There is a decent chance that most Spectator readers have seen at least one of the following: the much-ballyhooed Adolescence, the rather less controversial Black Doves, and the once-magnificent, latterly tawdry The Crown. From the travails of royalty to the horrors of a child killer, via the acrobatic derring-do of unusually witty spies, these shows include some of the greatest British actors working today. They are all quintessentially English in their settings. All three have been hugely successful and should, by rights, be programmes that the British television industry should be extremely proud of.
Except, of course, they’re not British. Well, not wholly, anyway. Despite their Anglophile content, all three were produced by Netflix and streamed by the wholly American-owned company. They may be filled with and filmed by British talent, but it’s dollars, not pounds, that have enabled them to exist.
There are growing suggestions, culminating this week in a report from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, that ‘distinctly British programming’ is facing a crisis. Despite around half of TV workers being out of work at the moment, a huge amount of interesting stuff being made; in addition to the shows mentioned above, everything from the peerless Slow Horses to The Day of the Jackal features British talent across the board. But if you’re looking for original and distinctive drama on today’s BBC, forget it. It says a lot about the industry that the last bona fide hit that was truly home-grown, the excellent Line of Duty, still attracts fervent speculation as to the possibility of another season.
British television was once the envy of the broadcasting world. From Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown to Pride and Prejudice and Our Friends in the North, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all managed to make superb television that was internationally successful and said something original about Britain and Britishness (often in unpredictable and often unflattering ways – nobody could watch the hugely popular Boys from the Blackstuff, for instance, and think that it was some sort of cosy heritage drama). Despite this popularity, if you’re in British TV and can’t get work on Netflix or Amazon Prime funded shows, there’s increasingly little out there for you.
If Pride and Prejudice were made today, whether by the BBC or Netflix, it would almost certainly have to address issues of diversity and gender to be commissioned. One could easily imagine a mixed-race Lizzie Bennet, an overtly gay Mr Collins, and all the rest. There are those who would suggest that this makes it more ‘relevant’, and they may well be right. However, such tweaks and changes are unlikely to make it better. Just look to the latest Hollywood flop, Snow White, to see what happens when studios focus on politics rather than entertainment. The reason why the original Pride and Prejudice worked so well (and it should be noted that Jennifer Ehle, who played Lizzie, is in fact American, rather than the quintessential English rose she was taken for) was because it was executed with complete conviction in the source material. It seems almost quaint now to think of the uproar when Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy appeared in a wet shirt. Today, he would undoubtedly be naked – and probably in the embrace of another man.
They may be filled with and filmed by British talent, but it’s dollars, not pounds, that have enabled them to exist
There will be pressure on the government this week to increase funding for film and television from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This funding, they argue, should not take the current form of encouraging UK-based big-budget productions like Star Wars and Mission: Impossible via generous tax credits. Instead, the aim should be to invest directly in home-grown talent. This is a sensible idea. Yet the reasons The Crown ended up on Netflix rather than at its natural home of the BBC is because of far higher budgets and considerably less editorial oversight. (Can you imagine a BBC incarnation of the show including a scene in which William asks Prince Charles if he had his mother murdered, as The Crown’s sixth series does?)
The idea of encouraging quintessentially British content is seductive, but I fear largely empty. Netflix and the other streaming services are not going anywhere, and unless the government does something stupid such as blocking access to their shows, they will continue to offer better-funded competition for the average viewer – even if this does have the knock-on effect of limiting UK talent. What terrestrial services need to do instead is focus on building on their traditional strengths: finding brilliant talent and nurturing it without worrying obsessively about box-ticking at every turn. If they can’t do that, then this is a David v. Goliath fight where there can only be one winner – and it isn’t the Biblical victor.
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