person, but is never dull.

In the good times the swaggering chair is a lot of fun, rarely out of the papers, spreading bonhomie.

When his luck turns, the magic dies. Look out for retribution and the blame game.

If your business is going through hard times and needs a turnaround, the swaggering chair may not be for you. Better to send for him when things are already on the up.

Ah, yes. I realise that the male pronoun “he” has been used throughout this piece so far. There is a reason for that.

There are precious few women chairmen – chairwomen, if you prefer – to be found in the corporate world.

This is not the place to debate why.

But the lack of women chairs does point to an opportunity for the more imaginative business. Women are different. You may have noticed this.

A board led by a woman is, perhaps, going to be more open, somewhere that measured discussion can take place.

This is not automatically going to be true, as any fan of Spitting Image’s portrayal of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet could point out.

Nonetheless, the world is not going to end if a few more women are given opportunities in the boardroom.

Indeed, that thought might have occurred to those in charge of finding a new chair for the BBC Trust. We shall see, quite soon.

There you have it. By reading to the end you have practically saved yourself a headhunter’s fee. Good luck.

And choose your chairman with care.

Stefan Stern writes regularly for the FT and The Guardian and is Visiting Professor of Practice at Cass Business School.

The swaggering chairman

Some chairmen know it all. At least, they think they do. Maybe they have a lifetime of success in business behind them.

Maybe they just have the right surname, and have been groomed for success by the preceding generation from an early age.

The swaggering chair has panache, a ready wit and an eye for a headline.

He might not run board meetings by the book; indeed, he may be a law unto himself.

18

June 2014 www.rts.org.uk Television

OUR FRIEND IN THE

FAR EAST

JJ

ust off the coast of eastern China, near to Xiamen, lies a new island.

Well, two islands to be precise, and shaped like leaping dolphins.

Think of the yin and yang symbol and you will understand how they are aligned and the reason behind their name.

They were built by the China Merchants Bank, one of the institutions in eastern China championing the development of infrastructure (including housing and ports) and establishing a base for media, broadcasting and the creative industries.

That is why the prestigious organisation was a funder, along with Hong Kong-based broadcaster Phoenix TV, of the inaugural Sino/UK Innovation in Media Management Summit, held near Xiamen last month.

Twenty-six UK independent production companies were selected from nearly 100 applicants for the opportunity to attend this fully paidfor, four-day event.

More than 100 of China’s top channel executives flew in from across the country to join the UK delegation in a five-star venue.

Alongside the producers were David Abraham, CEO of Channel 4, who gave a rousing keynote, and Martin Davidson, the BBC’s Head of Commissioning, History and Business, who generously participated in the headline sessions and panels.

The ambition of the UK participants was not only to find potential customers for programmes, formats and new ideas but to discover partners for new projects.

For the Chinese, it was an opportunity to meet some of the best UK factual-entertainment producers, to hear exciting and professional pitches, and to discuss new ideas.

Each UK company presented itself to the assembled Chinese broadcast-

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

Cavalier treatment of a business card can destroy your hard-won relationships in China, warns John McVay

ers in its own distinctive style. Showreels were crammed with award-­ winning, popular and commercially successful programmes.

Special mention has to go to James Burstall, CEO of Argonon. He did his entire presentation in Mandarin and had all the titles and text translated, too. This wowed the Chinese who remain convinced that westerners won’t even attempt to speak Chinese, let alone learn the language. According to my translator, James was word perfect.

Things like this make a huge impression. So does understanding the etiquette of their business meetings.

Rule number one – never, ever write on or deface any business card

you’ve been given and always place them on the table in order of seniority. Also, everyone uses WeChat and QR codes for networking.

Second – you won’t always know precisely what it is that you are eating, but it’s rude not to try dishes.

Pact has spent several years developing relations with the Chinese market, led by our tireless Dawn McCarthy Simpson.

The first Pact trade delegation was in November 2013. This involved 20 UK independent companies visiting all the main broadcasters in Beijing, Shanghai and attending the Sichuan TV market.

The visit was supported by the UKTI Tradeshow Access Programme.

It proved just how critical these modest amounts of support can be to SMEs in the creative industries.

The trip resulted in Pact signing a memorandum of understanding with CCTV-9, China’s main documentary channel.

The Chinese regarded this as a significant development in their relations with UK producers.

As a consequence, I returned to Beijing a few days before the summit in Xiamen to sign a new MOU with the Vice-President of CCTV to work with all the CCTV channels.

The Chinese love UK programming.

They appreciate our maverick creativity, British TV’s commitment to high quality and our ambition to make content for global audiences.

They share this ambition.The summit will be repeated next year.

Pact is planning more work with our partners in China to ensure that the UK television industry is the preferred English-language partner as the Chinese look to expand their horizons beyond Double Happy Island.

John McVay is CEO of Pact.

19

Convergence in a box Richard Halton tells Torin Douglas why YouView is an essential part of British TV’s future

I

t’s little wonder that YouView’s CEO, Richard Halton, is smiling.

After years of delayed launches, regulatory rows, changes of chairmen and negative headlines (such as “Alan Sugar should kill the YouView brand”), the venture that Halton has nurtured from its earliest days as “Project Canvas” can look ahead with confidence.

In March, against pundits’ predictions, YouView’s seven owners – the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, BT, TalkTalk and Arqiva – agreed to fund the service as equal shareholders for the next five years.

YouView has also signed up a string of new on-demand services, from Dave to STV; it’s passed more than 1 million connected homes, with 3 million video-on-demand plays a day; and won five-star reviews and consumer satisfaction plaudits for its technology and ease of use.

To cap it all, BT is to replace all its existing set-top boxes with YouView boxes.

The project that critics once claimed was over-ambitious and anti-competitive and should be put out of its misery is taking on new staff and developing new apps, as it aims for a long-term target of 10 million connected-TV UK homes.

For Halton, who has lived and breathed digital television since joining the BBC in 1999, it is a good moment.

“People were suggesting that the BBC would not reinvest in YouView but I’d had James Purnell [BBC Director of Strategy and Digital] in this office giving me an absolute assurance – and

20

the deal is for five years, which is longer than most people expected.”

Even so, critics claim that YouView is turning into something it wasn’t meant to be – a gateway for BT and TalkTalk to launch pay-services – rather than the next generation of Freeview, taking free-to-air broadcasting into the internet TV world.

They point out that most of its growth comes from boxes supplied free or at low rental by BT and TalkTalk (rather than bought by viewers) and that this is where most of YouView’s investment is coming from.

Halton argues that the service hasn’t changed its role. “YouView was set up to future-proof the major broadcasters and to provide a path into internet TV for Freeview.

“Each of the broadcasters wants it for different reasons – ITV to smooth the way for targeted advertising, Channel 4 for richer customer data – but they all want there to be a single platform of scale for free-to-air broadcasting, to compete with Sky and Virgin.

“And TalkTalk is seeing a huge increase in customer satisfaction from YouView.”

Even so, people still find it hard to sum up what YouView does.

It describes itself as “an on-demand TV service with more than 70 live,

PEOPLE STILL FIND IT HARD TO SUM UP WHAT YOUVIEW DOES

free-to-air digital TV and radio channels” that “seamlessly combines seven-day catch-up on BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4oD and Demand 5 with a library of on-demand television programmes, film and radio”.

Halton accepts that choosing a TV provider has become too complicated.

He says YouView is working on how to simplify its message, in conversation with BT and TalkTalk.

It wouldn’t be his first such callenge.

On leaving the University of Warwick, Halton joined Andersen Consulting (later Accenture) and then moved to the BBC to work on the launches of BBC Three and BBC Four with Stuart Murphy and Roly Keating, respectively.

“Roly and I sat in his kitchen thinking up ways to describe BBC Four – we pointed out the parallels with Tate Modern, which was starting at about the same time,” he recalls.

“I was also on Lorraine Heggessey’s BBC One team, trying to ensure the channels linked together as a family.

Helping to develop commissioning strategy was a great way to start in television.”

As Controller of TV Strategy, and later responsible for the BBC’s corporate strategy, Halton dealt with all the key players inside and outside the corporation.

“I brokered the relationship between the BBC, ITV and BT, when we were first developing Project Canvas to see how Freeview could be upgraded to be received online,” he says. That was no mean feat, say those familiar with the situation.

The partnership between the BBC,

Humax

YouView

YouView

Richard Halton ITV and BT was announced in December 2008. TalkTalk joined the Project Canvas consortium shortly afterwards, then Channel 4, Arqiva and, eventually, Channel 5.

