Television Magazine, February 2015

February 2015

Peter Kosminsky Making history with Wolf Hall

Apply now for the 2015 Shiers Trust Award

d £2,000 e e n oury of television project? y Dor a histo

o £2,000 towards ant of up t e a gr k a f o ct the history of television an m on any aspe c t s k Tru wor The lishing b pu

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Objectives

The promotion of public education through the study and research of the history of ­television in all its aspects and without regard to country of origin, including the d ­ evelopment and encouragement of publications and associated projects such as ­bibliographies and monographs on particular aspects, provided that the results of such study and research shall be published and that the contribution made by the Trust shall be suitably acknowledged in any publication.

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Criteria

Grants will be given to assist in the ­completion of new or unfinished projects, work or literature specific to the objectives of the trust. ‘Literature’ is defined as including audio-visual media such as CD-Roms and websites.

The Trustees must be satisfied that the work they are supporting either could not be finished or ­published without the grant and that, with it, the work will be ­completed, or, the grant will provide the ­initial phase of a project that will be c­ ontinued and completed with other i­dentified funding.

Applications will be considered broadly in support of research, development, writing, editing or publication. Grants for research will require that the results of the work will be made known and accessible through appropriate means. In the case of literature, projects must have a real prospect of publication. Applicants must demonstrate that their work will have a clear e ­ xpectation of making a s­ ignificant contribution to the objectives of the Trust.

Applicants will be required to satisfy the Trustees of the soundness of their projects, and identify any grants from other sources. The Trustees will not make commitments to support re­curring funding, nor make grants to cover fees or maintenance of students undertaking courses.

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George Shiers

George Shiers, a distinguished US television historian, was a long-­standing member of the RTS. Before his death in 1983, he and his wife May ­provided for a bequest in their wills. The Shiers Trust grant, now in its 15th year, is normally worth £2,000.

Grants will be consid­ered and approved by the Trustees who may, at their ­discretion, consult appropriate experts to assist their decisions. In assessing priorities, the Trustees will take into account the sums of money available.

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Application procedure

Applications are now invited and should be submitted to the Trustees by 31 March 2015 on an official ­application form (available from the RTS, address below). Applications should set out the nature of the project in not more than 500 words.

Supporting ­documentation may also be included. Details of your experience or qualifications should be provided. Applicants should ensure that their project conforms to all the criteria. Applications should be accompanied by a budget that clearly identifies the sum being requested for a grant and the ­purposes for which it will be used. Application forms are available from the RTS and should be returned to the same address:

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lare Colvin, archivist C Royal Television Society Kildare House 3 Dorset Rise London EC4Y 8EN clare@rts.org.uk

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Previous recipients

1 2 014: Shared between Dr Sheldon Hall, whose Armchair Cinema is a study of feature films on British television, and Marc Scott, whose research focuses on the unofficial development of TV in Australia 2 2013: Barry Fox has built a website (www.tekkiepix.com) to present his collection of historical consumer electronics imagery and documents.

The picture shows a publicity still for Philips’s optical videodisc 3 2012: Paul Marshall researched a biography of Alan Archibald Campbell Swinton, the early visionary of all-electronic television 4 2012: Simon Vaughan digitised the 300-page ‘Black Book’, the first manual of the Marconi-EMI electronic television system, installed in 1936 5 2011: David Rose presented an illustrated retrospective of his exceptional career as a ground-breaking television and film producer to a large number of live audiences 6 2008/2010: Steve Arnold digitised back issues of Radio Times to make a searchable online archive of articles and schedules 7 2001: Simon Vaughan, archivist of the Alexandra Palace Television Society, printed a collection of 1,200 photos by the father of television lighting, Desmond Robert Campbell 8 2004: Don McLean compiled an authentically accurate audio two-CD presentation of the beginnings of television in Britain.

9 2005: John Grist wrote a biography of Grace Wyndham Goldie, the first Head of BBC Television News and Current Affairs 10 2009: Ronald Sandell, a key planner of the analogue terrestrial transmitter network, conducted research for a book, Seventy Years Before the Masts 11 2010: John Wyver conducted interviews on the presentation of theatre plays on British television

Journal of The Royal Television Society February 2015 l Volume 52/2

From the CEO The RTS has started 2015 with two hugely well-attended events.

The inaugural RTS Futures Entry Level Training Fair saw major broadcasters and production companies of all sizes come together to promote their training schemes and work placements.

The day was a big success, with around 400 young people learning more about how to kick-start their working lives in television.

I’d like to thank all the exhibitors, including the BBC, Channel 4, ­Creative Access, Discovery, ITV, ­Latimer, Mama Youth, Media Trust/ London360, The Network, Procam, RDF, Roundhouse/Bloomberg, Sara

Putt Associates, Betty, FremantleMedia and Warner Bros.

The year’s first early-evening event, “Fixed-rig documentary: the story behind the lens”, gave attendees a unique insight into the exacting process behind the making of shows such as Educating Yorkshire, One Born Every Minute and 24 Hours in A&E. A big thank you to the panellists and Chair Lorraine Heggessey.

Last year, the RTS awarded 20 bursaries to help support students considering a career in TV production or broadcast journalism.

Applications are now open for this year’s bursaries. The RTS will provide financial assistance to a further 20 students planning to start their courses later in 2015.

Contents 5

Jon Snow’s TV Diary

6

The history man

The Charlie Hebdo massacre echoes through Jon Snow’s week. TV journalists can be blasé about many things – but not about being the target of assassination

The last time director Peter Kosminsky made a period drama, it flopped. So why did he take on Wolf Hall?

Steve Clarke finds out

10

Vice comes of age

12 14

Social media sets the political agenda

Launched a year ago, the upstart news network is winning new respect for Vice Media. Pippa Shawley takes stock

May 2015 is shaping up to be the UK’s first connected general election. Torin Douglas reports

Dating shows: the new rules of the game From Blind Date to Ex on the Beach, Sanya Burgess tracks the evolution of a guilty pleasure

Editor Steve Clarke smclarke_333@hotmail.com Writer Matthew Bell bell127@btinternet.com

Production, design, advertising Gordon Jamieson gordon.jamieson.01@gmail.com Sub-editor Sarah Bancroft smbancroft@me.com

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

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

The Society is also launching a new initiative, which builds on the success of the original bursary scheme. Five technology bursaries are available to talented students from less affluent homes studying engineering or computer sciences.

The objective is to help address the technology skills gap in our industry.

The scheme is being chaired by Simon Pitts, ITV’s Managing Director, Online, Pay TV, Interactive & Technology.

Meanwhile, for those of us addicted to Wolf Hall, our cover story is a must.

Theresa Wise

Cover illustration: BBC

16 18 20 21 24

Send in the drones

Breathtaking footage filmed by drones is becoming part of the grammar of TV. Andrew Sheldon is excited, but warns that producers must tread carefully

Sky spreads its risks

The merger of three European satellite broadcasters is a defensive move, explains Raymond Snoddy

Our Friend in Ireland

Public-service media has a vital role to play in sustaining a sense of community, says Noel Curran. So why is the state so slow to grasp that?

A story born every minute

Factual TV has been transformed by fixed-rig docs such as Educating Yorkshire and 24 Hours in A&E. Matthew Bell hears how they are made

The way we view now

As Amazon signs Woody Allen to make his first TV series, are on-demand services poised to wreck the broadcast model? Stephen Price is sceptical

Subscription rates UK £115 Overseas (surface £146.11) Overseas (airmail £172.22) Enquiries: publication@rts.org.uk

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

Legal notice © Royal Television Society 2015.

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

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RTS NEWS National events RTS AWARDS Wednesday 18 February RTS Television Journalism Awards 2013/14 Venue: London Hilton, Park Lane, London W1K 1BE ■ Jamie O’Neill 020 7822 2821 ■ jamie@rts.org.uk RTS FUTURES Tuesday 24 February

From runner to superstar Venue: Hallam Conference Centre, 44 Hallam St, London W1W 6JJ ■ Book online at www.rts.org.uk RTS EARLY EVENING EVENT Tuesday 24 February

No longer only buying eyeballs: Why advertisers want to make programmes Panellists: Jon Lewis, Head of Digital and Partnership Innovation, Channel 4; John Nolan, Managing Director, Apollo20; Sue Unerman, Chief Strategy Officer, Mediacom UK. Chair: Claire Beale, Editor-inChief, Campaign. RTS Members book for free. Non-RTS member tickets are £12.50. 6:30pm for 6:45pm Venue: The Hospital Club, 24 Endell Street, London WC2H 9HQ ■ Book online at www.rts.org.uk

RTS AWARDS Tuesday 17 March RTS Programme Awards 20132014 Venue: Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London W1K 7TN ■ Callum Stott 020 7822 2822 ■ callum@rts.org.uk RTS EARLY EVENING EVENT Wednesday 25 March

Armando Iannucci in conversation with Lucy Lumsden Venue: TBC RTS FUTURES Monday 27 April

I made it in… digital Venue: The Hospital Club, 24 Endell Street, London WC2H 9HQ ■ Book online at www.rts.org.uk

Local events

DEVON & CORNWALL ■ Contact TBC EAST ANGLIA ■ Contact TBC

Presentation by Richard Salmon, Lead Research Engineer, BBC R&D. Book via: richard.salmon2@ bbc.co.uk. 6:30pm for 7:00pm Venue: BBC R&D, Centre House, Wood Lane, London W12 7SB Wednesday 4 March

Ultra high-definition TV and 4K

NT Live – behind the scenes

Panellists: Emma Keith, Producer, National Theatre Live, and Chris Bretnall, Creative Broadcast Solutions. Chair: George Jarrett, writer and producer. 6:30pm for 7:00pm Venue: London Television Centre, Upper Ground, London SE1 9LT

THAMES VALLEY Wednesday 11 February AGM and The future of QC Venue: Pincents Manor, Calcot, Reading RG31 4UQ Wednesday 18 March

NORTH WEST Wednesday 11 February

Student Television Awards Venue: The Lowry, Pier 8, Salford Quays M50 3AZ ■ Rachel Pinkney 07966 230639 ■ rachelpinkney@yahoo.co.uk

Venue: E3 Campus, Belfast Metropolitan University, 398 Springfield Rd, Belfast BT12 7DU ■ John Mitchell ■ mitch.mvbroadcast@ btinternet.com

Lord Dobbs of Wylye: Public service broadcasting – a house of cards?

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Television Awards

Venue: Hilton Newcastle Gateshead, Newcastle upon Tyne NE8 2AR ■ Jill Graham ■ jill.graham@blueyonder.co.uk

Venue: Bristol Old Vic, King Street, Bristol BS1 4ED ■ John Durrant ■ john@bdh.net

LONDON Wednesday 18 February

The lecture will be recorded for transmission on BBC Four on Sunday 8 March. Due to filming restrictions, latecomers may not be admitted. Spaces are limited so RSVP by email: rtslecture@ bbc.co.uk. 6:30pm for 7:30pm Venue: Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4TN

NORTH EAST & THE BORDER Saturday 28 February Annual Awards and Student

NORTHERN IRELAND Week of 23 March, TBC

West of England Awards

meet informally with a range of media professionals. Attendees will include: Peter Salmon, Director, England, BBC; Richard Klein, Director of Factual, ITV; and representatives of regional independent producers.

2:00pm-5:30pm Venue: Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Talbot Campus, Poole, Dorset BH12 5BB ■ Gordon Cooper ■ gordonjcooper@gmail.com

MIDLANDS ■ Jayne Greene 07792 776585 ■ jayne@ijmmedia.co.uk

BRISTOL Sunday 8 March

RTS HUW WHELDON MEMORIAL LECTURE Thursday 26 February

■ Daniel Cherowbrier ■ daniel@cherowbrier.co.uk

Your guide to upcoming national and regional events

Student Television Awards

Niche channels: IPTV delivery models Venue: Pincents Manor, Calcot, Reading RG31 4UQ ■ Penny Westlake ■ info@rtstvc.org.uk WALES Tuesday 24 February

Visit to ITV Wales new HQ Members only, numbers limited.

5:00pm-7:00pm Venue: ITV Cymru Wales, 3 Assembly Square, Cardiff Bay CF10 4PL Tuesday 17 March

REPUBLIC OF IRELAND Thursday 12 February

Coffee shop debate: Devolution of broadcasting

Student Television Awards Venue RTÉ, Donnybrook, Dublin 4 ■ Charles Byrne (00353) 87251 3092 ■ byrnecd@iol.ie SCOTLAND ■ James Wilson 07899 761167 ■ james.wilson@ cityofglasgowcollege.ac.uk

Venue: Aberystwyth University Friday 27 March

Student Television Awards

Venue: Zoom International Youth Film Festival, Sony Theatre at Bridgend College CF31 3DF ■ Hywel Wiliam 07980 007841 ■ hywel@aim.uk.com YORKSHIRE Monday 2 March

SOUTHERN Friday 6 March

The impact of new technology on broadcasters

Annual Awards and Student Television Awards Venue: The Guildhall, Broadway, Winchester SO23 9LJ Wednesday 18 March

Meet the Professionals

An opportunity for media-based HE and FE media students to

Joint event with Radio Academy Yorkshire. 6:00pm for 6:30pm Venue: Leeds Trinity University, Leeds LS18 5HD ■ Lisa Holdsworth 07790 145280 ■ lisa@allonewordproductions. co.uk

February 2015 www.rts.org.uk Television

TV diary The Charlie Hebdo massacre echoes through Jon Snow’s week. TV journalists can be blasé about many things – but not about being the target of assassination

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hen you’ve been anchoring a programme such as Channel 4 News for 25 years, you could be forgiven for thinking that nothing shocks any more. But one week into 2015, the first news of the slaughter of journalists, cartoonists, policemen and women in Paris shook me in a way I had not experienced since 9/11.

