Television Producers

Jeremy Tunstall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415094719
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134868179
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts & Business

Covering all the major areas of television production, this in-depth work highlights the widely varying influences, difficulties and opportunities at work in the industry. Each kind of producer across the seven areas here examined faces the same practical issues of budget, talent and equipment resources, and end-product expectations; however, the self-image of the producers and the creative environment in which they work can differ greatly from one programming sector to the next, and whilst their careers may run parallel they are usually cut off from one another ideologically. Based on interviews from over two hundred and fifty producers working across a selection of British television channels as well as producers of a number of high-profile American shows, this book takes in a panoramic view of production models at work today and concludes with some insightful suggestions for the future.

Chapter 1
Producers in British television

The ‘series producer’ or ‘series editor’ in British national television is the main focus of the book. Each TV programme is a collective enterprise involving between twenty and a hundred people; producers are the individuals in charge of these programme teams.

British television is, however, ‘driven’ by producers in additional ways. It is sometimes said that the British tradition of PSB, ‘Public Service Broadcasting’, would stand more accurately for ‘Producer Self-Service Broadcasting’. This latter assertion, at least, is an oversimplification; but the practice of ‘public service’ in British television (made up of education and information as well as entertainment) has required the individual producer to create the TV service that the public has received.

Former programme producers have gone on to run not just the BBC’s two national TV channels but also the entire BBC (with its 27,500 employees in 1991–2). Even in the advertising-financed ITV companies, former producers have always been prominent in management; and since Channel Four began in 1982 it has been dominated by former producers and ‘commissioning editors’ with a programming orientation. From 1982 independent production companies made much of the programming for Channel Four, and since around 1990 increasingly also for the BBC and ITV channels; almost all these independent production companies were again run by producers. People with advertising backgrounds have played a much smaller part in running British television.

PRODUCERS IN PRIVATE WORLDS

Public Institution and Private World was the subtitle that Tom Burns chose for his book about the BBC in the early 1960s and early 1970s.¹

His study focused on senior management and the producers of just two types of programme output. The present book is about producers in seven different genres or TV programme categories; it suggests that each programme genre—sport or drama or news—has its own distinctive ‘private world’ that stretches across all the channels.

This study covers a wide range and omits a few categories, such as purely educational programming. However, an important characteristic of British television is its tradition of covering a wide range of different programme types, and of carrying this range within the high-audience hours of the evening. Part of the traditional ‘public-service broadcasting’ project is that both popular and less-popular programming should be scheduled in the most popular hours on the main channels. It is also characteristic of British television that several of the genres are factual—including not only news, current affairs and sport, but also documentary and mixed-goal or ‘edinfotainment’ programming (this latter unlovely term is intended to underline the heavy emphasis placed on a large mixed bag of factual programming, which seeks to deliver education and information entertainingly—or is it to deliver entertainment educationally and informatively?).

Each specific genre has its particular requirements and working cycles, which tend to cut its producers off from producers and others working in different fields with different timetables. Most British producers spend between 4 and 6 months each year locked into the intensive effort involved in meeting deadlines for a series of programmes; during this intensive phase they may well work 7 days a week for many weeks in succession. The other half of the year includes vacation time and perhaps 5 months of less intensive work. During these other months the producer may be supervising writing, casting supporting roles, engaging in research, looking at locations, seeing possible interviewees, talking to actors’ agents, and so on. Producers spend much of the time out of their offices—in the studio, at the location, viewing the raw rushes and, later, the rough edited film or tape.

Even at the quieter times of the year most producers do not arrive home until after the London rush-hour. They often take home with them scripts and programme outlines to read, as well as cassettes of programmes submitted by available writers, directors or performers. Much of their domestic TV viewing is of programming in their own genre. Thus producers tend to be locked into a genre-specific world even when at home.

Each of the genres is located within a department or departments; and even independent production companies specialize, so that here also producers are locked into the private world of a single genre. Each genre has its own specific goal or goals; it has a characteristic style of production—location film, or live studio, or the ‘outside broadcasts’ of sport. Each genre has its own internal system of status and prestige, its own values and its own world-view.

Departments and genres also function as career-ladders. There is continuing movement between organizations: many producers have started in the BBC, moved to ITV, then back to the BBC, only finally to go freelance or to set up as independent producers; but such job moves all take place within one small world which shares one broad career-ladder. It is common for a producer’s career to have involved several job-moves, each move following one particular senior colleague. Producers also in turn tend to be surrounded by production team-members with whom they have worked on several previous programmes and projects.

Thus the producer’s own work-career advances within the private world of a particular genre whose peculiar work-mix of timetables, goals, production schedules and world-view largely shuts its members off from the members of other private genre-worlds.

WHERE THE PRODUCER CAME FROM

The producer role (like television itself) has multiple origins. The British TV producer historically is derived from the civil servant, the radio producer and the film producer, as well as from show business and the stage.