The YouView brand was launched in September 2010. But it still took until July 2012 to launch YouView boxes to the public.

It seemed the project was being overtaken by a stream of competitors’ systems, including smart TVs with ever-more-sophisticated software.

Why did it take so long?

“The regulatory issues took 23 months to solve, instead of the nine months that we’d expected,” says Halton. “Sky and Virgin naturally had concerns and the TV-set manufacturers had issues with it, too.

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

“Fortunately, when it was referred to the Office of Fair Trading they saw the benefits very quickly.”

One frequently heard criticism was that this was a grandiose, over-prescriptive BBC project, designed to extend the grip of the established UK broadcasters into the YouTube era.

Better to “let 1,000 flowers bloom”, said YouView’s critics, and allow a free flow of creative ideas from producers and technology companies to find their place in the market.

Halton counters that the problem with this analogy was that the “1,000 flowers” were dwarfed by massive trees with huge girths, such as Sky, Virgin, Google/YouTube and Apple, which would have dominated the marketplace – and still could.

“Isn’t it better to have a consortium of the major British broadcasters and broadband companies?” he asks. “BT and TalkTalk compete strongly in broadband with Sky and Virgin, and there are three strong TV platforms – Sky, Virgin and Freeview/YouView.

“It’s about broadcasters controlling their own destiny, allowing them to continue to invest in great new content.”

Halton believes that mainstream television still requires a structure to produce high-quality content and to allow viewers to find it easily.

“We believe that linear channels are still hugely important,” he says. “That TV schedule grid – with the BBC News at Six, and The One Show and Channel 4 News at 7:00pm, and the Saturday night entertainment shows – is a very easy way of finding content.

“We’re not saying, like Google, ‘forget TV channels, watch what you like when you like’, or Netflix, that the future is all about streaming. That still has a very small share of viewing in this country.”

Having said that, Halton believes YouView has much in common with those companies.

He calls it a “brilliant, young technology company”, developing software for a range of devices, including an upgraded BBC “red button” and apps to allow smaller companies – such as the National Theatre – on to YouView.

With its funding secure for five years, it has just become an RTS Major Patron and is taking on new staff.

“I feel we need to be part of the RTS conversation,” he says. “We must attract the best skills and talents into this industry. YouView has 135 staff – average age under 30 – and 95 are technologists or in related disciplines.

“We’re launching an intern scheme, with 12 places, because we need the talent.”

Halton says coding and software are now vital TV skills – alongside those of programme-making, script-writing and audience research – and that makes television a much bigger industry than it was.

“We’re growing an eco-system of TV app developers to make viewing more personal.

“And, because of Sky’s development record and the BBC iPlayer, the UK is seen as a leader, not just in content but in the ‘context’ of TV. “YouView is part of that future,” he concludes. “It’s living proof of convergence.”

21

The new retail revolution

T

wo events recently marked another chapter in the history of television shopping channels. The first was that Sit-up TV – which operated Bid TV and Price-drop TV and once used David Dickinson as the face of its brand – went into administration.

The second was that the wrecking balls moved in to demolish the old south-west London headquarters of QVC – an iconic, neo-classical building that once represented the dreams of the pioneers of home shopping.

The incidents tell stories about two different areas of the UK market, which is still big business.

Figures from research and consumer insight company Opinion Matters suggest the British market for products bought from TV shopping channels is worth around £1bn a year.

QVC, now based in a more high-tech building in Chiswick, is the UK’s market leader. It launched in Britain in 1993 and is now owned by Liberty Interactive; Liberty-owned sister companies include Virgin Media and All3Media.

QVC CEO Dermot Boyd reckons the UK “probably has more [shopping] channels than anywhere else”.

On Sky, there are 27. These range from niche ones such as Create and Craft, through to jewellery station Gems TV (which hit the headlines recently after a presenter made a rude gesture live on air) and Paversshoes.TV, apparently the world’s first 24-hour channel dedicated to shoes.

Others include Ideal World – singing the praises of “smart trousers with an elasticated waistband” when I tuned in – and The Boutique, which was extolling the virtues of a Victorian porcelain doll.

There are fewer channels on Freeview, largely because of the higher cost of scarcer spectrum.

But why does the UK have so many

22

Multichannel TV

Will the internet empty out the UK’s crowded mall of TV shopping channels? asks Tara Conlan TV shopping channels, and are they in decline in the internet era?

Retailer Argos’s experience of launching a channel in 2011 and closing it less than two years later suggests it is not an easy market.

Says Retail Week Senior Reporter Gemma Goldfingle: “TV made sense for Argos. It seemed to fit well with the catalogue retail company. But it was ill-fated; it didn’t last very long.”

She explains that while companies might do well on the internet, this is not always an indicator that they will prosper as a TV channel. Where TV shopping differs from online browsing is that it usually gives a demonstration and often has fixed “special-offer” points in the schedule, such as a “finale” or “today’s special value”.

QVC is available to around 27 million homes – and is, arguably, the most upmarket. It sees itself more as a department store – providing entertainment and, often, exclusivity on certain brands.

TV CHANNELS CAN SURVIVE AND DRIVE SALES, IN COMBINATION WITH THE WEB AND MOBILE

Last year, it launched two more channels – jewellery and fashion-­ focused QVC Style and “best of the rest” station QVC Extra.

QVC’s focus on beauty and jewellery has paid off, along with partnerships with celebrities such as Joan Collins and Donna Air (who recently launched beauty and jewellery ranges, respectively), guaranteeing star factor and coverage in the Daily Mail and women’s magazines.

But it also sells more diverse products. Prince Charles praised it a couple of years ago when it sold meat from a small lamb producer as part of a rural campaign backed by him.

He said: “There are huge opportunities, it seems to me, through something like QVC, to communicate to so many people all these wonderful little stories that are going on, so often in dark, unseen corners.”

According to QVC’s figures, in 2013 it handled 14.5 million calls and shipped 14.8 million products. Revenues rose from £404m to £418.6m, year on year.

The company has always been an early adopter of digital enhancements – from websites and content that is compatible across all mobile devices to a YouTube channel and apps.

More than half its business is now via the internet and around 50% of its web business is from mobile devices.

This is more than QVC achieves in the US market.

Boyd reckons the outlook for shopping channels in the UK is pretty good at the moment. It certainly is for QVC’s net revenues, up 10% in the first quarter of the year, boosted by its new channels.

He says the company benefits from the expertise available across the QVC group, including at owner Liberty Interactive, particularly in areas such as website development and apps.

“Television channels can survive and drive sales, in combination with the web and mobile,” argues Boyd. He

QVC

THE UK PROBABLY HAS MORE [SHOPPING] CHANNELS THAN ANYWHERE ELSE

points out that QVC’s channels are now available for streaming to iPads.

One of the enduring draws for TV shopping audiences, particularly on QVC, says Boyd, is the relationships viewers have with the presenters.

As anyone who has seen candidates in The Apprentice doing the shopping-­ channel buying and presenting challenge, marketing a product on live TV in an entertaining way is a real skill.

“We like to think of it as social entertainment and being able to buy things in one place,” says Boyd. “Amazon is a phenomenal competitor but our customers still use us because we provide a different experience.”

Ashley Faull, one of the founders of Sit-up TV, acknowledges that the online retailer was a factor in the company’s demise.

“I’m very proud of what we did, we had 1,200 people working for us,” he says.

After he and the original team sold Sit-up, it declined – largely, says Faull, because it ceased to innovate.

Moreover, he claims that around £100m in cash was taken out of it,

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

“plus the web didn’t help the Sit-up model”.

He thinks it is now a tougher market as Freeview slots are more expensive and the biggest brands, QVC and Ideal World, have launched more channels: “The economics have changed – having a 10-channel block ahead of you [on the electronic programme guide], all promoting each other, makes it more difficult.”

Boyd emphasises that TV shopping is a “scale business” and that perhaps the market is moving towards a “fixedprice model”.

He says that fewer TV shopping channels are running the falling-price or auction models, typified by Sit-up’s channels, Price-drop and Bid TV; both specialised in starting products at high prices, then reducing them to encourage sales.

That might be where the impact of the internet is being felt, as viewers can “showroom”, as Goldfingle puts it.

In other words, watch a TV shopping channel to find out about a product, but then go online to find it cheaper on websites such as Amazon.

The writing was on the wall, arguably, for Sit-up after regulator Ofcom launched an investigation last May. This followed 27 complaints being upheld against Bid TV and Price-drop TV over the true value of products and the misleading of consumers.

TV shopping channels are often seen as the domain of older viewers.