It felt raw, brutal, immediate, and I found the shock lingered all day.

■ But, that evening, my friend Neil MacGregor, whom I had come to know when he ran the National Gallery and I was a Trustee there, had agreed to take four of us around the Rembrandt show at the gallery.

By 9:30pm, the heaving crowds for this blockbuster have melted away.

We are alone in the Gallery with Rembrandt – lots of him. Three striking self-portraits greet us in the first room.

Neil began to flesh out Rembrandt’s insecurity, his fast-wasted wealth, his loves and, above all, his artistry. He plays with light on the face and leaves the hands below all but unpainted. We are absorbed and, amazingly, Charlie Hebdo is a world away.

■ The following Sunday night, I go very deliberately to the cinema for further distance from “events”.

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

As I enter, I’m still asking questions: “Was it the specific, face-to-face assault on so many of my trade, in cold blood, that had reaped so much anxiety in my soul?” I cannot tell.

The front row in the Hampstead Everyman with three friends is an uncomfortable escape. You have to lie almost horizontal on the pseudo sofa even to see the screen.

But at least someone brings you a gin and tonic. Birdman is good – cleverly conceived, brilliantly shot, with truly original camerawork. Charlie Hebdo had taken another back seat.

■ By Monday, I’m back in Paris.

Despite great advances in the digital age, a live, hour-long outside broadcast is still a bit of a roller coaster.

We lost sound and vision 30 seconds before the start of Channel 4 News. Mysteriously, both returned with 10 seconds to go.

■ On the first Eurostar to London the next morning, I got the last seat – Coach 6, seat 75. It was a 24-coach train and I was so late for it that I had to walk through 18 packed coaches before I found my seat.

Finally, I reached seat 75. There, sitting in seat 74 was my editor’s sisterin-law, Christiane Amanpour of CNN fame. We talked the entire journey, covered the piste, and speculated on what might happen next and who was ultimately to blame.

We decided we deserved a full breakfast. Christiane had cut a restau-

rant reference out of some glossy mag – “The Great Northern Hotel,” it extolled, “Try plum and spilt milk for breakfast.”

With the extra hour gained in crossing the Channel, we could afford time for porridge, French toast, and the rest. A great way to start the day, save that I had to walk to work, having left my bike at home.

■ The weekend comes. I decide to take the train to the little place we have in the country 60 miles west of London – single-track roads, sheep on the hills.

Richard picks me up in his situp-and-beg taxi. He must be the only Old Etonian taxi driver in the world. His salmon farm was ruined by some poisonous discharge into a Scottish loch. We are just 10 minutes from the station.

■ Once through the front door, I set the log fire and light it. Tomorrow, I shall do a watercolour. Somehow, that aspect of tomorrow never comes.

By Monday, I am renewed and refreshed. One of my colleagues is a judge on the RTS Television Journalism Awards. I catch myself thinking that she doesn’t look like someone who knows we have won anything.

And then I remember Charlie Hebdo and feel a bit uneasy for even allowing such a thought to cross my mind.

Jon Snow is Presenter of Channel 4 News.

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The history man

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Public domain

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eriod drama and Peter Kosminsky are odd bed fellows. The director is celebrated for edgy, politically charged, investigative, contemporary pieces. Remember the story of Iraqi-weapons expert Dr David Kelly, The Government Inspector, or Britz, Kosminsky’s response to the 7/7 bombings, with its two contrasting depictions of young British Muslims.

As we all know by now, Kosminsky is the director of Wolf Hall, the BBC’s six-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s two Booker prize-winning historical novels, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies.

“This is not my natural milieu. I had one previous venture in costume drama (a feature film of Wuthering Heights) and it was borderline disaster,” he says. “So I’ve been very nervous about this field, and went into Wolf Hall with great trepidation…

“In the end, without wishing to sound too cute, what’s important is what the audience thinks.”

This is only part of the story. As Kosminsky, an obsessive, precise man capable of enormous charm, knows well, the chattering classes’ verdict on Wolf Hall is all too relevant as charter renewal looms.

Not surprisingly, he is a committed supporter of the BBC’s place in our cultural life, and alarmed at the precarious state the institution finds itself in.

“At the moment, the BBC feels like a slightly friendless organisation,” he observes with understatement.

We meet five days before the first episode of Wolf Hall is broadcast. He is hot from the Soho edit suite where the finishing touches have been put to episode 5.

After our interview, he flies to the US with Mark Rylance (Thomas Cromwell) and Damian Lewis (Henry VIII) for a promotional burst arranged by the

Television drama

The last time director Peter Kosminsky made a period drama, it flopped. So why did he take on Wolf Hall?

Steve Clarke finds out BBC’s co-producer Masterpiece Theatre. Wolf Hall airs there in April.

Here, the hype swirling around the show’s launch is verging on the embarrassing. There have been constant trails on BBC TV and radio, alongside saturation coverage in newspapers and their colour supplements. The obligatory Radio Times cover story hailed Wolf Hall as “2015’s biggest drama”.

Even The Daily Mail is onside. The day we met, the normally BBC-bashing tabloid devoted its centre-page spread to the joys of Wolf Hall under the heading, “Greatest period drama ever made”. No pressure, then.

The irony can’t be lost on Kosminsky, once nick-named “Trotsky” by his BBC colleagues for his leftward-leaning views; today, he describes himself as

an old-fashioned Labour voter who supports wealth redistribution.

“The hype terrifies me… I wrote to one of my colleagues the other day and said, ‘Stand by for the backlash.’”

Even so, the director knew how important it was to win the approval of Mantel for the film version of her novels.

Her spell-binding story of brutal dysfunction at the Henrician court has already been given a highly praised stage workout by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Kosminsky deliberately avoided seeing the RSC’s productions of the novels until the BBC’s version of Wolf Hall had wrapped: “I was concerned that something might lodge and I might nick it. I didn’t want to risk plagiarising the production.

“The stage version was entertaining, fast moving and it had lovely performances. The television version is slower, more thoughtful, more interior and darker.”

Will it be too slow to hold the audience through all six parts? “I am glad it is on BBC Two. When we first started submitting the rushes there was a discussion, at a fairly high level within the BBC, about whether the show should move to BBC One. “I argued with the producers that this would be a mistake. It wouldn’t meet the slot average and therefore the BBC would be put on the defensive…

“Transmitting it on BBC One would open it to illegitimate criticism because it is aimed at a thoughtful audience and one prepared to give things a bit more time.”

He adds: “This is quite serious, intellectual stuff. Hilary has said that this is not escapism. She is right.”

Kosminsky is one of television drama’s most celebrated directors. After The Government Inspector and The Promise, his 2011 film about Britain’s rela-

tionship to Palestine, he is enjoying a growing reputation as a writer, too. The RTS and Bafta awards are numerous.

Meeting Mantel for the first time made him anxious. “I was very nervous,” Kosminsky recalls of the encounter. He had read the two Tudor novels and Mantel’s memoir, Giving up the Ghost, but admits he did not know her work inside out.

They got on well. She told him her five years of research for Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies was available for him to use as he saw fit.

“I went into her house nervous and came out super-charged and ready to go,” says Kosminsky.

Despite the success of this initial conversation, some apprehension over the idea of directing a costume drama based on her books remained. And he took a memento from the visit to her coastal Dorset home as a lucky charm.

“I picked up a pebble from the beach which I kept with me throughout the

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

shoot. I kept it as a lucky talisman on my desk at home.”

Kosminsky, who is 58, lives in rural Wiltshire, where he keeps a massive film library comprising “thousands of DVDs”. “I don’t watch a lot of television drama. My influences are movie influences,” he says, citing Roland Joffé, Les Blair and Ken Loach as directors who have helped to inform his own style.

The new “golden age of TV drama”, defined by the likes of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Killing, True Detective and Game of Thrones are a closed book to Kosminsky.

“I’ve never seen a single episode of

ROGER BOLTON MADE ME A FILM DIRECTOR AND I FOUND MY NICHE

BBC

Peter Kosminsky, right, on location for Wolf Hall

any of them… It is not a conscious decision to boycott television drama.

There’s some wonderful work being done… I watched The Honourable Woman because the subject matter interests me and I admire Hugo Blick’s work...

“Most of the things I write are based on research. I work very long hours. I don’t watch a lot of stuff. The free time I get, I prefer to watch movies.”

Kosminsky’s parents were blue-collar East Enders: his father was a machinist in the rag trade, paid as a piece worker, his mother was a secretary.

Going to Oxford (where he read chemistry) and being accepted for a BBC general traineeship were big steps. So when, in 1980, following three months working in the Plays Department as a trainee, he was fired, Kosminsky was utterly devastated.

The reason for his sacking remains mysterious. “I never really knew but, basically, gross incompetence,” he remembers. “In fairness, I wasn’t very �

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Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall � good at it. I joke about it now, but I almost had a nervous breakdown.”

Kosminsky came close to taking a job selling communications satellites for British Aerospace. But chance led him to work on BBC One flagship show Nationwide, following the intervention of the then-Controller of BBC Two, Brian Wenham.

Part of Kosminsky’s training at Television Centre had involved working for Wenham on planning BBC Two schedules. When Wenham discovered Kosminsky had been let go by Plays, he summoned the aspiring film-maker to his office.

“Brian was very peremptory. He said: ‘What’s all this about you being fired?

We spent almost £20,000 training you.’

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“He picked up his phone. ‘Get me Roger Bolton [then Nationwide Editor]…

I’ve got one of your general trainees here. He’s completely fucked up. I want you to take him on for six months. “‘It won’t cost you anything. If he’s any good, you can keep him; if not, get rid of him when his contract expires.’”

After a tricky start (he completely lacked journalistic experience), Bolton steered him towards making short, human-interest films for Nationwide.

He didn’t know it at the time, but Kosminsky had found something he loved doing.

He credits Bolton with saving his career. “Roger made me a film director and I found my niche.”

It was as a documentary-maker, as

BBC

I DON’T WATCH A LOT OF TELEVISION DRAMA. MY INFLUENCES ARE MOVIE INFLUENCES

part of John Willis’s First Tuesday team at Yorkshire Television, where Kosminsky’s exacting and often challenging work first won acclaim. This in turn led to Shoot To Kill, his incendiary TV drama directorial debut.

A high watermark of the British television drama documentary, the fourhour ITV programme examined the killing, by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, of six terrorist suspects.

It won the RTS award for Single Drama and a Bafta nomination. Shoot To Kill was banned in Northern Ireland.

Subsequent Kosminsky films have embraced such equally hard-edged subject matter as child abuse – No Child of Mine (winner of a Best Single Drama Bafta) – and British attempts at peacekeeping in Bosnia. Warriors won him another Single Drama award from the RTS, a Bafta for Best Drama Serial and the Prix Italia Fiction prize.

The first film he wrote, in addition to directing it, was The Government Inspector. Mark Rylance played biological weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, who apparently committed suicide after being identified as the source of leaks concerning Saddam Hussein’s lack of weapons of mass destruction.

The Channel 4 production won Baftas for Best Single Drama, Best Actor and Best Writer. Crucially, The Government Inspector enabled Kosminsky to form a good working relationship with Rylance.

The actor’s mesmerising depiction of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall is certain to lead to another trunkful of silverware. Understandably, Kosminsky is gushing and diplomatic when the subject is Rylance.

Can actors have large egos? “I am not even going to comment on that one,” is Kosminsky’s instant retort. “He is a complicated man, as you would expect, given his brilliance. I am glad that I have come to direct him later in my career… Directing is a performance just like acting…

“The tricky part of it is that you may be doing a scene with three actors and the performance required for each actor may be subtly, or not so subtly, different…

“You give him what he needs and you don’t encumber him with things that he doesn’t need for the sake of appearing to direct. This is something probably harder to achieve with less experience.”

Kosminsky adds: “With Wolf Hall, it was important to create a strong sense of the interior world. Better than any

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

YOU DON’T ENCUMBER [THE ACTOR] WITH THINGS THAT HE DOESN’T NEED FOR THE SAKE OF APPEARING TO DIRECT Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall oping an Isis drama. Another project, some 25 years in gestation, is a BBC Films adaptation of Children of the Siege, Pauline Cutting’s story of how she worked as a trauma surgeon during a siege of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut.

These both put Kosminsky back in his comfort zone. Would he consider doing more period drama? “Oh yeah,” he says, without a moment’s hesitation.

“I’m hoping that, as a result of Wolf Hall, others things will be offered to me that I don’t have to develop myself.

“There would probably have to be a political element in it to feel that I had something to contribute.”

Some directors thrive on their reputations as control freaks. Kosminsky

BBC

actor I know, Mark generates a sense of the interior world…

“I wanted to shoot it in what I call a point-of-view and reaction style. You see events from Cromwell’s point of view.

“That can very literally be the camera sitting on his shoulder, following him into a room and then coming back on to his face for a reaction. And, all the time, making his shots that little bit tighter than the point-of-view shots of others.”

Previewers and critics have remarked upon the singular colour palette of Wolf Hall, an effect gained partly by the prodigious use of what are believed to be authentic Tudor tallow candles.

More than £20,000 was blown on candles. Paradoxically, it was the development of the latest camera technology that permitted scenes to be shot with no illumination other than candle- and firelight.

“With the Arri Alexa camera, for the first time on television, it has become possible to shoot exclusively by candlelight,” enthuses Kosminsky.

“Some scenes were shot with just one candle.”

Wolf Hall is costume drama, but, in common with all of Kosminsky’s best work, the serial embraces a deeply political story – and one that carries contemporary resonances.

The resemblance between some of the religious and cultural mores in early-modern English society and those that influence today’s Islamic extremists are easy to detect.

Kosminsky suggests that “Christianity is at about the same level of development during Henry VIII’s reign as [some interpretations of Islam now].