Intriguingly, while QVC’s audiences have predominantly been women over 35 – and Boyd says the company is “very comfortable with that demographic” – he adds that “new customers tend to be younger each year”, perhaps as a result of the company’s investment in technology.

Goldfingle says QVC is “continually solid” and the famous faces it attracts prove that TV shopping is “still a powerful medium”.

After watching hours of television shopping channels, you can’t fail to notice that one of the most-frequently repeated phrases is: “They are going to start selling out, they’ll be gone soon.”

The same could be said about those channels that do not adapt and use the benefits of the digital world.

23

F

rom BBC Two to TV-am, getting a new television station on air and establishing it has never been easy. But on 31 March London Live, the biggest channel in former Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s new wave of local-TV services, arrived in one piece.

And so was born the capital’s first bespoke, multi-platform network channel aimed at the under-35s.

“It’s a crazy project. Who would launch a TV channel in eight months?

I wouldn’t have imagined doing that and I can’t believe we have all done it,” said Launch Programme Director Jane Mote.

She added: “It’s an incredible TV station, it looks good, sounds good and it’s achieved the objective of opening up a platform for Londoners.”

Mote and her colleagues – Bryn Balcombe, Technology Director, Jonathan Boseley, Head of Programming, Vikki Cook, Head of News and Current Affairs, and presenter Gavin Ramjaun – had gamely agreed to discuss the birth of London Live at an RTS event, “London Live – the first month”.

In the front row, their boss, Andrew Mullins, CEO of London Live, listened attentively and was at hand to argue his side of the case about the station’s ratings.

The new kid on the block had deliberately avoided taking the obvious path of giving audiences a celebrity-­led service.

“We could have gone the easy route – slammed a few celebrities in, got some quick wins, made some bucks and gone home,” stressed Mote.

The presenting team is young and diverse – and are given a lot of opportunities to be hands-on and work across a variety of shows.

Ramjaun, whose career includes stints at both ITV and the BBC, said he had fronted all of the channel’s live shows apart from the lunchtime show.

“From having done television such as Daybreak and This Morning, I’ve done the traditional routes…,” he said. “Obviously, it has to be interesting and relevant to Londoners, but the thing that’s struck me most about this channel is that, if you have an idea, you can get it on air.

“I don’t just sit there and read an Autocue…

“We write our own scripts and produce our own content.”

Mote said that the desire to break

24

30 days in the life of a new channel Local TV

London Live, the new multi-platform broadcasting operation serving the capital, has ignored much of TV’s established playbook, reports Steve Clarke new ground was reflected in how London Live was distributed, in its content and in its technological innovation.

She said London Live wanted a brand proposition that was “modern, celebratory, urban and knowing”.

Is it an advantage having the backing of a big newspaper group (London Live is owned by the publishers of The Independent and Evening Standard, Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev), asked the evening’s chair, journalist Kate Bulkley.

“To start with, it wasn’t very helpful at all.

There were hundreds of people working in the company who all thought they knew about television, who wanted to

spend time telling me, then the only TV employee, what should be done…

“Obviously, to hit timetables like that we had to be laser-focused, but what’s been amazing about working with the London Evening Standard and Independent journalists is the amount of quality news and information and creativity in the building...

“We couldn’t have done it without that newspaper base. It’s turned out to be a complete blessing.”

There are advantages also to be had via cross-promotion, although London Live’s demographic is unlikely to have many committed newspaper readers.

They are certainly big users of social networks, and wouldn’t be seen dead on the streets of Hackney or Hammersmith without their mobile devices.

Part of London Live’s pitch involves making maximum use of the connected generation’s tendency to watch TV in non-traditional ways.

“We’re not just interested in TV viewers. We’re interested in viewers of our content,” said Boseley. “We want people to watch us on the move and on

Paul Hampartsoumian

From left: Jane Mote, Bryn Balcombe, Jonathan Boseley, Vikki Cook, Gavin Ramjaun and Kate Bulkley

THE THING THAT’S STRUCK ME MOST ABOUT THIS CHANNEL IS THAT, IF YOU HAVE AN IDEA, YOU CAN GET IT ON AIR any platform they want to watch us on...

“We absolutely know that people are streaming us and watching us on their devices. That will grow and grow.”

Ultimately, though, it is the appeal of London Live’s content, regardless of the distribution platform, that will determine its success or otherwise.

Much of the schedule is dedicated to news and current affairs. Cook stressed that the channel aims to bring a fresh take on the capital and avoid old staples such as the habit of filming vox pops in Chiswick High Road.

Instead, said Cook, she was looking for a “slight cheekiness, a slight knowingness”. Not for nothing is the early-­ evening magazine show called Not the One Show.

“If you talk about news for a young demographic, a lot of people think you are going to be gimmicky,” she said. “It was something I was very clear about with Andy, our CEO: it had to be credible journalism, otherwise I didn’t want to launch it.”

Bulkley said that both The Independent and Evening Standard’s journalism are known for their campaigning edge.

Would this be reflected in London Live?

“It is definitely a different voice,”

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

Cook replied. “It’s important to say that I do want this positive take on things.

That is not to say I want Martyn Lewis-­ style all good news…

“I don’t want to feel like a community channel. I don’t want dark, dingy, grimy duty news. That said, I don’t want to say we will not tell a story because it is in a slightly depressing category.”

How was she approaching the challenge of covering such a huge and ­heterogeneous area as London?

“We had lots of conversations about this when we started… It can’t just be in High Street Kensington or Shoreditch…

“News is driven by deadlines, so it’s practicality versus ambition. Because I am trying to steer us away from duty news it will come down to planning and where we can reach stories.

“It’s difficult. There’s no use pretending it isn’t.”

As for London Live’s non-news and current affairs shows, Boseley is relying on a mix of what he claims are cutting-­ edge programmes featuring fresh TV talent and tried-and-tested acquisitions such as Peep Show, Smack the Pony and Misfits.

He admitted that commissioning shows on such tight budgets (the peaktime tariff is £20,000 an hour) had led �

How London Live uses new technologies Bryn Balcombe: ‘It’s a massive advantage to start with a blank sheet of paper…

‘I wanted to make sure that the content we produce that comes out of news and current affairs or any programme we do in our studio matches the online quality you see.

‘It should be a post-produced quality. If you clip anything up for the studio and put it online, it will stand up as if it was shot for post.

‘That’s why we innovated around DSLR camera technology and formed a long-term partnership with Nikon.

‘We also innovated around robotics. We’re the first in the world to do industrial robotics live in the studio all the time.

‘Our primary camera is an industrial robot. The type of thing you can build a car with...’

25

Why London Live backs diversity

THIS IS A HUNGRY CHANNEL. THIS IS A BIG FREEVIEW CHANNEL. IT IS NOT ON AIR FOR [JUST] TWO HOURS A NIGHT

small pool compared with the luxury I had when I was recruiting here.’

Jane Mote: ‘It is really, really important to us that the channel reflects London. London is incredibly diverse…

‘Why we’ve been able to maintain such diversity in everything we do is because we’ve been very clear there are opportunities for all and that it’s not the same old people.’

Jonathan Boseley: ‘It doesn’t need to be a problem if you’re open…

Anyone can approach us.

‘Look outside and see the variety of London. It’s our mentality. It’s only a problem when you’re in a closed shop. It is very easy to change.’

26

� initially to scepticism from producers. Some of these doubts evaporated when it became clear that London Live was committed to doing something different. “The sort of production companies we’re working with want to play in this space because technology is changing the way you make programmes,” he said.

A recent show, Drag Queens of London, had provoked a big response on Twitter and was a good example of how the station “can create cuttingedge mainstream TV on our tariffs,” noted the head of programming.

YouTube will probably be a good recruiting ground for would-be London Live stars, but the station’s hope is that, eventually, unknown talent could work, too.

“This is a hungry channel,” said Boseley. “This is a big Freeview channel. It is not on air for [just] two hours a night.”

Since arriving last July, Boseley said he had commissioned 40 programmes. High-profile producers such as Fresh One are on board (the company makes Food Junkies for London Live) and original comedy is also part of the mix.

“We’re a broad, mainstream entertainment channel. We want the advertisers to spend with us, so we have to generate ratings. That’s crucial. We’re a commercial company and we’re commercially minded.”

There has been press comment about London Live’s low ratings. But Mullins insisted the figures needed to be looked at in context.

“It’s phase one,” he said. “We haven’t really started to do it with any real skill or capability yet… Who the hell cares about Barb ratings when you’ve got millions and millions of people picking up your news and current affairs across the internet, within the UK and worldwide. That’s the ambition.”

He claimed that 20% of video

viewing on The Independent’s website is by users watching London Live’s content.

The Independent website has 39 million unique browsers, according to Mullins.

He claimed that Barb was under-­ estimating the size of London Live’s audience by 50%.

The station’s breakfast show, Wake Up London, has averaged only 2,400 viewers, according to Barb.

But Mote claimed that, on average,

CEO Andrew Mullins

Paul Hampartsoumian

Audience Q&A

Paul Hampartsoumian

Vikki Cook: ‘I feel passionately about this. It’s one thing I will not do – tick boxes… If a person is talented, I don’t care what their colour, age, sexuality or creed is.

‘I’ve never been able to choose a team from scratch (there were 5,000 applicants for 30 jobs). This time I could… and it was literally the people who came in and sat in front of me.

‘If you’ve got a very diverse team, which we have, actually it just seeds itself...

‘I was at Sky for 11 years. Brilliant company to work for but, in terms of attracting talent and staff, it seemed to come from quite a

150,000 Londoners were tuning in to London Live daily.

She added: “In the first month, according to the same Barb figures that other people are quoting, we’ve had 2 million Londoners watching us.

That is more than one in five Londoners.”

It is, of course, early days. London Live sounds genuinely committed to creating a channel that young Londoners can identify with and watch, use and interact with in a way that is different to traditional linear networks.

Whether this can be translated into a successful business, only time will tell.

‘London Live – the first month’, was a joint RTS London Centre and RTS Early Evening Event held at ITV’s London Studios on 30 April. The producers were Terry Marsh and Martin Stott, Head of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs at Channel 5.

June 2014 www.rts.org.uk Television

T

he top primetime ­entertainment shows ­– Strictly Come Dancing, The Voice UK, Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor – all occupy a unique place in the ecology of British TV. They offer viewers glitz, gossip and star power – and deliver huge audiences. And if an entertainment format can be sold overseas, rights holders can cash in worldwide.

There’s plenty of entertainment programming further down the television food chain, too, in the form of game shows, quizzes, comedy panel series, celebrity specials and dating shows.

In other words, entertainment shows are the lifeblood of TV. It’s a hugely competitive genre, but one that constantly needs people to work in it. How, though, can newcomers gain a foothold? And, when

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

RTS Futures

The broader the appeal of your format ideas, the better your chances with producers and broadcasters, hears Matthew Bell they have one, how do they scale the TV heights?

The latest RTS Futures event in May, “Speed date the entertainment gurus”, aimed to provide some answers.

Over a series of three-minute dates, the young TV hopefuls sold themselves and their ideas to some of the

Paul Hampartsoumian

Speed date the entertainment gurus country’s leading entertainment executives.

At the same time, the gurus offered top tips on how to generate, develop and pitch ideas. ITV Entertainment Commissioning Editor Asif Zubairy reckoned the RTS Futures members had acquitted themselves well during the evening, “especially as they didn’t have much time”.

But, although they may have hit it off with their dates, the young hopefuls wanted more than a one-night stand – could they make a life for themselves in TV? It’s never easy to break into the industry, but the entertainment gurus were convinced that their genre is alive with opportunities.

“It’s a great time for entertainment.

When times are hard people like to sink into a relaxing entertainment show where they can forget about their troubles,” said Zubairy, who has �

27

Paul Hampartsoumian

� worked across most programming genres during a TV career spanning more than 30 years.

Former Managing Director of Princess Productions Sebastian Scott, whose credits include Sky 1’s Got To Dance, argued that there is a demand for “broad-form entertainment”, especially shows that can sell overseas.

“The success of shows such as The Voice UK on BBC One, ITV’s Splash! and Channel 4’s The Jump shows that there are subjects which you can revisit. But you have to find a new way to do them,” he said. Scott recently launched an entertainment indie, Predictable Media.

RDF Head of Entertainment Peter Usher thought that ITV, in particular, could prove fertile ground for new ideas: “Next year, Dancing on Ice won’t be coming back and ITV will also no longer have the Champions League.

“You’d hope that entertainment would seize some of that airtime. There is a really huge opportunity to make entertainment for one of the country’s big terrestrial broadcasters,” he argued.

“From a development perspective, it’s a good time,” added Wall To Wall Entertainment Development Head Poppy Delbridge. “There’s not many things happening in the big acquisitions world, so it’s a good time for original formats if you can get them right.”

It’s unusual for newcomers to win

28

DAYTIME IS BECOMING THE TESTING GROUND FOR NEW SERIES their first break on a top-rating ITV or BBC primetime entertainment show.

New local-TV broadcaster London Live is perhaps a more realistic point of entry.

“We want to be a platform for the best young talent that’s out there,” said Derren Lawford, London Live’s Commissioning Executive. “If young talent comes to our channel and, as a result, gets poached by a bigger broadcaster, then, in a way, we’re doing our job.”

Lawford told Television he was looking for ideas for shows that resonate with his core audience of 16- to 34-year-old Londoners.

“We need shows about their interests and passions, which you never see on screen. Drag Queens of London and [freestyle football show] F2 Kicks Off are great examples, as is Extreme Playgrounds, which is about the urban sports that lots of young Londoners are into.”

Finding a hit entertainment show is no pushover, but executive producer Fi Cotter Craig knows more than most about the genre. Almost a quarter of a

century ago she was part of the team that launched Channel 4’s wildly successful The Big Breakfast.

Subsequently, she has worked with the likes of Eddie Izzard, Nigella Lawson and Derren Brown.

It may seem strange, given her TV background, but Cotter Craig believes that a show “doesn’t necessarily need stars to be a hit”.

But she adds: “The audience has to engage with it. [Channel 4’s] Gogglebox, which is an entertainment show – although it may not be called that – is a perfect example. It wasn’t like anything else, it came out of the blue; you sit and watch it – and, boy, do you relate to those people.

“Too often, producers lose sight of who their audience are and what they’re doing. You have to make an effort to engage them when they have a phone, tablet and laptop with them – all of which are clamouring for our attention,” she added.

While all the gurus were adamant that there are opportunities to break into entertainment for committed and enthusiastic people, they also argued that the genre has never been more competitive than it is today.

Money to make programmes is tight, said Usher, whose company, RDF, makes shows such as Sun, Sex and ­Suspicious Parents.

Paul Hampartsoumian

“Budgets, generally, have gone down and yet the demand for innovation and quality remains as high, if not higher,” said Usher. “I think the challenges for the executives and development teams who make entertainment are as tough as they’ve ever been.

“We have to make what we have go as far as we personally can.”

“Ratings are so important these days,” reckoned Ed Booth, the Series Producer of The Voice UK. He worked on the first series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2004 and recalled that “there wasn’t so much pressure then with ratings – the show was allowed time to grow”.

He added: “Doing The Voice UK, you realise you’ve got to come in hard. The expectation is that you are a fullwhack show at the top of your game.

“Broadcasters and the public expect you to be the new Britain’s Got Talent or The X Factor from the word go. The pressure is never off.”

Thames Executive Producer Mel Balac, a veteran of top entertainment shows including the BBC’s How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? and ITV’s All Star Family Fortunes, argued that “it is hard to get a Saturday-night hit and it is becoming increasingly harder because broadcasters don’t want to take risks. There are huge super brands now and everyone wants a global hit.”

“Daytime is becoming the testing

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

ground for new series,” continued Balac. “Look at Pointless: it runs in the daytime and then there is Pointless Celebrities on Saturday night.”

Balac launched ITV dating game show Take Me Out in 2010, which, she suggests, is the model for any show starting out. “We had a fantastic commissioner, John K Cooper, who really loved the format. He always said the show was a ‘slow burner, give it time’.

“We were so lucky and now we’re going into our seventh series. You have to have people at the network who stick their necks out for you.”

The Thames Executive Producer has also worked in the US on entertainment shows such as Grease: You’re the One That I Want, which was an eyeopener for her.

“It’s tougher in America. You think the budgets are going to be really huge,

Entertainment gurus’ top tips ITV Entertainment Commissioning Editor Asif Zubairy: ‘Do as much pitching as you can – the more you do, the better you will get… Don’t pitch an idea that isn’t right for the station or the genre that you’re pitching to.

‘Don’t pitch me an idea that is purely sports because, first of all, I don’t know anything about sports. And secondly, I work in the entertainment department… There are bonkers ideas but there is no such thing as a bad idea.

‘You don’t tend to hear totally new ideas; it’s more a combination of old ideas re-badged as a new idea.’