We look at Isis beheading people and displaying their severed heads. That is, of course, what was happening during Cromwell’s era.

“It was completely unacceptable in Cromwell’s time for a woman to appear with her head uncovered (or, come to that, a man), as is the case in [many Islamic countries today].

“I am not saying the parallels are exact. But the brutality and viciousness of the killing – hanging, drawing and quartering (disembowelling while still alive) – for minor religious transgressions is similar to how Isis puts fellow Muslims to death because they don’t accept the same interpretation of the Qur’an.”

Under the terms of his output deal with Channel 4, Kosminsky is devel-

appears to believe in a more collegiate approach to film-making.

“I don’t believe in all this auteur crap.

Television is a collaborative medium,” he emphasises. “When I first started in this business, as a BBC general trainee in 1980, I went on a training course at what used to be called Woodstock Grove.

“I was told that you are surrounded by all this experience: use it. If you tell a camera operator or a designer what to do because you’re the director, they’ll do it and you may be rather disappointed by the result.

“But if you tell them what you want to achieve, they’ll help you achieve it, and you may be a lot happier with the result. I have lived and worked by that maxim for 35 years.”

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Vice News comes of age

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hen Vice News launched online, in March 2014, it had a lot to prove. Coming from the same stable that had published articles such as “It’s time to talk about armpit fetishes” and “Santa was a shroom head”, there was a risk that the hipster bible would struggle to make a credible entrance into the field of news reporting.

One year on and Vice is hailing its news channel as a success and established broadcasters have been forced to sit up and take notice.

“A lot of the received wisdom, particularly from television news and current affairs, was that young people didn’t like news and current affairs.

“Well, actually, what we realised and, I think, have proved, is that there’s a massive thirst for how the world is seen from people aged 16 to 35,” says Kevin Sutcliffe, Head of News Programmes for Europe at Vice News.

With just 59% of 16- to 24-year-olds tuning in to TV news programmes, according to Ofcom’s News Consumption in the UK: 2014 Report, Vice News already boasts an impressive 1.1 million subscribers to its YouTube channel.

The key to winning over millennial viewers, says Sutcliffe, who edited Channel 4’s Dispatches before joining Vice, is to recognise that viewers want to pick and choose what news they watch, and how and where they watch it.

Vice News’s video output varies from three-minute Beyond the Headlines daily news summaries to long-form documentaries on big issues.

Last year, Vice attracted international headlines for The Islamic State series, in which film-maker Medyan Dairieh gained exclusive access to the self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria.

Dairieh spent three weeks with Islamic State fighters, reporting from an area that had been virtually abandoned by the mainstream press following highly publicised murders of

10

Digital news

Launched one year ago, the upstart news network is winning new respect for Vice Media.

Pippa Shawley takes stock foreign journalists. The footage was so compelling that it was used by Newsnight, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7:30 news programme and All in with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. The Islamic State, alongside other videos looking at the conflict in Ukraine, the Peruvian cocaine trade and the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, has helped Vice News quickly establish a reputation in foreign news reporting.

Richard Sambrook, Director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff University, believes that this head-on approach is what makes Vice News so popular among millennials: “Part of its brand is that it is edgy and young and a bit punkish and gonzo.

“Actually, Kevin Sutcliffe is a very experienced TV executive producer, so, behind the scenes, I think it is a lot more traditional and professional than it appears to be.”

Dorothy Byrne, Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4, agrees that Vice News content is, in reality,

VICE HAS SHOWN HOW… OLD-FASHIONED A LOT OF THE TRADITIONAL FORMATS HAVE BECOME

fairly traditional. She likens Vice News reports to the kind of programmes Channel 4 was making 15 years ago.

“Unreported World, in the past, used to be more like Vice is now, with a young, often white, male in a war zone, rushing around. It was all quite macho and often exciting, and it’s interesting that we’ve moved on from that,” says Byrne.

With Vice News and Channel 4 both targeting millennial audiences, it would be easy to see this as a dig at Byrne’s former colleague Sutcliffe.

Both claim, however, that their editorial decisions are not influenced by demographics. “What’s liberating for us is that [audience demographics] are none of our concern,” says Sutcliffe.

He acknowledges that Vice shares some characteristics with his former broadcaster: “The parallels with Channel 4 are, I think, that we draw broadly from the same set of sensibilities about just making good journalism and good films and good content.”

Byrne agrees: “Our experience is that if you try and target young people on TV, you lose all your older viewers, and young people go, ‘Oh God!’. I don’t think it’s about being young or old; it’s about your attitude.”

Vice News claims to be the fastest-­ growing channel on YouTube, and recently featured in a major advertising campaign by the video host, alongside vloggers Zoella and The Slow Mo Guys.

Its videos have received more than 190 million views since March 2014, indicating that Vice’s storytelling is clearly chiming with a large audience worldwide.

“The way it tells its stories is far more immersive and feels more authentic than the traditional TV format,” says Sambrook. “That’s given the main TV industry something to think hard about.

I believe it has shown up how old-­ fashioned or stuck in a rut a lot of the traditional formats have become.”

Whether Vice News is responsible for involving a younger generation of viewers in current affairs, or has simply attracted those who were already con-

suming this material, remains to be seen.

Byrne says that Channel 4 has noticed a significant increase in the number of younger viewers engaging with its current-affairs output. She notes that “in the period of a year, we’ve had a 20% increase in the youth share for Unreported World, which is extraordinary.”

Byrne cites Patrick Speaks, a four-­ minute clip about a profoundly deaf Ugandan teenager learning sign language, which has received more than 1.5 million views on YouTube alone, as one reason for this change in audience profile.

The other reason, she says, is the way in which the programme is made: “We foreground people from those countries in Unreported World, and particularly people from those countries doing something to help their own communities, rather than following the reporter. This is where I think we’re different to Vice.”

The 2015 general election will be a major test for programme makers who hope to appeal to the under-35s (see election article on page 12).

With the think tank Demos suggesting that young voters could swing the

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

vote this year, the question of how to make election coverage that is appealing to them is troubling broadcasters.

The rules around broadcasting during the election period lead to a certain kind of programming, argues Sutcliffe at Vice. “I think [it’s] important that we’re able to say something that we think hasn’t been said or shown.”

Meanwhile, Byrne says that Channel 4 is planning to launch a new online product in the next few months to specifically target young people.

“Essentially, what we’ve realised is that you have to reach out to them. In the past, we would have said, ‘We’ve got great material, come and watch it on Channel 4’. Our new strategy is: ‘We’ve got great material and we think it’s so good we’re taking it out online to you. We’re taking it to where you are’.”

Although Vice News is still in the planning stages of its election coverage, its new series Europe or Die focuses on migration in Europe – a key political issue across the continent, not least in the run-up to the British general election.

“We think it’s one of the biggest stories of the early part of this century, and it won’t go away,” says Sutcliffe.

Vice News

Vice coverage of protests in Ferguson, Missouri in October 2014 against the police shooting of Michael Brown “We’ve really put some effort into understanding migration routes and Europe’s response to migrants. It’s become critical.”

The flexibility of producing content for an online audience means that Sutcliffe and his colleagues can be more creative with their programming.

However, Vice plans to launch a 24-hour linear channel in Canada later this year. On top of that, Vice founder Shane Smith previously announced that a Vice channel would be available in 18 countries. So, Vice may find itself struggling with the scheduling challenges of more traditional broadcasters.

“When it has got a schedule to fill day-in, day-out, the quantity of content has got to increase exponentially.

Therefore, you’ve got to wonder whether it can continue to produce the same quality in that quantity,” worries Sambrook.

Sutcliffe isn’t fazed by talk of linear channels: “It’s Vice content, and that’s what is important…

“We’re happily growing Vice News at the moment and, if people want to come and talk to us [about broadcasting content on television], that would be great.”

11

Social media sets the political agenda Election coverage

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May 2015 is shaping up to be the UK’s first connected general election.

Torin Douglas reports

f anyone doubts, in this digital, social-media age, that television will play a key role in the general election campaign, they need only look at the rows over the leaders’ TV debates.

“Televised election debate plans in disarray” was The Daily Telegraph’s splash headline over the leak of new proposals drawn up by the broadcasters, after David Cameron refused to take part if the Greens were excluded.

BBC Radio 4’s Today also led on the plans for the debates, which would involve the leaders of seven parties, regardless of whether any party leader refused to take part.

With three months to go until polling day, the line-up of the TV debates remains as uncertain as the election result itself.

But what’s not in doubt is that this year’s media coverage will be very different to that of the 2010 campaign, as broadcasters respond to the impact of social media and YouTube channels, the fragmentation of the party system and the decline in voting among 18- to 24-year-olds.

“There’s a really different dynamic, now, because of social media – the speed at which things happen will be much quicker,” says Jason Mills, Head of Digital at ITV News. “We’ll be monitoring many more places this time – official sources and unofficial – and our aim is to add clarity to the debate and sort the wheat from the chaff.”

“The big difference is that it’s not about three or four parties any more,” says Jonathan Levy, Director of Newsgathering at Sky News.

“We’ll no longer be following just three leaders – we need to find out

12

what Nigel Farage and Natalie Bennett are doing, and what’s happening in Scotland, which could have an impact on the outcome. And, of course, the swingometer is broken.”

“Our challenge is to make the election issues relevant to young people – and the key thing is keeping politicians out of it,” argues Louisa Compton, Editor of BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat.

She’s been asked to spearhead the BBC’s drive to digital-first, using video, mobile and online to reach a 15- to 24-year-old audience that is switching off radios.

While most broadcasters are keeping their election plans under wraps (the strict impartiality rules for the election period don’t take effect until 30 March), some initiatives can already be seen, as programmes strive to attract younger audiences and prevent viewer boredom creeping in.

Newsnight kicked off the year by unveiling its “election marathon” with presenter Emily Maitlis (“a jogger’s delight in a high-vis pink padded body­ warmer, turquoise running shorts and matching trainers,” panted The Guardian).

We saw her conducting interviews

LARGE MEDIA ORGANISATIONS RARELY GIVE THE YOUNG ENOUGH ATTENTION IN OUR COVERAGE, AND THAT MUST CHANGE

– somewhat breathlessly – with Ipsos Mori’s Ben Page and the Watford Running Sisters at the start of her election odyssey from “coastal paths to industrial estates and everything in between”.

Young voters are a key target for all broadcasters. Head of Sky News John Ryley spelled out the challenge in an Observer article headed: “It’s vital to get young voters into the polling booth”.

“The turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds at general elections has been declining since 1997,” he wrote. “In 2010, only 44% of registered under-24-year-olds voted, compared with an average 73% of those over 45.”

Ryley said the media must take some of the blame. “We, and other large media organisations, rarely give the young enough attention in our coverage, and that must change…

Young people are not only alienated by politicians but by the way politics is covered – the lobby system and the focus on Westminster, rather than issues that matter.”

So Sky News has launched Stand Up Be Counted in partnership with the Media Trust and youth organisations “to turn up the volume of what young people are saying and ensure the establishment is listening”.

Using the tag @SkySUBC, young people are posting videos, articles and comments and sharing them across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Kik. The project feeds into another Sky initiative – In the Margins, focusing on 150 key marginal seats – and has been nominated for an RTS Television Journalism award.

“We’ve all grappled with how to integrate social media into our TV coverage,” says Levy. “All our journal-

ists are on Twitter and so are the politicians, so it will play a big part in the election.

“And Facebook is going to be much bigger for us than in the past – it’s relatively unexplored territory for journalism and we’re going to put a lot more video up there.”

ITV News has teamed up with @BiteTheBallot, which describes itself on Twitter as “a party-neutral movement on a mission to empower young voters”. Before Christmas, the group ran #LeadersLive debates with four of the party leaders, streamed on YouTube.

Questioned by young “influencers”, Labour leader Ed Miliband pledged to give the vote to 16-year-olds in all parts of the UK. Meanwhile, the BBC is building a panel of 200 18- to 24-year-olds from across the UK, called Generation 2015, based on the Generation 2014 initiative run by BBC Scotland in the Scottish referendum.

Those chosen could find themselves appearing on The One Show, Radio 1’s Newsbeat, Newsnight and other outlets.

The centrepiece of Generation 2015 will be three big audience debates on Radio 1, with TV coverage on the BBC News Channel and BBC Three, linked to Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. The panel will help to choose the debate topics.

“The received wisdom is that young people aren’t interested in news and politics,” says Compton, “but since I came to Newsbeat last year (from Radio 5 Live), I’ve learned that’s not true. In Scotland, young people were massively engaged in the referendum – it was about their future.

“So our coverage will be all about the audience, getting them talking to each other about what matters to them.”

At last year’s Radio Festival, Compton acknowledged that the BBC was “playing catch-up” with Vice Media, widely seen as the home of serious content that appeals to the so-called “millennials” (those born between 1980 and 2000, aged 16 to 35).

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

Vice’s 43-minute documentary The Islamic State has been watched (or partwatched) more than 15 million times on YouTube (see page 11).

So how is Vice News planning to cover the UK general election? Its Head of News Programmes, Europe, is Kevin Sutcliffe, a former Editor of Dispatches on Channel 4. He says he is relishing not being shackled by the “extraordinarily formal theatre, and artificial nature, of traditional TV election coverage”.

Sutcliffe says that Vice News and the website Vice.com don’t have to provide wall-to-wall election coverage and so won’t “slavishly follow” the agenda of others, too often dictated by the parties’ photo-opportunities.

“We have a much more fluid and flexible approach and I’ll be able to commission some breakthrough films and opinion pieces on subject areas that are resonant with our audience,” he says.

Sutcliffe adds: “This is going to be a very important election with big, Europe-wide issues and we’re an international channel. We’re still pondering how best to tackle it, but we’ll certainly have a different voice and perspective.”