Predictable Media Founder Sebastian Scott: ‘Look for an idea with an extremely broad appeal. If it’s good, you’re pushing at an open door. A good idea can come from anywhere and we would be excited by it, whether it is from a newcomer or someone who has been making shows for the past 20 years.’

Wall To Wall Entertainment Development Head Poppy Delbridge: ‘Use opportunities like tonight. There are some really good people here – be enthusiastic, watch TV and have something to say about shows that are on at the moment… [and] have some ideas to talk about.’

but they get cut up with off-screen costs, paying huge amounts of money to execs and talent. So it actually becomes a bit of a battle,” she recalled.

“Working in the US made me realise how brilliant British television is. TV over here is still a creative vocation for a lot of people.

“In an American studio, the crew will down tools the minute the wrap is called.”

‘Speed date the entertainment gurus’ was held at The Hospital Club in central London on 19 May. Emily Gale and Susie Worster produced the RTS Futures event. The other gurus appearing were Yalli Productions Managing Director Robert Gray, Channel 4 Entertainment Commissioning Editor Tom Beck and the BBC’s Controller of Entertainment Commissioning, Mark Linsey.

Series Producer Ed Booth: ‘Take every opportunity that comes your way and then work your way to where you want to be. Don’t try to get to your ideal role instantly. Get into the industry and, once you are in, keep moving around.’

RDF Head of Entertainment Peter Usher: ‘There was a time when you could walk into a commissioner’s office and pitch off paper, but technology has come on leaps and bounds so it’s possible now, using [editing software] Final Cut Pro and suchlike, to take clips off the internet and fashion something from moving pictures to sell your idea…

‘Think really hard about how you pitch. We approach each pitch as if it is a fresh pitch and we try not to get into a pitching pattern – every pitch is bespoke to both the idea and to the broadcaster.’

Executive Producer Fi Cotter Craig: ‘A lot of people [I spoke to] wanted to move from other genres, such as factual, to entertainment – and that is more and more difficult these days, when people are encouraged to specialise.

‘The only way you’re going to achieve that is by being super-nice to people, really helpful and suck up to the people who work in the areas you want to… You need a breadth of experience in TV and then you can decide what you want to specialise in – you should not be pigeonholed right from the start.’

29

Awards

The awards ceremony on 16 May at the BFI, Southbank, London was hosted by comedian and actor Joel Dommett

RTS Student Television Awards 2013 Undergraduate Animation

The Light Bulb Alicja Jasina, Kingston University “A well-scripted, delightfully funny and subversive film that takes a wry, oblique look at the creative process of making a student film, while making one!”

Nominees Innisfree, Don Carey, Irish School of Animation, Ballyfermot College of Further Education Poyo and Neko, Adam Gierasimiuk, Edinburgh College of Art

Patrick Younge

Undergraduate Entertainment

Telebox Elliot Nelson, Alex Rudys, Nichola Emsley, Simeon Petkov and Gary Quan, University of Bradford “Brave and ambitious despite its small production budget, and executed to a high standard with accomplished direction. The well-written script had a clear narrative arc, and the characters had been well thought through.”

Nominees Fist Punch, Ally Lockhart, Ruth Gallacher, Chris McGarrity, Kyle Spence and Guy Thomson, City of Glasgow College Mini Munchies, Bethany Lamont and Team, Bournemouth University

Postgraduate Animation

Undergraduate Factual

Birdman Sam Clarke and Matt Farrant, Southampton Solent University “Discovering a different story to one they had anticipated, the producers commendably followed a new path to produce a moving, character-driven film with visual ambition.”

Nominees Twogether, Neringa Medutyte, Arnoldas Alubauskas, Liam Dowler and Jonathan Mason, University of South Wales Untold Story, Pawel Grzyb, Christopher McGill and Michal Zagorski, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design

30

Postgraduate Fiction

Postgraduate Factual

Undergraduate Animation

Postgraduate Entertainment

Undergraduate Fiction

Undergraduate Fiction

Joel Dommett

Hannah Michael Crumley, Rosemary Levine and Jonathan Blair, The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland “A brave, moving, understated gem of a film. Highly assured direction and compelling performances deliver a poignant story of loneliness and isolation.”

Nominees Snapshot, Diogo Guerner and Team, University of York Untitled Blues, B Welby-Delimere and Karin Kavanagh, The Arts University Bournemouth

Postgraduate Animation

Undergraduate Factual

Miss Todd Kristina Yee, Frances Poletti, Suzanne Mayger and Team, National Film and Television School “An ambitious, well-directed film that delivers its inspirational message with confidence. The cut-out animation, art direction and camerawork all come together beautifully.”

Nominees The Dewberry Empire, Christian Schlaeffer and Carla MacKinnon, Royal College of Art The Magnificent Lion Boy, Ana Caro, James Cotton, Jonathan Carr and Team, National Film and Television School

Postgraduate Entertainment

Undergraduate Entertainment

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

Killer Moves Ben Hillyar, Tim Partridge and Team, National Film and Television School “An original concept with pacy writing and editing and clear characters with room to develop storylines across a series. We commend it for its ambition, execution and sheer watchability.”

Nominee The Big Steal, Andre Sousa, Anti Reinthal and Team, National Film and Television School

Postgraduate Factual

Waiting for You Lisa Fingleton, Goldsmiths, University of London “An extremely moving and personal film with engaging story-telling that took the audience through a very real and raw experience with an ending that didn’t shy away from the truth.”

Nominees Pablo’s Winter, Chico Pereira, Screen Academy Scotland, Edinburgh Napier University Sodiq, Adeyemi Michael and Team National Film and Television School

Postgraduate Fiction

Border Patrol Peter Baumann and Nishad Chaughule, The Northern Film School at Leeds Metropolitan University “Clever, inventive and with lovely performances, this exceptionally well-scripted film delivers as a black comedy with a great twist.”

Nominees Cocoons, Joasia Goldyn, Sarah Woolner, Dan Demissie and Team, National Film and Television School Wasted, Cathy Brady, James Walker and Team, National Film and Television School

Judging process The Undergraduate and Postgradu­ ate Awards are judged in four cat­ egories: Animation, Entertainment, Factual and Fiction.

Undergraduate entries are judged in two stages: regionally and nat­ ionally. Regional winners are eligible for national judging.

The juries are chaired by Patrick Younge, Founder and Director of WeCreate Associates.

31

TV design: apply within

T

he UK’s reputation in the traditional TV and film crafts of make-up, costume and production design is unrivalled – and the good news is that there is no shortage of work in these areas.

That was the overwhelming conclusion of the recent RTS Futures event, “Making it in TV design”, where aspirant make-up artists and designers were given advice from a panel of industry practitioners.

Home-grown TV production is buoyant, while many US shows, such as the long-running 24 and new sci-fi series Outlander, are taking advantage of recently introduced tax breaks to film in the UK. “There are not enough people feeding the industry at the minute – there’s huge demand,” said Ruth Brooks from training body Creative Skillset.

Brooks was a member of the RTS

32

RTS Futures

Matthew Bell learns what it takes to fill the vacancies in TV’s design disciplines Futures panel that offered advice on how to get into, and get ahead in, art, costume and make-up departments.

The panellists, ranging from young trainees to experienced designers, were proof that there is no single way to establish a foothold in the industry.

However, they all had certain qualities in common. According to event host Alice Skidmore, who ran the BBC’s Design Trainee Scheme for five years, designers require a “combination of key skills, talent and contacts to progress”.

Costume trainee Jo Stobbs is part of

Creative Skillset’s Trainee Finder initiative and has already worked on Strictly Come Dancing, BBC Four drama Burton and Taylor, and the upcoming Abi Morgan-scripted film, Suffragette.

Before joining the Skillset scheme, Stobbs had sent out countless CVs. “At the beginning, it felt like I was shouting down a hole,” she recalled.

But she explained that any work, no matter how insignificant it seems at the time, can pay future dividends: “The two trainee jobs I’ve had have both come about from an unpaid work experience job I did three years ago.”

Sarah-Jane Prentice has climbed a few more rungs of the career ladder.

While studying set and costume design at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Prentice secured work experience on Mike Leigh’s Another Year after hearing the director give a talk to Rada students.

“I wrote to him and was very persistent,” she recalled. “It was a

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE FEEDING THE INDUSTRY AT THE MINUTE – THERE’S HUGE DEMAND

QUESTION A & ANSWER Q

What can you do if you cannot afford to take unpaid work experience?

A

Jo Stobbs: I couldn’t afford to.

I worked full time and took holiday to do work experience… it was hard.