So how far will things change? “People said the last election would be the online election, but it wasn’t,” says Sky’s Jonathan Levy.

He continues: “TV dominated the campaign because of the leadership debates. This time, digital will be on a par with television.”

That means viewers and voters will have to do more to seek out election material, instead of having it handed down to them by broadcasters and newspapers.

This may excite the politically engaged. The danger is that millions of people may simply not be bothered.

13

Dating shows: the new rules of the game Content

From Blind Date to Ex on the Beach, Sanya Burgess tracks the evolution of a guilty pleasure

T

hanks to TV, observing people’s love lives and dating habits has come a long way from reading the protracted courting rituals of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

From the titan of TV matchmaking, Blind Date, to the more niche Take Me Out, the British public has fallen in love with a genre that mixes the suspense of “Will they, won’t they?” with nervous singles blurting out naff chat-up lines.

It’s been 50 years since the first hit dating show was broadcast by ABC in the US. The Dating Game wrote the rule book for dating shows: corny questions, cheesy answers and a host who acts as a tongue-in-cheek Cupid. The programme revolved around three hopeful singles sitting behind a screen answering the coy questions of another lonely heart.

It was the predecessor to Britain’s iconic Blind Date (1985), hosted by national treasure Cilla Black on a bright, fuchsia set.

At its height, in the 1980s, more than 18 million viewers tuned in to a show that was one of TV’s heaviest hitters.

But by the time Black called a halt to Blind Date in 2003, audiences had sunk to under 3 million.

Blind Date was based on Australia’s Perfect Match, which was itself derived from The Dating Game.

The ITV show remained mostly unchanged from the formats that inspired it – apart from the introduc-

14

tion of “ditch or date”, which involved the picker being able to dump their date after seeing what they looked like.

When Blind Date left our screens in 2003, televised dating hooked up with the incumbent bad boy of television, reality TV. A world of novelty dating shows exploded into British living rooms.

Farmer Wants a Wife, the show in which women from the city vied for the attention of a farmer, did not do well here, but it became one of FremantleMedia’s biggest sellers in international markets.

Other dating shows included Playing it Straight (2005), where a woman tried to find love from a mixed group of straight and gay men, and Dating in the Dark (2009), where contestants dated in a pitch-black room.

Nowadays, shows such as The Only Way Is Essex have crossed into dating-­ show territory through their in-show relationship storylines.

Meanwhile, dating shows have split into three factions: traditional studio shows, such as Take Me Out and The Love Machine; voyeuristic guilty pleasures,

SHOWS SUCH AS THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX HAVE CROSSED INTO DATING-­SHOW TERRITORY

including Ex on the Beach and The Bachelor; and gentler formats, such as Dinner Date and First Dates.

Filling the void left by Blind Date, FreemantleMedia’s Take Me Out is the UK’s number-one dating show. It delivers audiences hovering around the 3 million mark for ITV; Take Me Out has been remade in some 15 other countries, including South Korea, Denmark and Spain.

“I think Take Me Out has been such a success because it had been a long time coming,” opines Suzy Lamb, Head of Entertainment at Thames and one of the show’s executive producers.

Essentially speed dating en masse, the show’s format involves a male contestant choosing his date from 30 women.

They stand on stage beneath 30 white lights, with a button in front of them.

Each woman has the option of turning her light off to declare her disinterest in the man.

Lamb believes the programme reflects the modern dating scene and is a necessary update to the studio dating show. She says: “Nowadays, dating is all done more quickly and the turnaround of making decisions on Take Me Out is so much faster than the way it was done on Blind Date.”

Blind Date was criticised for not showing audiences enough of the dates. Take Me Out’s sister show, Take Me Out – the Gossip, has risen to the challenge.

“The Gossip is something that I’m very proud of. People would say, ‘What really happened when the cameras stop rolling?’ and I thought, ‘Hang on a

minute, there is so something in this,’” reflects Lamb.

Initially trialled online, the show reveals more of the dates and what the couple got up to afterwards. It was brought to ITV2 to help pair the slightly more adult content (a bit of drunken kissing) with a younger audience.

On the other end of the spectrum is MTV’s Ex on the Beach. With barely an episode passing without contestants humping or having an argument, viewers are treated to the ultimate guilty pleasure of today’s dating shows.

A group of beautiful singles are gatecrashed by their exs, ensuring that, as well as new passion, contestants may also rediscover love or relive their heartbreak.

Clocking in as the mostviewed launch programme on MTV in the UK, with an average audience of 328,000 at 10:00pm on launch night, it beat the launch figures of the hugely successful Geordie Shore by 34%.

Across the Atlantic and in continental Europe, local MTV channels have aired the UK version; and talks are under way to sell the format so that it can be remade overseas.

Lisa Chapman, MD of Whizz Kid Entertainment and Executive Producer of Ex on the Beach, says: “When Blind Date first started, it had to be so different. Our show reflects what’s happening now.”

The sexually charged show could be seen as too hedonistic, but Chapman points out that “this is what people are doing. We send them out on dates, but what they do on them is up to them.”

The way these wild young things are identified is another reflection on how dating shows have adapted to the world of Facebook and Twitter.

“We have a fantastic casting team and a lot of it is done through social media,” explains Chapman. “Often, you’ll find there is a whole section of a club scene where people are all talking on Twitter and Instagram, and they’ve all been out with each other.”

Hat Trick’s Dinner Date (originally shown on ITV1) is certainly the gentlest of the lot. The show sees a singleton choose three out of five menus and proceed to have dinner at the

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

Ex on the Beach

mystery chefs’ houses, before taking one lucky romantic out for a meal they don’t have to cook.

When Claire Collinson-Jones pitched the format in 2009, dating shows were scarce on the ground.

“The spectre of Blind Date loomed so large that people felt dating didn’t work any more,” she recalls. “I originally got away with it because it was seen as cooking with dating.”

Four series in and regularly pulling in 1.5 million viewers, Collinson-Jones says the show has “totally different rules of engagement”, compared with a studio show. “People watch Dinner Date for all sorts of reasons: the cooking, or because you get to see behind people’s front doors and have a nosey, and, obviously, we can play along, guessing who will be picked,” she explains.

Recently moved from ITV1 to ITVBe, the show has a young demographic, but the starting point of the programme was to appeal to everyone. “I wanted it to be like a dating agency,” remembers Collinson-Jones, who is proud of the show’s history of diversity, featuring contestants over 70, gay couples and ethnic minorities.

The dating show has evolved into a many-headed beast, but one thing that has remained the same, according to Lamb, Chapman and Collinson-Jones, is that, to be successful, audiences must be able to laugh along with contestants.

It seems that what doesn’t work is to ignore the rules set out 50 years ago by The Dating Game. The disastrous Dapper Laughs: on the Pull was scrapped after it offended many viewers by laughing at others, using abusive language and having a host who rejected any attempt at finding love.

To fans, successful dating shows are more than just guilty pleasures. They become invested in the real-life stories – be that discovering that couples on both Take Me Out and Dinner Date have got married or watching hearts break on Ex on the Beach.

15

Send in the

drones W

e work in an industry that takes new kit to its heart. Right now, drones are the gadget of the moment. They bring a little bit of Hollywood to even the most mundane corners of the EPG. No jib long enough? Don’t worry, the drone will get there. No helicopter nimble enough? The drone will get it… and without the downdraft ruffling the leaves.

A couple of years ago, a director couldn’t have said: “I’d like the shot to move out across the dining table, through the windows and out over the cliff, to reveal the view of the house from the sea in a wide shot from, let’s say, 60m.”

But we can now – and without busting the budget or the shooting schedule.

The drones developed for military use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan are rapidly becoming part of

16

Technology

Breathtaking footage filmed by drones is becoming part of the grammar of TV. Andrew Sheldon is excited but warns that producers must tread carefully

mainstream television production. And to meet the demand, companies specialising in their use are springing up all over the UK. They bring with them kit in which they’ve invested – perhaps in the region of £20,000 – which, if used creatively, can make your show look a million dollars.

So, all very intoxicating. But it’s not

without risk… for the producer, the production company and the industry.

Even though the use of drones is regulated through the Civil Aviation Authority, their operation for filming remains a subject of heated debate.

Where, and when, you are allowed to fly them remains contentious.

As in many areas of life, the technology is running ahead of the legislation.

What constitutes an invasion of privacy is already a prickly subject, but material shot from drones has the capacity to take it to a different level.

A shot of a board meeting taking place on the 10th floor of an office block? Technically, no problem. A shot of a celebrity sunbathing on the roof of a villa? Ditto.

As the law stands, there are no legal restrictions on photography in a public place and no presumption of privacy for individuals in a public place.

But with the first paparazzi drones already taking to the skies, how long will this remain the case?

Homes by the Sea. Inset: Phantom 2 Vision+ camera drone With the hacking scandal fresh in everyone’s memories, could our airspace be the new frontier for the battle between privacy and freedom of the press?

Drones have brought two worlds together and it’s going to be fascinating to see how the dust settles.

There are a host of human-rights and public-safety issues emerging and a lot of catching up to do.

Media lawyers will need to get to grips with aviation and aviation authorities will be brushing up on their media law.

And, of course, it’s a new line to add to that already tight budget.

We used Spider Aerial Filming’s drones on Homes by the Sea. They did a terrific job, but there were scheduling lessons to be learned, to make sure their presence on the shoot was cost-effective.

The Spider operators felt very confident with the kit, were clearly across the regulatory and legal framework,

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

True North/DJI

COLOUR TV SHOWS HOW QUICKLY THE STUNNING CAN BECOME THE STANDARD

and engaged with what we were trying to achieve.

They arrived in a van with three different drones, capable of carrying a range of camera types, and coping as well as possible with the oh-so-­ unpredictable British weather.

We were conscious of cost; with so many operators out there, there are deals to be done.

But remember that there are also stories of mixed results from some firms. So as well as agreeing the price, make sure their showreel stacks up.

If you do that, you’ll get material that would previously have been beyond the reach of all but the best-funded shows for not much more than the cost of a conventional crew day.

We used a two-person set-up – an operator for the camera and an operator for the drone. This felt like the best way to get the right creative result.

It also minimised the risk of a piece of equipment akin to a hover mower landing somewhere it shouldn’t.

If you want a sense of what the drone offers creatively, then go to YouTube and watch mountain biker Danny MacAskill riding Skye’s Cuillin Ridge.

Beautiful… and quite vertigo inducing.

The potential applications are fascinating. From the moment it lifts off, it’s recording. And though you won’t want to use every shot, pretty much every shot is usable.

News broadcasters can report from conflict zones and disaster areas with reduced risk to safety.

Covert and investigative programming has a powerful new tool at its disposal, and film-makers can take us to places we’ve never seen before.

And because we’re not used to viewing the world from the places a drone can reach, it’s constantly offering material that looks fresh and revealing.

It’s certainly tempting.

Drones can breathe new life into traditional TV subjects. In the past year, we’ve seen numerous programmes that have successfully integrated drone technology into their formats, from our own Homes by the Sea, for More4, to ITV’s Secrets from the Sky. As programme makers, one of our toughest challenges is finding ways to provide new insight and fresh perspectives.

Suddenly, that appears to be remarkably easy, but it won’t last. In no time at all, audiences will expect to see these types of shots. Unless these shots are cleverly used, they will lose their impact.

On Homes by the Sea, we quickly realised that the way to use this new tool was sparingly. The drone was used to create standout moments.

The director and the DoP delighted in designing shots that appeared to be conventional at first but developed into breathtaking aerials.

Shots could start in the darkness in a tunnel and then burst out into a castle courtyard in Northumbria.

They could move from inside a dining room out across the rugged cliffs of Devon; they could circle a beautiful converted lighthouse in Norfolk.

In a single shot, we could establish our presenter, Charlie Luxton, in a close-up, before moving around him to show the epic coastal landscapes he was describing.

This kit could bring a sense of the spectacular. But what it couldn’t do is replace good-quality material shot on the ground in a conventional way.

Right now, drones feel like they could become a game changer, one of the biggest things to happen to the small screen since colour arrived in our homes in July 1967.

At the time, BBC Two Controller David Attenborough announced that colour programming would be restricted to around five hours per week. By the end of the year, BBC Two was broadcasting everything in colour.

It was what the audience expected.

That’s how quickly the stunning can become the standard. When that day arrives for drones, we’ll all have to work that little bit harder once again.

We should guard against coming to depend upon them. They provide a televisual punctuation mark and need to be carefully integrated into the grammar of whatever show you’re making. Everyone knows that there are few things more distracting than over-punctuation!!!

Andrew Sheldon is Creative Director and founder of True North.

COULD OUR AIRSPACE BE THE NEW FRONTIER FOR THE BATTLE BETWEEN PRIVACY AND FREEDOM OF THE PRESS? 17

Sky

spreads its risks Pay-television

The merger of three European satellite broadcasters is a defensive move, explains Raymond Snoddy Fortitude

W

hen Rupert Murdoch tried in 2010 to acquire the 61% of satellite operator BSkyB that he did not own, pandemonium broke out. There were inquiries, protests and threats to a number of powerful reputations.

Eventually, the deal was fatally undermined by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and revelations that murdered teenager Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked.

Yet, recently, the satellite broadcaster was able to complete a quiet coup by taking control of both Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia from Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox in a £7bn deal. There was little sign of opposition.

Murdoch already had effective control of Sky in the UK. He retains the same degree of control, flowing from his continuing 39.1% stake in the enlarged European company – now called Sky, rather than BSkyB. The transactions netted Murdoch £5bn.

The new Sky has 20 million subscribers across five countries – the UK,

18

Ireland, Germany, Austria and Italy.

As a result, it boasts of being the leading entertainment company in Europe and is seen by many as an expanding European pay-TV powerhouse.

Sky CEO Jeremy Darroch, who will run the entire company as Group Chief Executive, promised: “The new Sky will be a world-class, multinational pay-TV business headquartered in the UK, anchored in Europe.”

The few complaints raised about the deal concerned price, not power, and it was virtually nodded through by the EU. It ruled that the transactions would not hamper competition: the three companies were based in different countries, operated in local languages and focused on different audiences.

In fact, all the signs are that Sky’s big European adventure is more defensive than aggressive. It reflects the relative maturity of the UK pay-TV market and the rise of other big beasts in the European communications landscape.

These include Liberty Global, with, following its acquisition of Virgin Media, 27 million subscribers. And that is before considering the increasingly expansionist mobile operators and

companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Google.

Alex DeGroote, Media Analyst at stockbroker Peel Hunt, notes that the UK may be an attractive market, but it is also an increasingly competitive one.

“To some extent, Sky was running out of road in the UK in terms of further scope to grow. Germany and Italy are large countries, but relatively immature in pay-TV terms. There is lots of scope to grow if it gets it right,” DeGroote believes.

Germany and Italy each offer different opportunities for Sky. In Germany, Sky Deutschland, run by Brian Sullivan, is progressing well, albeit from a relatively low base.

Until recently, German consumers have been used to relatively cheap packages of channels from either phone companies or cable operators.

Germany has 40 million households.

Sky’s subscriber base was 3.9 million in September 2014, having grown by 379,000 over the previous year. Churn (the rate of subscriber loss) had fallen to 9% from close to 20% in the recent past.

But revenue per subscriber has been

Sky

either flat or declining thanks to discounted, two-year subscription deals.

There have also been cheap packages to attract subscribers from Deutsche Telekom after Sky outbid the phone company for live TV football rights to the Bundesliga until June 2017.

On present trends, Sky Deutschland will only move into underlying profit six months before the Bundesliga deal expires. This will coincide with a new, and probably more expensive, bidding round.

In Italy, the main problem is a national economy mired in a tripledip recession.

Sky Italia, which will continue to be run by Andrea Zappia, is profitable.

This is despite the number of subscribers falling from a peak of 5 million in 2012 to around 4.7 million now. Churn, however, is down from 13% to less than 10%.

Future strategy involves targeting the most attractive 9 million out of the 21 million Italian homes that do not have Sky. The bait is high-definition TV and multi-screen technology, combined with live coverage of all Serie A football games.

Apart from the potential for subscriber growth, to what extent can Sky become more than the sum of its parts?

“There are a lot of synergies, but not necessarily the ones you would first look to,” says Toby Syfret, a television specialist at consultancy Enders Analysis. You can forget about general sports deals with organisations such as Formula 1, but there could be savings from “backroom” areas, such as transmission, back-up facilities, set-top box development and, possibly, programme acquisition, suggests Syfret.

The fact that Fortitude, the new crime thriller filmed in Iceland, will be shown across the new Sky empire gives a hint of things to come.

Joint management roles are also possible. In January, Sky asked Sky Deutschland executive, and a Sky founder, Gary Davey, to take on a new expanded task. He was promoted to Head of Content for Germany, the UK and Ireland. Davey will divide his time between London and Munich.

Overall, the acquisitions give Sky the advantages of scale, says Syfret: “Bulking up gives Sky a sense of being less dependent on any one thing. If anything goes wrong, it now has a larger core that is not doing so badly.”

The obvious thing that could go wrong would be the loss of most of the

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

Premiership TV rights to BT in the current, crucial auction.

Sky holds rights to five of seven Premiership packages. The nightmare for Sky would be for that score line to be reversed by BT, which has pushed into televised sport, primarily to defend its vital broadband business.

At £18bn, BT revenues dwarf those of Sky, even before the likely impact of BT’s planned £12.5bn acquisition of EE, the UK’s largest mobile operator.

In a foretaste of what might come, BT outbid Sky for Europa League and Champions League football rights.

The existing Premier League deal is worth £1bn a year. The Sky-BT battle could push it up to more than £1.3bn.

The result could be a close-run thing.

Apart from BT’s financial muscle, DeGroote points to BT’s advantage of having former Sky Chief Executive Tony Ball on its board.

“That’s invaluable experience to have,” says the analyst, who adds that the Sky share price, which has been treading water between 850p and 930p in recent months, is being held back by fear of losing the Premiership – or of winning at too high a price.

Syfret thinks there is “quite a risk” that Sky will lose the majority of the seven packages to BT; no one player can have more than five. “I think BT will pay substantially more than it has done. I have a feeling it’s going to be a four-three split to BT – which would be dreadful for consumers,” says Syfret.

It would also be a huge symbolic blow to Sky to lose the majority of Premiership rights packages in an auction it has dominated from the outset – but not terminal, as it might once have been.

Sky, as a business, has broadened out far from football, and even television rights, and will now have Germany and Italy to fall back on. This may have been a large part of the broadcaster’s strategy in buying the German and Italian businesses.

Even if the worst should happen – and it is far from inevitable – Sky will go on and live to fight another day.

But does it all amount to a cunning step-by-step plan by Murdoch to own all of Sky outright in the end?

Probably not. If Murdoch were to try again, you can be sure that political pandemonium would break out once more in the UK. Besides, by then, Murdoch will have moved on and may have much bigger fish to fry in the US.

SKY’S EUROPEAN ADVENTURE IS MORE DEFENSIVE THAN AGGRESSIVE

THERE ARE A LOT OF SYNERGIES, BUT NOT NECESSARILY THE ONES YOU WOULD FIRST LOOK TO 19

OUR FRIEND IN

IRELAND

20

Public-service media has a vital role to play in sustaining a sense of community, says Noel Curran. So why is the state so slow to grasp that?

RTÉ

G

rowing up on the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s left me with an acute sense of community – or, perhaps, “communities”.

Of course, the Troubles dominated, and our idea of “community”, the idea of “Ireland” itself, was the lead story for a media that often had only one story to tell.

Today, while our definition of community and “communities” has changed, it’s as important a concept as ever.

Take this statistic: towards the end of last year, the final episode of RTÉ drama Love/Hate was watched by 56% of the television audience.

Yes, over half of all people watching television were watching RTÉ One. Only a few weeks later, a seasonal edition of The Late Late Show, the world’s longest-running chat show, was viewed by 71% of the available audience.

Almost three-quarters of the people watching television were watching RTÉ One. If, once, it seemed that, at home and abroad, the Troubles defined us and our communities, it is also true to say that, in the past decade, the prevailing international narrative has been one of loss: of identity, of culture, and, yes, of community.

Perhaps this is true in some countries – in other territories, nightly current affairs receives a share of 4% to 5%. Compare this with RTÉ’s Primetime, which routinely receives a 22% to 25% share.

Clearly, Ireland is different: shared mass experience still exists. Think about it: 71% of people watching television all watching the same thing.

It’s a powerful idea; it’s an emotional idea; it’s a hopeful idea.

It’s hopeful, not just for the idea of “society”, but for the role of public-­ service media.

We are in danger of assuming that public-service media can no longer be relevant in a world of rapidly expanding choice.

We are told that there is nothing truly indispensable that public-service media adds to a society that commercial media cannot also add.

However, this is not the truth:

­ ublic-service media remains hugely p relevant in our shared futures, not simply through the varied genres that it supports, but in the simple fact that it supports this idea of shared experience in a way that no other media can.

In March, RTÉ will host an International Mobile Journalism Conference in Dublin.

That RTÉ is hosting this conference says something. It says that RTÉ is at the centre of both our traditional ideas of community and our emerging ideas of community.

RTÉ is a truly public space. The fact that it is funded in part by the public is central to that definition.

And yet, despite the fact that RTÉ can demonstrate its centrality to Irish life, the Irish licence-fee system is among the most inefficient in Europe.

It is a troubling paradox.

When 94% of Irish people are using RTÉ’s services in any given week, and yet upwards of €30m is being lost in potential revenue from the licence fee, it’s clear that in Ireland the current public-funding system is not effective.

It’s clear that policy is at odds with reality.

The Irish have demonstrated, time and again, that we hold dear our sense of ourselves.

When 71% of people watching television on a given night choose RTÉ, it tells me that public media can play a vital role in informing that identity.

Public-service media should be at the heart of a society that sustains a true, not virtual, community.

In Ireland, it really is long past the time for some real decisions on the funding of public media, and the preservation of shared communities.

Noel Curran is Director General of RTÉ. www.rte.ie

February 2015 www.rts.org.uk Television

A story born every minute

C

hannel 4’s top fixed-rig series – One Born Every Minute, 24 Hours in A&E and Educating Yorkshire – have won a clutch of RTS awards and Baftas, and have proved enduringly popular with viewers over the past few years.

At the first RTS early-evening event of the year, an audience of close to 200 braved the bitter January cold to hear a panel of experts, interviewed by former BBC One Controller and TalkbackThames boss Lorraine Heggessey, explain how they make these shows.

Fixed-rig productions have radically changed the way that film-makers work, giving them many more tools to work with. While old-school observational documentary directors have to make do with a couple of cameras to shoot their series, fixed-rig shows have up to 100, as they take viewers inside every nook and cranny of schools, hospitals and police stations.

“As a film-maker, it’s the most incredibly exciting place to be – you’re completely liberated in terms of the stories you can tell,” said David Brindley, who made Educating Yorkshire, whose consolidated ratings Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

Content

Factual TV has been transformed by fixed-rig docs such as Educating Yorkshire and 24 Hours in A&E. Matthew Bell hears how they are made frequently topped 4 million. As Channel 4 Commissioning Editor, Documentaries, he is now responsible for the broadcaster’s fixed-rig shows.

Despite turning the school of ­Educating Yorkshire or the cop shop of 24 Hours in Police Custody into one large film set, fixed-rig technology allows people to be filmed intimately.

The subjects know where the cameras are. They know they are being filmed. But, without the presence of a crew, which they may find inhibiting or even intimidating, they tend to act more naturally.

Channel 4

Educating the East End

Documentary subjects act less self-consciously, argued Sarah Swingler. She is Head of Dragonfly West and the Executive Producer of One Born Every Minute, which has aired on Channel 4 since 2010.

“They behave differently to how they would if the crew were in the room with them,” she said.

“There’s a different tone to a rig show,” agreed Brindley. “It’s about as purely observed as you can get – there’s a real honesty to the scenes.”

Armed with more cameras, the gallery director can concentrate on the reactions of the other people in a room. “We’re constantly looking for reaction shots, which often say a lot more than the person speaking,” said Brindley. “Traditionally, with single-­ camera [shoots], you’re very worried about making sure you’re [focusing] on the person speaking. Here, you’ve got the luxury of being on two or three other people, who are reacting to things.”

Making a fixed-rig series is a huge undertaking. Up to 100 cameras have to be installed and connected, via cabling, to the gallery.

“On 24 Hours in A&E we used nearly � 21

Sarah Swingler Seeking consent to film One Born Every Minute is ‘the most tricky consent process I’ve had to deal with’, said Executive Producer Sarah Swingler. It requires both hospital staff and expectant mothers to give their consent to be filmed.

‘We have a double consent process.

[Initially,] a mum and her family would only be asked to consent to an interview that we film before she has her baby,’ explained Swingler. ‘She doesn’t sign a release form at that point so, for us, it’s a leap of faith.’

‘When she comes to the hospital, we hope that she hasn’t lost her nerve and that we can then film her having her baby. Only once the baby has been delivered and is fit and well does she sign a release form.’

Discussing the difficulty of gaining the consent of NHS employees, Swingler said that managers are usually concerned that the hospital’s reputation is not tarnished.

Midwives’ consent is typically given on a ‘sliding scale’, she explained. ‘We might get to the point where they’re prepared to be filmed in the background and that’s it, or they may say, “You can film my hands while I do an epidural.”

‘You just hope that, by building up a strong relationship through the filming process, you’ll get to the point where they’ll let you film them delivering babies and then, ultimately, be interviewed about it. It’s a long process.’

22

Paul Hampartsoumian

Consent flows from trust

For Educating Yorkshire, Director David Brindley had to gain the consent of around 750 staff and pupils. The secret was ‘building trust and relationships’ over time, so the production team began to seek the consent of participants six months before shooting started.

‘We had an “opt-out” consent process within the school,’ Brindley explained. Unless their parents stated that they did not want their child to be featured, they could appear in shot.

For the principal characters, such as Musharaf, the student who defeats his stammer in the moving series finale, there was a secondary consent process, which goes on beyond the end of the shoot.

‘We told them the things we were filming; we interviewed them at the same time, so they got a good steer about [what] we were interested in. We [involved them] through the edit. Then, with viewings, we showed the films to each of the children and their parents or guardians, as well as the Head Teacher and senior staff,’ said Brindley.

Few subjects withdrew their consent, which Brindley attributed to the efforts of the production team to build trust over many months.

His general experience is that ‘there isn’t much dropout. Only a huge change of heart or a legal issue means that we lose a story.’

� 18km of cable to fit 92 working cameras,” recalled Adam Berger, General Manager of outside broadcast outfit CTV. “It can take up to two weeks to get the cable into a hospital because, if somebody’s in resuscitation or a woman is giving birth in a delivery suite, we have to wait.

“We’re taking outside-broadcast technology and embedding it into a hospital or hotel,” he explained.

Instead of the high-tech OB trucks used to broadcast from sporting events, a fixed-rig show is usually run from a single Portakabin. Once the equipment is installed, the production requires only a small technical presence to run.

“When we’re up and running, there’s only a technical crew of four people – a camera operator, sound mixer, a vision engineer and a technical assistant – operating a 50-camera system with 20 radio mics and another 50 or 60 effects mics. If we were doing a golf event, we would have a crew of 100,” said Berger.

Video is recorded from just three of the many robotic cameras at any one time, chosen by the gallery director.