Q

Where do you draw the line between being persistent and becoming a nuisance?

Sarah-Jane Prentice: Photos and visuals of your work are really important. While we may not know what your jobs are, as soon as you send a photo of something you’ve worked on it gives a visual key to show exactly what your skills are.

A

Neill Gorton: That’s a very valid point… We make, mould and sculpt things: why are you sending me [just] words [on your CV] – send me pictures.

A

Sara Putt: If you can’t present yourself elegantly and well visually, it’s not going to encourage somebody to use you.

A

Catherine Scoble: I had a few emails from somebody, and I was filming and so I couldn’t answer… She got angry and rude and that’s not good… I think a couple of emails is fine.

A

Sara Putt: Do the research – on IMDb.com you’d find out that Catherine was busy on a show.

Q A A

Do you have to be based in London to get work?

Neill Gorton: It’s better to be a bigger fish in a small pond.

Sara Putt: More than half of my established client base live outside the M25.”

A Q

Ruth Brooks: Get your driving licence.

I have lots of experience in Iceland as a set designer but am finding it hard to get comparable work in the UK?

A

Sara Putt: Like any transition, you’re probably going to have to go down a bit to build up… you need UK credits that people recognise.

Ruth Brooks

Paul Hampartsoumian

CalArts Center For New Performance

brilliant experience – he was incredibly encouraging to trainees.”

The contacts Prentice made on Another Year helped her find work when she left Rada.

“I stayed in touch with the set decorator and production designer,” she recalled. “I got my first job when I graduated through that same team.”

Prentice completed the BBC Design Trainee Scheme in 2011, subsequently working on Les Misérables and Muppets Most Wanted as a standby art director.

She has now landed the job of production designer on the new series of BBC One drama Call the Midwife.

Experienced hair and make-up designer Catherine Scoble, who numbers Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Shane Meadows’ various This is England projects among her credits, said that aspirant designers needed determination and flexibility to succeed.

“You can’t be put off by the long hours and the early starts, and you have to adapt to many different situations and to work with many different types of people,” she said.

“You have to be flexible, fluid and not set in your ways.”

Scoble, who won a Bafta for This is England ’86, added: “You can expect a good deal of rejection – I did for ages.

But you have to get past that.”

More sage advice followed from Millennium FX Director Neill Gorton, a prosthetics and special effects designer who has worked on effects-heavy shows including Doctor Who and Being Human.

“Learn the craft,” he exhorted. “If you’re going to be a make-up designer, you’ve got to be a make-up artist first.

“If you’re going to be a production designer, you have to have been involved with building, painting and dressing sets.”

Keen to land what can be an elusive first job, many young designers are tempted to exaggerate their experience.

“Be really cautious about over­selling yourself,” warned Skidmore. “In lots of the CVs we saw when we were running the [BBC] design scheme, people would often call themselves a designer when they’d just graduated – and they’re not.

“You have to find a way to sell yourself strongly, but very honestly.”

“I’ve got more respect for people who send me a CV that says, ‘I’m a prosthetics trainee’. The amount of times I get cards from people who’ve �

A

Neill Gorton: The amount of people who send me pictures taken on a phone… We’re working in high definition… It looks awful.

Q A

How do I build a career?

Neill Gorton: Do anything – keep busy. You never know where a contact will come from. Even when I started in the industry, I would still work on student films… Those student film-makers are going to be the professional film-makers one day.

33

We can help

masterclasses from Bafta winners and nominees.

Bafta also puts on London masterclasses twice a month at the BFI and the ICA. “We run hundreds of events a year, ensuring that our winners and nominees give back to the industry, to help sustain the moving image arts,” she said.

To take part in Bafta Crew, recruits need at least four programme credits; these can be at the level of runner or assistant. ‘They need to be working in the industry. It’s the next step on from [Skillset’s] trainees scheme,’ explained Campbell.

Creative Skillset’s Trainee Finder initiative finds paid work placements for up-and-coming talent.

‘It’s a database that helps to match people who want to be trainees in the film, TV, visual effects, animation and games industries with companies.

We also provide funding for those placements,’ explained Ruth Brooks, who manages the scheme.

Trainee Finder recruits as widely as possible, aiming to bring greater diversity to the TV and film industries.

It is widely accepted that unpaid work experience tends to favour people from wealthier backgrounds, who can afford to work for free.

‘We want to bring people on board

from different walks of life and [to do that] we need to make sure people are paid,’ said Brooks.

‘If you get on to our database you are not guaranteed a placement, but if you do, you will be paid above the minimum wage.’

The trainees are paid by production companies, which are reimbursed for a percentage of the costs by Creative Skillset, usually 50% or 75%.

To be eligible for the scheme, trainees must have less than 12 months’ paid experience and present two references from industry professionals.

Bafta Crew is a networking and skills development initiative for production crew outside London, run

by Skills Development Manager Katie Campbell. It offers online and live

34

Paul Hampartsoumian

Neill Gorton

The Neill Gorton Prosthetics Studio is a training facility associated with the prosthetics, make-up and animatronics company Millennium FX, run by Neill Gorton.

Gorton teaches both students and their lecturers. ‘I’m an employer and I try to use what I know about employing people to help jobseekers get employment,’ he explained.

Sara Putt Associates, which represents film and TV production crew, has recently set up its own trainee scheme to ‘bridge the gap between education and industry in terms of the soft skills, not the technical skills. ‘[We teach people] how to be a freelancer, how to get work, promote yourself and develop your career – because it can be a very isolating and lonely experience,’ explained Managing Director Sara Putt.

‘Any good agency helps to give a freelancer a sense of community and belonging. One of the best things that happens with the trainee scheme is that they start to network and help each other to get work,’ Putt added.

The Knowledge database contains details of thousands of UK and international production suppliers.

Crew can post a basic profile and a few credits for free.

It also offers ‘how to’ e-guides, and news about upcoming productions and industry events.

The Unit List publishes job vacancies for freelancers in TV, film, digital media, corporate work and commercials. The website also offers employment advice and news.

BE REALLY CAUTIOUSABOUT OVERSELLING YOURSELF… IF YOU ADMIT YOUR LEVEL AND SHOW YOU WANT TO LEARN, YOU GET MUCH MORE RESPECT

� just finished a course that say, ­‘prosthetics designer’,” added Gorton.

“People think they have to big themselves up but, if you admit your level and show you want to learn, you get much more respect.”

Agent Sara Putt highlighted the importance of possessing a “good attitude”, adding: “The hard skills will get you through the door and enable you to do the job but the soft skills are what ultimately will get you the job.

“You can be the best make-up or costume trainee in the world but if you’ve got a rubbish attitude, people aren’t going to want to work with you.”

In costume, hair and, in particular, make-up, added Bafta Crew Skills Development Manager Katie Campbell, designers are “talent-facing and [work] with the most important asset on set, which is, let’s face it, the cast.

Being discreet and articulate are important soft skills.”

There is always room for new talent; in fact, Gorton argued that new blood is necessary to keep the industry in good creative health.

“It’s a freelance business and one of the beauties of this is that people move around and it keeps the creativity flowing,” he said.

“If you’ve got a workshop and new blood and imagination coming in all the time, it keeps things fresh – and that’s what an industry needs.”

‘Making it in TV design’ was an RTS ­Futures event held at the Hallam Conference Centre, central London, on 29 April. The producers were Don Kong and Jude Winstanley.

June 2014 www.rts.org.uk Television

RTS NEWS

Reading’s verdict on Vegas

T

hames Valley Centre’s annual NAB review in May assembled a toplevel panel, chaired

by Dick Hobbs, to discuss the Las Vegas trade show.

It was also a top-level audience: a quick poll revealed that around twothirds of the RTS audience had attended NAB this April – together with nearly 100,000 other visitors.

IABM Business Development and Technology Director John Ive gave the encouraging news that the industry is continuing to experience a 5% year-onyear growth. But his long list of company mergers suggested that not everything is rosy.

The confirmed takeover and merger activity might be only the tip of the iceberg: a poll indicated that, of the 1,550 exhibitors at NAB, 28%

Dick Hobbs expected to acquire a company and 33% were looking to be acquired.

Graham Pitman was involved in manning the Vidcheck stand during NAB and had a busy time. He felt this reflected the rise in filebased products, whereas

more modular-based manufacturing booths might not have seen such activity.

Alan Bright, Director of Operations at Presteigne Broadcast Hire, said that he didn’t care about mergers and acquisitions. His only concern was ongoing support and, as long as this is maintained, then who owns who is not really an issue.