When the cameras pick up an interesting conversation or incident, the director has to make a call on whether to follow the story.

Using streams from just three cameras on One Born Every Minute produces 6,000 hours of raw material from which to make a series. “To have more

would be prohibitive – we’re directing, not just hoovering up images,” said Swingler.

“The skill is in using the rig to its full potential,” said Brindley. “A common misconception about directing in a rig is that you walk in, press record and sit back. That’s not the case at all.

“You need to work the gallery and the technology. You’ve got to make sure that you’re getting strong content. Like any other observational film-making, content is king – it’s all about delivering good stories and characters.

“No matter how many millions of pounds of kit or how many cameras you’ve got, if you’re not doing that, you’re not going to get a strong series,” emphasised Brindley. “Even with all this technology, you can still direct [a programme] badly.”

Thorough preparation is important, but reacting to events equally so. “With Yorkshire, we were in the school for nearly a year before we pressed record – finding out about the children, the school, the staff and the narratives to follow,” recalled Brindley.

“Half of those probably played out and made it to screen in some shape or form, but the other half – and this is what the rig allows you to do brilliantly – [we got from] following something spontaneously that we could never have predicted would happen.”

Fixed rigs have also changed the scale and nature of post-production.

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

David Brindley

One Born Every Minute

Channel 4

A COMMON MISCONCEPTION ABOUT DIRECTING IN A RIG IS THAT YOU WALK IN, PRESS RECORD AND SIT BACK

“There’s a lot of media. One hundred hours was very typical for a documentary. Now, there’s day after day of media, and 50 tracks of audio with every hour of vision,” said Owen Tyler, Operations Director at post-production company Evolutions.

“Traditionally, people would come to us with tapes – [for One Born Every Minute] that meant 6,000 hours of material, which we would have had to ingest at a massive cost.

“We now go to the location and capture it straight on to our servers,” he continued. “We’re working more closely with the production, which is fundamentally different for us.”

Having filmed inside many of the UK’s leading institutions, Channel 4 is now taking fixed-rig technology to Africa in The Tribe, which is due to air later this year.

“We’re trying to recreate the idea of the first series of The Family with a tribe in Ethiopia,” said Brindley. “It doesn’t have that sense of a big white filmmaker following their every move.

What we did was put cameras in their homestead for four weeks and let them get on with life.”

‘Fixed-rig documentary: the story behind the lens’ was an RTS early-evening event held at the Cavendish Conference Centre in central London on 20 January. The producers were Lucinda Hicks and Terry Marsh.

Paul Hampartsoumian

Magic moments would be lost without an index

Editing fixed-rig footage into a coherent series, with the best characters and stories to the fore, is like completing a jigsaw puzzle from hundreds of thousands of pieces. It is a Herculean task, but one that is made possible by the systematic logging of all the material, as it is shot, in the gallery.

When the material is logged, editors can then search for particular sequences using key words such as characters’ names.

‘You’re nothing, if you’ve lost your brilliant moments from your thousands of hours of [footage],’ admitted Channel 4’s David Brindley.

Recalling the logging process from Educating Yorkshire, which he directed, Brindley said: ‘We had two people at any one time who were transcribing exactly what was said on the three [camera] streams.’

Hot keys for characters’ names were used to enable the typists to keep up with the conversations they were hearing. ‘We also had a line of keys, which said things like, “Brilliant moment”, “Funny” or “Sad”,’ explained Brindley.

At the same time, an assistant producer in the gallery wrote an editorial log on the day’s highlights.

‘That was our first point of reference to find key scenes when we were in the edit. Finally, my co-­ director and I had laptops and, if there was anything that we felt we didn’t want to lose, that would also go in a log.’

23

Multi-platform viewing

As Amazon signs Woody Allen to make his first TV series, are on-demand services poised to wreck the broadcast model?

Stephen Price is sceptical

The way we view now

T

he traditional way of watching television, as a family around a static set in the corner of the living room, is over, we are told.

TV ownership has – for the first time ever – declined.

Now it’s about subscription-based, on-demand content downloaded to watch when you want and where you want; we’ll all be binge watchers soon.

According to this view, the way we watch TV is at, or even past, a tipping point. If only it were that simple.

Technological enhancements have been part of the TV viewing experience for some time. Viewers have become adept at navigating their way around the schedules using Sky+, Virgin’s TiVo system and other PVRs. As reported in Broadcast magazine,

24

the 5 January launch of the second series of ITV’s Broadchurch attracted 7 million viewers plus an extra 3 million, close to half as much again, watching via catch-up.

Downloading is gathering pace, too.

In 2014, BBC iPlayer handled 2.6 billion TV programme requests; 4.2 million of those were for an episode of BBC One’s Sherlock, although 13 million people watched either the broadcast or a home-recorded version of the episode.

Ofcom’s Infrastructure Report 2014, published in December, remarked that, while most television is still consumed through “traditional linear broadcasting platforms”, change is in the air – driven mostly by technology.

Consumers’ desire for higher-­quality pictures and improved sound continues to grow. Ofcom noted that 69% of

households now have HDTV, and that the focus is beginning to shift to ultraHDTV in its 4K version.

Ofcom also said that the proportion of UK households with a TV is decreasing, albeit slowly. As ultra-HDTVs fall in price, it will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

Using Barb data, Ofcom also reported that nearly 1 million UK households are now broadband-only homes. So these homes get their programming via the internet and, perhaps, are more likely to watch the broadcasters’ and other players’ on-demand services.

These, of course, include BBC iPlayer and ITV Player, plus IPTV services such as Netflix (more than 10% of UK homes are subscribers) or Amazon Prime.

As the uncertainty around mediause gathers, anxious eyes inevitably

BBC

The Great British Bake Off

turn to children’s viewing for clues to future TV viewing patterns.

Last November, Ofcom’s Children’s Digital Day research found that children aged 11-15 watched 1 hour 32 minutes per day of TV when it is broadcast. This is half as much as adults, who typically tune in for 2 hours 58 minutes.

There is much more TV around for children today. Thirty or 40 years ago, there was dedicated children’s programming for a couple of hours each day after school and on Saturday mornings. Now, children’s programming is available 24 hours a day on dedicated channels and on the internet.

It’s not that children aren’t watching anything; they are watching plenty of programmes, but in a completely different way.

By the time they become stressed-

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

out adults, they will be used to selecting their viewing from a range of different sources and devices. This will have as-yet-unknown consequences for future viewing patterns.

Soap operas used to hold families in perpetual thrall with tales of weddings, explosions and murders, usually crowned with a big Christmas special.

Now, however, they are in decline, even at Christmas: in 2010, BBC One’s EastEnders festive episode attracted 12.6 million viewers; in 2014, it managed just 8.6 million. ITV1’s Coronation Street pulled in 9.8 million on Christmas Day in 2010; by 2014, it had shrunk to 6.7 million.

Weekly entertainment events can still grab huge audiences but, even here, declines are apparent. ITV’s The X Factor, predominantly aimed at a younger audience, achieved 8.3 million viewers for the 2014 finale, compared with 10.0 million for its 2012 finale.

BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing managed 11.7 million for its final in 2014, compared with 13.3 million in 2012.

Live sport, especially football, still gathers people together: the 2014 World Cup Final, shown simultaneously on ITV1 and BBC One, was watched by a total of 21 million people– 14.9 million on BBC One alone.

And big audiences are still possible elsewhere. Last year’s final of BBC One’s The Great British Bake Off, on 8 October, secured more than 13.5 million viewers – the biggest non-sport show of the year. Not bad for a cookery competition.

An interesting result of this technological arms race has been the rise and rise of drama, a genre that, not so long ago, was considered an endangered species.

In 2008, as the economic crisis deepened, television, especially commercial television, looked as if it could no longer sustain this most expensive and risky of genres.

Then, in the midst of the economic mayhem, ITV commissioned an original period drama. It was risky on every level: it was expensive, it wasn’t an adaptation of a famous book and there were seven episodes – a big commitment, if it didn’t work.

ITV had always done period drama – adaptations of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey in 2007, for example – but it wasn’t the channel’s speciality. Downton Abbey’s unlikely success meant that suddenly the genre was back in vogue.

It is no coincidence that subscription services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have pinned their business plans on the creation of new, expensive dramas to attract subscribers.

Last month, Netflix reported revenues up by 23%, to $1.5bn, during 2014’s last quarter, stronger than expected. It is unlikely that this would have happened without House of Cards (a $200m commission for two series) or Breaking Bad (a one-programme marketing phenomenon that previously went unnoticed on Channel 5’s sister channel 5 USA).

Netflix’s latest £100m commission is The Crown, written by Peter Morgan and based on his successful stage play The Audience. The show is aimed squarely at middle-aged viewers.

In January, Transparent won two Golden Globes for Amazon Prime: Best TV Series and Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Series for Jeffrey Tambor.

Kevin Spacey won Best Actor in a Drama TV Series for Netflix’s House of Cards.

Subscription on-demand providers are TV interlopers no more. And now Amazon has signed Woody Allen to write and direct his first TV series at the age of 79.

But broadcasters still boast a long list of high-quality TV drama of their own.

In 2014 alone: BBC Two screened Line of Duty and The Fall; BBC One showed Happy Valley and The Missing; ITV continued with Downton Abbey and kicked off this new year with series two of Broadchurch.

BBC Two’s Wolf Hall launched on 21 January with nearly 4 million viewers and instantly became the channel’s most popular drama for a decade.

Undoubtedly, things are changing and on-demand TV is growing. But humble broadcast TV last year stubbornly accounted for 88% of all viewing.

The signs are, for the time being, that traditional platforms will co-exist with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Even the hardly impartial Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, predicts that traditional TV will be around for more than another decade.

“It’s kind of like the horse, you know; the horse was good until we had the car. The age of broadcast TV will probably last until 2030,” he forecast last year.

There is no doubt that a House of Cards binge-watch can take up a wet Saturday afternoon before Strictly comes on. But one thing is certain, the quality of TV is rising and the viewer is the winner.

25

FROM THE DIGITAL EDITOR

It’s an exciting, if somewhat daunting, challenge to help present the digital face of a society that dates back nearly 90 years.

I had that challenge in mind when I took over as the Digital Editor at the RTS from Sanya Burgess in December.

While I’m fairly new to the world of TV, I do have experience driving traffic and creating communities online.

As a founding editor of the Brixton Blog & Bugle, in south London, I built the traffic of an online news website to well over 1 million hits annually – creating a hub for information and discussion.

And while the affairs of a London suburb may seem a far cry from the cut and thrust of television, the struggle to build an engaged and relevant audience is just the same.

Here in EC4, the digital team has wasted no time in 2015. January saw a post-Christmas spike in traffic when we launched the first in our Behind the Scenes series, Behind the Scenes at Newsnight.

As the Newsnight video shows, being part of a society such as the RTS brings all kinds of access.

Everything we create now is designed to be shared, whether from a mobile phone from the top deck of a bus to a desk at the top of Broadcasting House.

We have analysis from the playmakers within television with our Patrons’ Insight posts, and reports of our high-profile events such as BBC Trust Chair Rona Fairhead’s first public engagement outside the Houses of Parliament.

Tips in 60 Seconds is uploaded every Tuesday, providing valuable advice from successful practition­ ers at every level of TV. Tim Dickens is RTS Digital Editor.

26

Behind the Scenes at Newsnight Behind the Scenes at Newsnight The digital team went behind the scenes at BBC Two’s Newsnight. They talked to Editor Ian Katz, Presenter Evan Davis and a range of behindthe-camera practitioners.

The 10-minute film acts as a guide to young people who may want to pursue a career in current affairs.

It also provides insights for avid fans of the flagship programme.

Tips in 60 Seconds: How to write a great BBC application with Don Kong In this video, the BBC Production Talent Pool boss takes us by the hand and gives us his advice on how to fill out an application to the Beeb – all in under one minute.

The video has been played nearly 1,000 times, after being shared widely across social media.

Guest Post: Ralph Lee on Channel 4’s new Diversity Charter In January, Channel 4 published its 360° Diversity Charter.

As part of our Insight series of guest posts, we asked the broadcaster’s Deputy Chief Creative Officer and diversity lead, Ralph Lee, to explain

RTS

RTS

The RTS is ramping up its output of multimedia programming. Tim Dickens shares the most popular online content this month

what the guidelines mean for his channel and for the industry.

Winners of the RTS Craft & Design Awards 2013-14 The Society’s major awards are always immensely popular as TV insiders log on to see who’s won an award. Since the RTS Craft & Design Awards winners were announced in December, more than 4,500 people have viewed these pages, which include a video of the ceremony hosted by Jennifer Saunders.

In the pipeline In the coming months, we have 15-minute Behind the Scenes films coming from Channel 4 News, The One Show, A League of Their Own and Emmerdale.

We’ll have live coverage of the RTS Television Journalism Awards at the Hilton on 18 February. And we’ve lined up features on TV location tourism, the rise of “hyperlocal” channels and the future of the adult watershed.

There’s a lot of buzz at HQ around the arrival of a new, much-improved website for the RTS, coming later this year. It is designed to be slick, easy to use and to reflect what we stand for.

February 2015 www.rts.org.uk Television

RTS NEWS

Apps: the business opportunity

Ofcom

I

nteractivity has been a feature of TV shows for many years but now – thanks to mobile apps – it could offer producers a way to make more from their programmes. A London Centre event late last year, “Interactive social TV formats: the business case”, revealed how the producers of big entertainment shows are exploiting second-screen smartphones and tablets.

Interactive TV can involve voting, sharing content via social-media platforms, playing along with a game, entering competitions or contributing to a programme, explained event host Tom McDonnell, the CEO of Monterosa. His company has developed mobile apps for shows such as Channel 4’s The Million Pound Drop and Sky’s Got To Dance.