Being involved heavily in live sports, Bright had limited interest in Ultra-HDTV, which, although it works well for drama and other genres, has not yet been taken up by live sports.

He also commented that the industry appears hesitant to adopt IP technology for signal distribution at this early stage.

Chellomedia Head of Technical Services and Support Maya Severyn did not go to NAB and questioned its

value as a place to talk technology.

In her experience, having detailed technical discussions with exhibitors is nigh on impossible. Moreover, the conference sessions seem to focus on “how to sell”, “how to find work” and “how to market”, rather than the technology she would be looking for.

Several panellists expressed concerns for smaller companies unable to match the offerings of the larger companies being formed by mergers.

From the audience, James Gilbert from Pixel Power argued that smaller companies that have been around for many years are more stable, and they are able to react with innovative solutions much more quickly than larger organisations.

Simon Tillyer

■ Republic of Ireland Centre welcomed three-time Irish Film & Television Academy award-winner Ray Roantree to talk to a large audience of RTS members and guests at RTÉ in early May. An editor for almost 30 years, Roantree has worked mainly in drama and documentary for both RTÉ and the BBC. He won an IFTA in 2003 for The Green Fields of Vietnam and in 2012 for The Ashes of 9/11, both for RTÉ. At this year’s awards, Roantree was awarded his third IFTA, for RTÉ’s Looking After No 1, a documentary that followed Irish MPs around their local constituencies.

Roantree gave the RTS

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

audience a masterclass in documentary editing using examples from his work.

These included a transition showing a boy diving into a canal, going underwater and coming up in an indoor swimming pool.

He discussed the “emotion of editing” and how an editor brings that home to an audience. Showing examples from The Ashes of 9/11, Roan­ tree talked about the sight of bodies falling from the burning towers, which, with the smoke and debris, presented the audience with a horrific visual tapestry.

He revealed that he had gone through hundreds of hours of material until he

Ashes of 9/11 was able to match footage of the story of an Irishman who had helped a woman badly burned by jet fuel from one of the planes and the ambulance taking her to hospital.

Unfortunately, she did not survive.

The editor let the audience in on one of his craft secrets:

RTÉ

The secrets of emotional editing

directors normally want him to start a project by putting together a memorable opening sequence. He tries to persuade them to wait until the edit is nearly complete and then, when he is familiar with the footage, they jointly assemble a vivid opening.

Charles Byrne

35

Archives set free of the past

36

VCI Video

A

packed audience for this year’s RTS/ Focal Jane Mercer Memorial Lecture was treated to Arena Series Editor Anthony Wall’s experiments with archive footage on the BBC’s idiosyncratic arts strand. Within Wall’s output, Christopher Columbus, Johnny Rotten, Shirley Bassey and Kendo Nagasaki happily share screen time.

Wall joined the BBC’s long-running arts strand in 1979 and has been editor since 1985. During this time, Arena has won six RTS awards and nine Baftas, as well as many other prizes from around the world. He peppered his lecture – which is held annually in memory of the first chair of the Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries International, Jane Mercer – with clips from some of Arena’s most memorable films.

The Arena editor argued that the “comfortable, safe idea of archive, which conjures up an image of miles of film cans with cobwebs on them” is redundant now that every institution and, indeed, person with a mobile phone produces video.

Wall and the late director Nigel Finch’s fascination with light entertainment led to one of Arena’s greatest films, My Way, about the much-recorded song. “It’s like a capitalistic equivalent of The Internationale, this mad idea that you can do everything your way. The song is so wonderfully bombastic,” he said.

The much-loved film, from which Wall played a clip at the lecture, used archive footage to comic effect, cutting together film of Shirley Bassey belting out My Way with musicologist Wilfrid Mellers dissecting the song’s melody.

‘Archive footage’ of Columbus reaching America in 1492 Occasionally, Arena has covered subjects where little or no archive exists.

Film-makers, explained Wall, can solve such problems by using a little imagination.

For the 1986 film from Nicaragua, Maytime on the Mosquito Coast, Wall wanted to show Columbus discovering the Central American country on his last journey to America in 1502.

The solution? He used a clip from the 1949 movie, Christopher Columbus, starring Fredric March.

“Broadly speaking, archive was used in an illustrative way and there’s nothing wrong with that. The idea was that it has a fixed meaning,” he said.

Now, Wall argued, “archive is not imprisoned in that way. What we can now do, in a multiplicity of methods and media, is to write new rules in archive that render it dynamic and potentially creative in the way it suggests the future as much as the past.”

Arena is renowned for its playful use of archive. “You definitely do your best work when you don’t know what you’re doing, because, if you do know what you’re doing, why bother?” argued Wall.

Paul Tickell’s 1995 film, Punk and the Pistols, intercut scenes from vintage British sci-fi film Quatermass and the Pit, in which the country was threatened by alien invasion, with clips of punk bands to mock the moral panic that punk generated in mid-1970s British society.

Scenes from Punk and the Pistols were shown at the lecture, as well as a sequence from Masters of the Canvas, which explored pop artist Peter Blake’s fascination with masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki.

More recently, Wall has been making “mash ups” of Arena films, rearranging scenes and images to create new forms and reveal new meanings. These include condensing the strand’s first 200 films into just five minutes. Other themed

three-minute films have followed, including Fancy a Drink?, which includes scenes featuring booze from Arena films and Animal Crackers.

“The idea was to come up with a confection that would be a visual, online equivalent of a three-minute pop song,” he recalled.

“The Arena films are intact – over my dead body would those films be butchered.

They exist in their true form, but they are also a treasure trove,” he explained. “We came up with ever more preposterous ideas for these three-minute mashes. I thought of one called Armed and Extremely Dangerous, but didn’t think there would be much of that. [In fact] there’s about 80 Arenas where people wield a weapon of some sort, often in anger.”

Modern TV, though, he argued, is not suited to short films, because of its rigid scheduling. “One of the things that has so corrupted TV is this absolute insanity of half-an-hour, 60-minute and 90-minute programmes,” he said. “Television is such a conservative medium.”

The internet has become the natural home for Arena’s mash-ups and archive experimentation. Wall’s latest project is the Arena Hotel, a portal for the strand’s content on the BBC website. As you would expect, the clips are arranged in a typically artful way: viewers can take a tour of the hotel’s rooms, including a ballroom, nightclub and health spa, and watch themed clips from the Arena archive.

The RTS/Focal Jane Mercer Memorial Lecture, “Archive – past, present and future”, was held at ITV Studios in central London on 14 May. The producer was Carol Owen.

Matthew Bell

RTS NEWS

M

argaret Thatcher labelled them the “enemy within” and the media cast them as “Arthur’s Army”.

Marking the 30th anniversary of the 1984-85 miners strike, Sinead Kirwan and Owen Gower from production company Bad Bonobo explained at a Wales Centre event how they made Still the Enemy Within as an independent, crowd-funded film.

Together, they raised £75,000 to tell the hidden story of the people behind the longest national industrial dispute in British history.

Kirwan and Gower collaborated with Mike Simons, the author of two acclaimed books on the strike, and photographers John Sturrock and John Harris, who took some of the most iconic images of the strike.

During the talk, which was held at the Park & Dare The-

atre, Treorchy in April, Gower reflected on how the broadcast news coverage at the time was criticised for its pro-police bias. Citing what became known as the Battle of Orgreave, and having viewed more than 2,000 hours of BBC and ITN news material, Owen said: “The BBC admitted that it re-­ edited the footage so that it looked as if the miners had started the violence.”

The miners interviewed were drawn from coalfields across the UK, including Scotland and Nottingham, areas not greatly documen­ ted in the past.

Kirwan added that the film avoided interviews with the key players, such as Arthur Scargill. “We deliberately kept to people on the frontline,” she said.

The film-makers defended the film’s perspective and structure, which gives a

Sinead Kirwan (left)and Owen Gower chronological account of the strike. “It’s more objective to fully report the miners’ views and allow people to agree or disagree,” said Kirwan.

Shiers Trust winners

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

Armchair Cinema, will be the first full-length historical study of the showing of feature films on British television.

The book will be complemented by online historical materials.

Scott is Lecturer in Digital Media at Victoria University and Hall is Senior Lecturer, Stage and Screen Studies at Sheffield Hallam University.

The Shiers Trust grant, now in its 14th year, is supported by the bequest of George Shiers, a distinguished US television historian, and his wife May. The grant is administered by the RTS History and Archives Group.

BBC

■ Researchers into the early history of feature films on British television and the early, unofficial development of TV in Australia are to share the 2014 Shiers Trust award. This prize, usually worth £2,000, is presented to support the publication of work on any aspect of the history of television.