There is nothing revolutionary about such ideas, said McDonnell. BBC One talent show Bob Says Opportunity Knocks was the first UK TV show to use a telephone vote to pick winners – in 1987.

McDonnell used The Million Pound Drop to illustrate how interactivity can add value to a TV programme. The C4 show “has 3 million UK apps installed now, which is

punching way above its weight, digitally”, he said.

The app game is free to play during the show, but users have to pay to play at other times. Some 10% of players choose to pay.

“As format owners, we try to create content experiences on [non-TV] platforms,” explained FremantleMedia Head of Digital Kat Hebden, who looks after The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. During the last series of the latter, its app was downloaded 1.5 million times, a 40% increase on the previous run.

“We’re always looking at new ways to commercialise apps,” said Hebden. “We create some five hours of branded content around both of these shows and we have a sponsorship deal with Domino’s. We designed a voucher system: you play a game and win a voucher, which you can redeem for free pizza. That’s worked phenomenally well.”

Jenny Howard, Strategy Director at advertising agency Sunshine, said that interactivity shouldn’t “annoy” viewers.

“I like the Domino’s idea;

The secrets of Olympic lighting ■ Emmy winner Peter Canning gave Republic of Ireland Centre members an insight into the complex lighting and visual set-up in Sochi, where he was Associate Lighting Designer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Canning worked in Sochi

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

for Al Gurdon’s company, Incandescent Design.

Together with Gurdon, Ross Williams and Michael Owen, Canning picked up the Lighting Design for a Variety Special award at the Creative Arts Emmys last August.

The Lighting Designer, who graduated from Ravensbourne

College of Design and Communication in 1995, previously gave the centre a presentation on advances in TV lighting.

His Irish TV credits include The Hit and The Restaurant and, most recently, he was Lighting Designer on The Voice of Ireland.

Charles Byrne

you’re watching The X Factor and you’re hungry and so [you order] a pizza – that will make your life better,” she said.

People using apps make up a minority of a programme’s viewers, but they are a potentially lucrative market. “There’s an 80:20 rule that says most loyalty and value comes from a small, engaged group of people. They’re the ones who buy regularly and talk about you,” said Howard.

Endemol Digital Media’s Karen Troop, whose shows include Big Brother, said that, while app users are valuable, programme-makers cannot afford to ignore their core audience. “What’s key for us, when we work on these things with a digital element, is that they also have to work for that 80% of the audience who aren’t going to be involved online and aren’t commenting on Facebook or Twitter,” said the Executive Digital Producer.

Endemol’s new show for C4, The Singer Takes It All, aired last summer and took interactivity a step further, with the entire production driven by its audience. “All the contestants who made it on to the show were voted for by people using the [free] app,” explained Troop.

Once on the show, contestants performed on a conveyor belt that “moved backward and forwards based on viewers’ votes at home”, she added.

Interactivity, she said, should not be an “add on” to a programme. “With The Singer Takes It All, it’s integral to the format. But, equally, that show is just as enjoyable to someone who’s not getting involved.”

Matthew Bell

27

RTS NEWS

Summit airs fears for Welsh TV

BBC/S4C

W

elsh deputy Minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism Ken Skates AM lamented the BBC’s lack of programming for Welsh audiences at the Institute of Welsh Affairs Media Summit in early December.

“It is unfortunate that BBC Cymru Wales no longer produces any English-language drama or comedy specifically for Welsh audiences,” said the member of the Welsh Government. “Especially given its reputation for high-end TV productions in the UK and internationally, thanks to the success of Doctor Who, Casualty and Wizards vs Aliens.”

The Cardiff summit, sponsored by the BBC, examined the broadcasting environment in Wales.

In the wake of the Scottish referendum, Skates told the packed conference that the Welsh Government does not want responsibility for broadcasting devolved to Wales. But

Hinterland he added that any new settlement needs to reflect the changing nature of the UK. During a session on commissioning, John Geraint, Creative Director of Green Bay Media, claimed that budget cuts were having a detrimental impact. Rondo Media Chief Executive Gareth Williams added that the commissioning process often stifles creativity.

However, S4C Content Commissioner Gwawr ­Martha Lloyd argued that

reduced budgets had led to an exciting move towards co-productions, such as the S4C/BBC Cymru Wales police drama Y Gwyll/Hinterland.

Interviewing BBC Controller of Drama Commissioning Ben Stephenson, journalist Maggie Brown asked him why so little is seen of Wales on network TV and whether this situation would deteriorate further if the BBC were to abolish production quotas.

Stephenson said that the BBC could lift the existing

50% supply cap, allowing the independent sector to increase its share of the BBC’s output. But this would also allow the BBC to produce more of its own programmes and make shows for other channels, too. He assured the summit that Doctor Who, Casualty and Holby City are “absolutely safe” in Cardiff In the final session, on news, Glyn Mathias, Ofcom Content Board Member for Wales, said: “We don’t have a sufficient plurality of the provision of information… about the devolved world of Wales.”

Rhodri Talfan Davies, Director of BBC Cymru Wales, claimed that around 45% of adults in Wales are not engaging with Welsh news from any source, adding that, in the online world, “we won’t address a democratic deficit by serving those already engaged. We need to reach out to those who have switched off.”

Hywel Wiliam

Dom Moore

Advice and awards day in Plymouth

■ The Devon and Cornwall Centre Student Television Awards were held at Plymouth University at the end of November.

Before the awards ceremony itself, nearly 150 stu-

28

dents from across the south west attended the annual “Breaking into media” day, organised jointly by the centre and the Media Innovation Network.

Industry professionals

offered students an insight into working in the sector and advice on how to develop their careers.

In “Secrets of… Rick Stein’s India”, the team from Plymouth-based indie Denham Productions explained the process of turning ideas into broadcast television.

“This was a great opportunity for the next generation of creative talent to understand what it takes to start and develop a career in the media sector,” said Karen Stockdale, Manager of the Media Innovation Network.

At the awards ceremony, Falmouth University gradu-

ate student Darren Smith won the Animation category for his short film Crocodile Tears.

The Comedy and Entertainment award was taken

by Cornwall College Camborne for Cheese Dreams, which the judges’ chair, Simon Willis, described as “a witty fable and produced to a high technical level”.

The Drama category was won by Plymouth College of Art undergraduate Robbie Doran for Knives, and the Factual category was awarded to students from Plymouth University for A Taste of Life.

Matthew Bell

T

he RTS has expanded its Undergraduate Bursaries scheme, which encourages students from lower-income households to explore the opportunities available to them in the television industry.

Last year, the Society awarded its first 20 bursaries, each of £3,000, to support the recipients in their studies on accredited university courses in Television Production and Broadcast Journalism.

This year, the Society is offering a further 20 of these bursaries to students applying to start their course in 2015.

And, building on the success of the scheme, this year the RTS is adding five new Technology Bursaries.

These will increase access to the industry, while helping to meet an identified area of skill shortage. The scheme is

available to talented students from lower-income households applying to study engineering and computer science degrees – skills much in demand within the television industry.

Applications for the 2015 bursaries are now open and will close at midday on 1 June 2015.

In both bursary schemes, awardees will receive: £1,000 each year for three years to support living expenses; membership of both the RTS and The Hospital Club while studying; RTS membership for a further year after graduation; and an offer of mentoring or placement in the final year of study.

For more information, guidance notes and a list of eligible courses, please visit: www.rts.org.uk /undergraduate-bursaries.

Three of the 2014 RTS Bursary recipients being interviewed for a web video

Paul Hampartsoumian

The RTS expands its bursaries schemes to target tech skills

■ At the end of October, 350 guests packed into the National Motorcycle Museum, on the outskirts of Birmingham, to see Vicky McClure collect the Baird Medal at the Midlands Centre’s Annual Awards.

The Nottingham actress has appeared in some of the country’s leading dramas of recent years, including Shane Meadows’ This Is England, BBC Two crime drama Line of Duty and ITV’s acclaimed Broadchurch.

The Baird Medal is presented to someone from the region whose contribution to television has been of national or international importance.

Previous winners include the

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

Father Brown

BBC

RTS honours Midlands’ TV contribution actors Robert Lindsay and David Harewood.

The ceremony was hosted

by ITV News Central presenters Sameena Ali-Khan – who picked up the Best On-screen Personality award on the night – and Gareth Owen.

BBC Drama bagged three awards, two of them for Father Brown: Best Fictional Programme and Best Acting Performance (Male), by Justin Edwards. Doctors’ Jessica Regan took the female acting prize.

The centre’s Student Television Awards were held at the same time, with the winners receiving their awards from McClure. There were 40 entries from colleges in Wolverhampton, Stafford,

Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln and Birmingham.

The judges gave a special mention to the winner of the Comedy and Entertainment category, Facebook Anonymous, from the University of Lincoln, a satire on serious documentaries, which they thought worthy of broadcast.

The Animation category was won by a team from Staffordshire University with The Animated Adventures of Edward Lear. Sophie Piggott, from the same college, won the Drama award for Archie and Andrew Cowper from Nottingham Trent University took the Factual award for Albinism: a Prisoner in My Own Skin.

Dorothy Hobson

29

RTS NEWS

Tony Pilgrim MBE 1923-2015

T

ony Pilgrim, an important figure in the RTS’s evolution, has died. He was 91.

In 1960, Tony helped to found the Midlands Centre of the Television Society, of which he became Chairman in 1964.

This led to a seat on the Council, which, in turn, led to his Chairmanship of the Society in 1969.

The Society had been granted “Royal” status in 1966.

During his term he opened the very first RTS Cambridge Convention, in 1970.

Meanwhile, at the BBC, in charge of engineering services, he worked closely with the architect and other specialists in the planning, building and installation of all technical services at Pebble Mill. This was the brand-new, state-of-the-art radio and television headquarters for the Midlands.

He led the team moving from mono TV to colour, mono radio to stereo and from valves to transistors.

This represented a major culture change.

Tony organised major awards events, including the RTS Television Journalism Awards, which he founded in 1978. Other awards recognised the different crafts in television production.

In 1987, the RTS celebrated its Diamond Jubilee. Tony organised the reception at Banqueting House in Whitehall attended by Her Majesty The Queen.

After retiring from the BBC in 1983, he devoted his time to the further development of the RTS. Moving the Society from its strong engineering base meant changing the membership of Council. He started the co-option of additional members from

Tony Pilgrim with HM The Queen in 1987 other disciplines so that the Council reflected the changes in membership.

Tony was forward-looking by nature, seeking to improve and develop everything in which he was involved. This brought recognition in many ways. He was awarded the RTS Gold Medal in 1987.

In 1992, Tony was appointed MBE for services to the television industry.

Tony is survived by Ysanne, after a marriage of 63 happy years. He will be remembered with affection by friends and colleagues throughout the industry.

George Pagan

STV applies Glasgow lessons to Edinburgh ■ RTS Scotland members enjoyed a fascinating insight in early December into the successful launch of local-TV channel STV Glasgow and a preview of the plans for STV Edinburgh, which went on air on 12 January.

The discussion took place at STV’s studios in Glasgow and was chaired by Angus Simpson, Producer of STV Edinburgh’s The Fountainbridge Show. STV was awarded local-TV licences in January 2013 to operate television channels in Scotland’s two largest cities.

On the six-month anniversary of STV Glasgow, Channel Editor Paul Hughes discussed its schedule and early popularity, which, he argued, was

30

Paul Hughes founded on the channel’s community reach. More than 250 local bands have already played on STV Glasgow and the station aspires to give every primary school pupil

Kathleen Wiseman in the city the opportunity to appear on screen.

Hughes was joined by Head of Consumer Insights Kathleen Wiseman. She revealed that 1.3 million viewers from

a potential audience of 2 million have watched STV Glasgow’s output and that locally originated content is proving popular. Wiseman drew on Barb figures to argue that the station’s reach compared favourably with local press and radio.

The final panel member was Commercial Manager Paul Genasi, who said that a simple and integrated solution was working well with local Glasgow advertisers.

The Edinburgh station would take an innovative approach to gathering content, including using a threewheeled Piaggio Gullwing to facilitate outside broadcasts in the community.

James Wilson

Michael Bunce OBE 1935-2014

M

ichael Bunce, who has died of a heart attack, aged 79, was the Royal Television Society’s first full-time director.

He died unexpectedly on New Year’s Eve, following the death of his wife, Tina, two weeks earlier from cancer.

Michael joined the RTS as Executive Director in 1991.

His nine years running the RTS were marked by a wide-ranging expansion in its activities and the modernisation of the Society’s role.

The initiatives undertaken on his watch included the introduction of RTS Masterclasses, the RTS Television Sports Awards, the RTS Craft & Design Awards and the RTS Hall of Fame, plus an increase in the number of RTS Dinners and workshops.

Known for his unflappable and urbane style, Michael played a key role in enlisting the Prince of Wales as the Society’s Royal Patron.

Crucially, he led negotiations on behalf of the RTS that led to the Society becoming a partner in IBC (International Broadcasting Convention).

His passion and enthusiasm for the RTS and all things television were obvious to all who knew him.

Michael was a popular leader of the RTS and was devoted to his loyal staff.

Paul Jackson, who chaired the RTS during Michael’s tenure at the Society, said: “Michael was one of the best lunch companions you could have. But underneath the bonhomie was a very astute political operator.

“On several occasions he stopped me from making a fool of myself – and a num-

ber of other people, too.”

He added: “Being in charge of the RTS requires very special skills. You have to keep a lot of egos and conflicting commercial interests in check.

“Michael always kept things running very smoothly. There were never any rows.

“The RTS may be a small organisation, but it is a very prestigious one. Michael was a consummate politician who never dropped the ball.”

Prior to his work at the RTS, Michael enjoyed a long and distinguished career at the BBC, much of it spent in television current affairs.

He was educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Kingston College. He joined the BBC in 1960 as an engineer, following National Service in the RAF. Initially, Michael worked in radio as a studio manager and tape editor. Success came quickly. A programme he worked on, European Enquiry, Six Nations in Search of Their History, won the Prix Italia for radio documentary in 1961.

Michael’s first job as producer was on the World Service’s People and Politics.

He went on to edit The Money Programme and Nationwide. It was Michael who

Head of Information Services, Television.

He was appointed the BBC’s Controller of Information Services in 1982. In this position, he handled the BBC’s PR machine with a legendary deftness.

Not even Margaret Thatcher’s well-known hostility towards the BBC could knock the sure-footed executive off course.

Crisis management appeared to be second nature to Michael. In 1987, it was his job to deal with the sudden and brutal sacking of Director-General Alasdair Milne by the new BBC Chairman Duke Hussey. He took it all in his stride.

MICHAEL WAS A CONSUMMATE POLITICIAN WHO NEVER DROPPED THE BALL

Television www.rts.org.uk January 2015

developed Nationwide into one of the iconic TV shows of the 1970s.

In 1975, Michael was promoted to Chief Assistant, Television Current Affairs.

Three years later, he became

His people skills and ability at handling powerful TV executives and politicians held him at good stead when he became Executive Director of the RTS. At the Society, he presided over a rich and varied programme of events and educational initiatives for members and the wider public.

On stepping down from the RTS in 2000, Michael was appointed Chair of IBC. He listed his recreations in Who’s Who as gardening, visiting fine buildings and fishing.

Michael was appointed OBE for services to broadcasting in 2001. He is survived by his son, Charlie, and daughters, Miranda and Bella.

Steve Clarke

31

RTS NEWS

■ BBC One antiques show Bargain Hunt, whose production unit moved to Cardiff last summer, came under the spotlight – though not the hammer – at a Wales Centre event in November.

Series Producer Julia Foot told the audience that the secret of Bargain Hunt’s suc-

Bargain hunters: Paul Tucker (centre) and Julia Foot (right) cess was its simplicity. Two teams of contestants are given £300 each to shop for antiques, which are then sold at auction – the team that earns most money is the winner. Bargain Hunt receives 25,000 applications each year from would-be contestants.

The show has been running since 2000, initially in peak but later settling down in daytime. In its 12:15pm slot, Bargain Hunt attracts more than 2 million viewers. The show’s main presenter, Tim Wonnacott, celebrated his 1,000th programme last May. Executive Producer Paul Tucker said that Bargain Hunt is “a key part of BBC Wales’s portfolio. It relies on a constant supply of local freelance workers” and prides itself on being a good training ground for young talent.

Spin-offs have included 20 celebrity shows of Bargain Hunt Famous Finds, which have featured the likes of Julian Clary, Dame Kelly Holmes, Jilly Cooper and Alvin Stardust, who appeared with his autographed guitar, reputedly worth £1m.

Hywel Wiliam and Tim Hartley

32

Pre-dawn start keeps daytime debate fresh

T

here’s rarely a dull moment on long-running Channel 5 daytime show The Wright Stuff. Over its 14-year run, guests have had panic attacks on air; streakers have invaded the studio; the audience has thrown both abuse and objects; lights have exploded; and sets collapsed.

A London Centre event in November brought key members of the production team together to explain how the show, which runs for close on two hours every weekday morning, is made.

Centre Chair Kristin Mason asked the questions.

The Wright Stuff’s origins lie in the murky world of TV regulation. “Largely, it started because Channel 5 needed to have a certain amount of news and current affairs in its Ofcom remit,” recalled Executive Producer Tim Cunningham. At the time, he worked for Sky News, which also pitched to fill the slot.

Anglia Television made the show for its first two years, before losing out to Princess Productions.

Matthew Wright, who made his name as a print journalist, has hosted the show since it first aired, aided by two panellists largely drawn from journalism, TV and comedy.

Programmes also feature phone-ins with the public and a daily special guest. The show is currently made at Princess’s studios on the third floor of Whiteleys shopping centre in west London.

“The main thrust of the show has been the same since the beginning, which is to take an interesting look at that day’s news in all its guises and get people to talk about

The Wright Stuff presenters (from left): Kirsty Duffy, Matthew Wright and Eric Johnson it,” explained Cunningham, who has worked for six and a half years on the show.

He added that the production team could fill “every show” with calls and emails along the lines of “‘Kick ’em out’ or ‘String ’em up’”, but he argued that the show had lasted because “we ask trickier and slightly weirder questions. These cover everything from ebola and Syria to ‘Should you wear Y-fronts?’ and ‘Are leaf blowers evil?’”.

Each programme is made on a three-day cycle, although last-minute changes are common.

Series Editor Beth Harding, a veteran of seven years on The Wright Stuff, is in charge of all five programmes a week, with responsibility for the show’s topics, briefing guests, overseeing scripts and legal compliance.

Monday to Friday, work gets under way at 5:00am, with Harding, the day producer and a researcher reading the newspapers to decide what stories to discuss in that day’s show.

Harding’s long shift ends

that evening as she checks the script for the following morning’s show. “The work can be relentlessness, but every single day is different, which is why I love it,” she said.

Celebrity Booker Jemima Headey, who has clocked up eight years on the show, is responsible for finding the panellists and special guests.

“You want people who have respect for each other.

If they’re just shouting each other down and not listening to each other, that doesn’t make for a good debate,” she explained.

The small production crew – almost half of whom were at the RTS event – make 250 shows a year – and all on a budget that they claimed is tiny even by daytime TV standards.

“The budget is very low,” admitted Cunningham. He was unwilling to put a figure on it, claiming commercial sensitivity, but he added: “It’s the cheapest TV programme I am aware of on network terrestrial television.”

Matthew Bell

Princess Productions

The simple formula that bids success

Mansfield’s format tips

Jon Craig

‘S

uccess consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm,” TV executive Grant Mansfield, borrowing a line from Winston Churchill, told RTS Bristol’s first event of the year.

Development producers from across the region joined the audience at Aardman Animation’s Bristol HQ to hear Mansfield, whose new global production company, Plimsoll Productions, has an office in the city, talk about US format markets.

Mansfield has had more success than many in the highly competitive market of popular formats and returnable brands, both in the UK and the US. Before moving to California, he was responsible for Driving School and Vets in Practice at BBC Bristol. At RDF TV, where he was Managing Director, his credits included Ladette to Lady, Holiday Showdown and Dickinson’s Real Deal. As CEO of Zodiak USA, he had Secret Millionaire, Celebrity Wife Swap and Killer Karaoke in his portfolio.

Mansfield talked about the importance of working with an agent in the US and

Grant Mansfield developing a thick skin. He said that commissioners are courteous and polite to everyone, whether they like an idea or not. “It’s the emotional, not necessarily intellectual, pull that gets commissioners listening,” he told the RTS event, titled “Crossing the pond: the secret of developing returnable formats for the global market”.

Unashamedly populist in his approach, Mansfield urged the audience to work on understanding the American viewer.

He quoted Woody Allen to illustrate his point: “In California, they don’t throw their garbage away, they make it into TV shows” – but added, “Of course, that’s not true.”

Lynn Barlow

Students get to interview reporters ■ “User-generated content rarely proves anything – it’s a witness to events. Never forget to ask pertinent questions.” This was just one piece of useful advice that emerged from the Southern Centre’s “Working in journalism” event at Southampton Solent University in November.

Some 140 journalism students from across the South met 15 working journalists, ranging from those new to the business to experienced news management figures.

The aim was to provide up-to-date information about changing working practices in journalism, as well as offering students the opportunity to chat with journalists informally.

The event began with a session featuring BBC Head of Newsgathering Jonathan Munro, ITV News’s Head of Digital Jason Mills and Sky News Editor, Digital, Neil Dunwoodie.

They stressed the need for young journalists to check accuracy, verify sources,

Belfast looks to its TV futures ■ RTS Futures Northern Ireland held its annual careers fair for young people trying to break into the creative sector at the end of November.

The newly formed RTS Futures NI Committee assembled five panels to cover all parts of the sector, from documentary-makers and assistant directors to games designers, talent managers and journalists.

The event, at the new

Television www.rts.org.uk January 2015

Employability Hub at Queen’s University in Belfast, also gave attendees a chance to network with influential people in the Northern Irish TV industry.

“Skills development is critical to the success of the local media industry and to the creative ambitions of the BBC,” said panellist Helen Thompson, Client Manager for External Business at BBC Northern Ireland. “Our work

with sector partners, such as the RTS, provides benefits for everyone involved.”

Over the past decade, the creative sector in Northern Ireland has grown hugely, thanks in no small part to Game of Thrones. With more than 100 people attending, the success of this event paves the way for the RTS to engage with more young people in the future.

Thomas Popay

maintain truth and build trust. The students then spent two hours networking with the journalists.

The event was well received by the students. Comments on Twitter included: “feeling super motivated”; “a brilliant initiative”; “such an insightful talk”; and “buzzing now to get out there and be a journalist”.

Gordon Cooper

33

OFF MESSAGE

I

t’s not so long ago that reality shows saturated our TV screens. And several of them were somewhat derivative.

Now, TV drama is the new rock ’n’ roll. The last month alone saw Wolf Hall, Cucumber and the rather unfairly neglected The Eichmann Show on our screens. And, of course, Sky Atlantic’s Fortitude.

Coming soon is the Channel 4 period piece, Indian Summers, an endof-Empire saga starring the great Julie Walters, plus ITV’s adaptation of Julian Barnes’s superb novel Arthur & George.

Later in the year, the BBC gives viewers lavish reinventions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Go-Between and Cider with Rosie.

There’s also another big bite of Shakespeare, following the deservedly award-laden The Hollow Crown.

We can look forward to a two-part Henry VI and Judi Dench starring in Richard III. This is all very good news for audiences. Commissioners should now reignite their efforts to ensure that comedy also raises its game.

After all, it is charter renewal time and we’re told that politicians have a sense of humour, too.

■ Not all so-called epic dramas live up to the hype. Off Message seems to remember that last year the BBC’s adaptation of Jamaica Inn led to a number of complaints regarding the sound quality from audiences and critics.

34

Spool forward to Wolf Hall and the reviewers are ecstatic. We might not always understand all the plot’s intricacies, but we can hear every word.

As for the colour palette, all those thousands spent on candles – a cool £20,000 according to director Peter Kosminsky – was evidently a wise investment.

Expect a rash of period dramas lit by nothing more than naked flames.

■ Here’s a way to cut location expenses. A fox was recently filmed scampering around Caffè Nero at New Broadcasting House as BBC folk collected their breakfast lattes.

Perhaps the next run of Winterwatch can be filmed in urban coffee shops, rather than programme-makers travelling to the wilds of Scotland.

Or maybe a fixed-rig (should that be foxed-rig?) series from London’s hippest cappuccino bars as customers wait for the next vulpine sighting?

■ Off Message looks forward to the return of Jeremy Paxman, hired

by Jay Hunt to pep up Channel 4’s general-election coverage.

So who is likely to produce TV’s most dangerous political attack dog?

There are rumours that none other than the BBC’s shortest-serving DG, George Entwistle, is being lined up to be re-united with Paxman. Remember, the two once worked together when Entwistle edited Newsnight.

Let’s hope that, if he does produce

Paxman for Channel 4, the luckless former DG doesn’t forget to read the newspapers.

■ It is just as well that the BBC retained the rights to Match of the Day. As you may have noticed, Sky Sports will have secured exclusive TV coverage of the British Golf Open. The BBC has broadcast the tournament for over 60 years.

Meanwhile, as the political parties prepare to publish their election manifestos, keep an eye out for what they have to say regarding the socalled “Listed Events”.

In a market-driven era, insisting that certain sports events such as the FA Cup Final and the Grand National remain on free-to-air channels is difficult for regulators.

Off Message hopes that new Ofcom CEO Sharon White holds firm on this sensitive issue.

■ And finally, Off Message congratulates the BBC’s Head of Commissioning for Music and Events, Jan Younghusband, on the wholly excellent three-part BBC Four series Sound of Song.

Presenter Neil Brand was in great form. He explained the development of recorded music from the 19th Century to the age of Auto-Tune.

Brand’s interviews were revealing, while his piano playing amplified the exposition.

If you haven’t seen it already, there’s always iPlayer.

February 2015 www.rts.org.uk Television

RTS PATRONS RTS Principal Patrons

BBC

RTS International Patrons

Discovery Corporate Services Ltd Liberty Global NBCUniversal International The Walt Disney Company

Turner Broadcasting System Inc Viacom International Media Networks YouTube

RTS Major Patrons

Accenture Channel 5 Deloitte Enders Analysis EY

FremantleMedia Fujitsu IBM IMG Studios ITN

KPMG McKinsey and Co S4C STV Group UKTV

Virgin Media YouView

RTS Patrons

Autocue Digital Television Group ITV Anglia ITV Granada

ITV London ITV Meridian ITV Tyne Tees ITV West

ITV Yorkshire ITV Wales Lumina Search PricewaterhouseCoopers

Quantel Raidió Teilifís Éireann UTV Television Vinten Broadcast

Patron HRH The Prince of Wales

Chair of RTS Trustees John Hardie

CENTRES COUNCIL

History Don McLean

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

EXECUTIVE

Chief Executive Theresa Wise

Channel 4

Lynn Barlow 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

Archives Steve Bryant

ITV

IBC Conference Liaison Terry Marsh 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

Education Graeme Thompson

Student Television Awards Stuart Murphy

RTS Futures Camilla Lewis

Television www.rts.org.uk February 2015

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17 March Celebrate the best of British television

RTS Programme Awards 2013/2014 Booking: Callum Stott | 020 7822 2822 | callum@rts.org.uk