Marc Scott’s interactive education resource, “The advent of television in Australia”, focuses on the little-known individuals and organisations that experimented with television production prior to its official inauguration in 1956.

Dr Sheldon Hall’s forthcoming book,

Hywel Wiliam

Inside view of the enemy within

The completed, 112-­minute film received its premiere at the Sheffield Documentary Festival on 9 June.

Hywel Wiliam and Tim Hartley

Midlands gets ultra-HDTV Richard Salmon, Lead Research Engineer at BBC R&D, delighted an audience of electronic engineers and non-technologists at a joint meeting of the RTS and the Institution of Engineering and Technology in Birmingham at the end of April.

His subject was ultra-high-definition TV – and not just in its emerging formats of 4k and 8k.

A plaque on London’s Alexandra Palace states: ‘The world’s first regular high-definition television service was inaugurated here by the BBC on 2 November 1936.’

So, high-definition is a relative term.

Salmon’s talk was videoed and uploaded to the RTS website.

Dorothy Hobson

37

OFF MESSAGE

S

ome disconcerting statistics were underlined at this month’s RTS/Broadcast “Diversify” debate confirming how “hideously white” UK broadcasting remains. One of the most worrying was unearthed by Trevor Phillips.

He drew attention to the fact that, of the 62 boardroom seats across all the main TV channels, the BBC Trust and Ofcom, only one is occupied by a non-white person – Sonita Alleyne at the Trust.

■ Peter Fincham, ITV’s Director of Television, is the only British TV executive to have run both ITV 1 and its biggest direct rival, BBC One. You will remember he was BBC One Controller until a contretemps involving Annie Leibovitz and the Queen led to his resignation in 2007.

At a lunch last month hosted by the Broadcasting Press Guild the disarmingly modest Fincham revealed that he had never been entirely comfortable being called BBC One Controller.

“I must say I prefer the term ‘Cajoler’,” he said. “That is a much more accurate description of what the job involves.”

Fincham may be right, but Off Message doesn’t see BBC One or BBC Two Cajoler catching on, not even under the enlightened leadership of Danny Cohen.

■ The recent awards season might not have been one of the best for the BBC; ITV and Channel 4 have fared well.

Next year may be better as the BBC One crime drama, Happy Valley, looks destined to collect a fistful of gongs

38

and emulate the success of Broadchurch Sarah Lancashire’s performance as Sgt Catherine Cawood was brilliant, according to critics, a match for Olivia Colman’s in the ITV show.

Congratulations to writer Sally Wainwright, whose stock just keeps on rising.

man from Twitter used that puzzled several members of the audience.

The term was “staggercast”, a noun new to many of the Twitterati.

In plain language Biddle subsequently explained that a “staggercast” is a plus-one channel.

So now you know.

■ Without wishing to in any way distract from what is bound to be a fascinating RTS debate on BBC funding at the House of Commons later this month, it was intriguing to note Armando Iannucci’s recent comments on the topic.

Quoted in the London Evening Standard, the Scottish satirist opined that the days of paying a BBC licence fee are dead and buried.

Said Iannucci: “The BBC should make a mint from the brand internationally. It needs a new attitude that says it’s not filthy to make money.

“As for the licence, you have people on laptops saying, ‘What is television?’

There will be a subscription model.”

Would Iannucci’s most famous creation, The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker agree – or would he respond with a typically foul-mouthed broadside?

■ The race to take over the hot seat on BBC Two’s Newsnight is warming up. How diverting to see the genial Andrew Neil host a recent Friday edition of the late-night, current-affairs warhorse.

So far, Eddie Mair has been conspicuous by his absence in the Newsnight presenter’s chair as the various candidates jostle for position.

Off Message understands the PM anchor remains a front runner to succeed Paxo when the great interlocutor discards his Newsnight earpiece for the final time later this month.

■ Those who missed the RTS’s recent early-evening event, “TV ReTweeted”, can read all about what a great debate it was in the next edition of Television.

For the moment, though, Off Message can say that one of the night’s stars was Twitter’s Head of UK Broadcast Partnerships, Dan Biddle.

He offered a persuasive, 20-minute lowdown on what the social network can do for TV. There was one piece of jargon the

■ After 11 years the woman who gave BSkyB a compelling voice in UK production, Sophie Turner Laing, is stepping down.

In some quarters regarded as the best DG the BBC never had, she will exit the satellite station later this year.

Her sure eye for must-watch US acquisitions – and her unmatched contacts book with the world’s top distributors – will be much missed at Osterley.

Quite where Sophie will turn up next is anyone’s guess. Surely, any producer would love to have her as part of their executive team.

One thing is for sure – if Sophie stops going to Mip and Mipcom, these markets will never be quite the same again.

June 2014 www.rts.org.uk Television

RTS PATRONS RTS Principal Patrons

BBC

RTS International Patrons

Discovery Corporate Services Ltd Liberty Global RTL Group Turner Broadcasting System Inc

Viacom International Media Networks Walt Disney Company

RTS Major Patrons

Accenture Channel 5 Deloitte Enders Analysis

Ernst & Young FremantleMedia IMG Studios ITN

KPMG McKinsey and Co S4C STV Group

UKTV Virgin Media YouView

RTS Patrons

Autocue Channel Television Digital Television Group Ikegami Electronics UK ITV Anglia

ITV Granada ITV London ITV Meridian ITV Tyne Tees ITV West

ITV Yorkshire ITV Wales Lumina Search PricewaterhouseCoopers Quantel

Raidió Teilifís Éireann University College, Falmouth UTV Television Vinten Broadcast

Patron HRH The Prince of Wales

Chair of RTS Trustees John Hardie

CENTRES COUNCIL

RTS Futures Camilla Lewis

President Sir Peter Bazalgette

Honorary Secretary David Lowen

Vice-Presidents Dawn Airey Sir David Attenborough OM

Honorary Treasurer Mike Green

Who’s who at the RTS

CH CVO CBE FRS

Baroness Floella Benjamin OBE Dame Colette Bowe OBE John Cresswell Mike Darcey Greg Dyke Lorraine Heggessey Ashley Highfield Rt Hon Dame Tessa Jowell MP David Lynn Sir Trevor McDonald OBE Ken MacQuarrie Trevor Phillips OBE Stewart Purvis CBE John Smith Sir Howard Stringer Mark Thompson

BSkyB

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Tim Davie Mike Green John Hardie Huw Jones Jane Lighting Graham McWilliam David Lowen Simon Pitts Graeme Thompson

EXECUTIVES

Chief Executive Theresa Wise Deputy Chief Executive Claire Price

Channel 4

Andy Batten-Foster Mike Best Charles Byrne Isabel Clarke Alex Connock Gordon Cooper Tim Hartley Kristin Mason Graeme Thompson Penny Westlake James Wilson Michael Wilson

SPECIALIST GROUP CHAIRS

ITV

RTS Legends Paul Jackson

AWARDS COMMITTEE CHAIRS

Awards & Fellowship Policy David Lowen

Craft & Design Awards Cheryl Taylor

Diversity Marcus Ryder

Television Journalism Awards Stewart Purvis CBE

Early Evening Events Dan Brooke

Programme Awards David Liddiment

IBC Conference Liaison Terry Marsh

Student Television Awards Patrick Younge

Archives Steve Bryant History Don McLean

Television www.rts.org.uk June 2014

39

RTS LONDON 2014

CON FERENCE

PRINCIPAL SPONSOR

CONFERENCE CHAIR Rob Woodward

Chief Executive, STV

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Chase Carey

President and Chief Operating Officer, 21st Century Fox

The Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport

JB Perrette

President, Discovery Networks International

SPEAKERS Sir Peter Bazalgette

James Harding

Stewart Purvis CBE

Jeremy Darroch

Lorraine Heggessey

Jim Ryan

Michael Foster

Steve Hewlett

President, Royal Television Society Chief Executive, BSkyB

Tony Hall

Director-General, BBC

John Hardie

Chief Executive, ITN

Director, News and Current Affairs, BBC Executive Chair, Boom Pictures Writer, Broadcaster and Media Consultant

Professor of TV Journalism, City University Senior Vice-President and Chief Strategy Officer, Liberty Global

John Ryley

Kevin Lygo

Head of Sky News, BSkyB

James Purnell

Broadcaster

Managing Director, ITV Studios

Kirsty Wark

Director of Strategy and Digital, BBC

9 SEPTEMBER

KINGS PLACE, LONDON N1