The BBC in the 1920s emerged from the Post Office, which was a department of government. The producer role in the BBC and in advertising-financed television derives from an inter-war civil service which still had colonial responsibilities; there are echoes of the district officer, gallantly attempting to administer one small corner of a vast empire. There is also a military element in this history: the BBC was set up in the 1920s by men who had served in and survived the first world war. British television in the 1940s and 1950s was built by men who had served in the second war or had done two years of post-1945 military service. Many young producers of the 1950s had been ‘national-service’ officers, and the television producer was seen as a leader of men (not women).

Political neutrality was a key element. The producer, like the civil servant and the army officer, avoided partisanship. In contrast to France or Germany, the British producer role was not, and still has not been, politicized. In Britain the BBC gradually evolved the tradition of being non-partisan while quietly patriotic. This non-partisanship has also been supported by the BBC’s early reliance on neutral news agencies as a model for radio news. The non-partisan tradition acquired in 1955 a non-commercial element; when advertising was introduced with ITV, the relevant legislation and regulatory authority required producers to be sheltered from any direct advertising connections.

The BBC, modelled on the Post Office with its monopoly of post and telephone, was a vertically integrated monopoly. This conception of vertical integration was only modified by the ITV and its cartel of fifteen regional companies. The British TV-producer role developed within a pattern of two large systems—BBC and ITV—both of which made the bulk of their own programming and also transmitted it to a national audience.

This pattern, which reached maturity in the 1970s, involved two large cultural bureaucracies with an occupational hierarchy. Like the civil service, television had three main occupational categories. At the top were the managers, amongst whom former and current programme producers were the largest subgroup; producers mingled with general administrators, accountants and senior engineers, constituting a managerial elite. In the middle was a large category of TV skills and crafts; there were the men (and a few women) who operated TV studios and the outside broadcasts, the outdoor filming, the post-production and editing functions and other craft skills. Third and last were the clerical and lower service functions, in which women predominated. These latter two groupings were again reminiscent of the civil-service executive and clerical levels.

Another crucial civil-service-style feature in the 1970s was job security. It was required by the trade unions, and accepted by both BBC and ITV, that 70 per cent or more of the employees were in permanent and pensionable employment. In the 1970s a substantial minority of producers and directors were freelances; but many of these had been in staff positions previously and had chosen to go freelance. At the skilled levels and above in both the BBC and ITV there were very low rates of employee turnover, and 86 per cent of BBC employees in 1989 had been in the BBC for all their broadcasting work-careers.² The numbers of producers and other personnel employed in British television expanded steadily—buoyed up by expanding revenue—in almost every single year from 1946 to 1988.

Producers were integrated into general management. Within this broad category, several levels of programme decision-making can be identified in 1990s terms:

Channel Heads

Departmental Head (BBC); Director of Programmes (ITV)

Executive Producer (BBC); Department Head (ITV)

Series Producer; Editor

Producer; Assistant Producer.

In this study we are focusing primarily upon the series producer or editor; this is the highest level of person who is in regular daily editorial or ‘hands-on’ control of the content of a series of programmes. At the executive-producer levels and above, the responsibility is typically for more than one series and has a lower ‘hands-on’ component.

Many producers are hesitant about accepting promotion out of the series-producer level; they often express their dilemma by referring to parallel cases of people promoted above the core-activity level— the teacher who is too senior to teach, the sailor who is too senior to go to sea. The tradition in British television is that the producer is part of management. The producer is made aware of what the senior people are thinking; the producer receives a flow of advice and guidance—much of it spoken, some of it written. Words such as ‘guidance’, ‘guidelines’ and ‘consultation’ are heavily used.³

The emphasis placed on ‘flexibility’ and the avoidance of rigid rules in turn reflects the vague collection of goals towards which British broadcasting traditionally strives; each one of the public-service trio ‘education, entertainment and information’ is fairly vague, and how these can, or should, be mixed together in a particular series of programmes is very uncertain indeed.

There is inevitably a substantial degree of tension in such a system. From time to time conflicts between creative autonomy and organizational hierarchy surface into press publicity and political controversy; this may involve a channel controller vetoing the work of a series producer. However, much more frequently these tensions are managed quietly within the system; often the disciplinary intervention takes the form of a ‘Don’t do that again’ retrospective memo, rather than an actual veto.

Many, or most, difficult decisions for the producer focus, in fact, on logistics and money. If television is an art-form, it is a cumbersome and expensive one. If the producer is an auteur or author, he is an author who needs the active involvement of thirty or forty other people, expensive equipment, studio space and—not least—a network to transmit the end-product. Few people who have not been involved in television recognize how much work, energy and time in programme preparation go into polishing and refining small details; dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s is an elaborate undertaking in this thousands-of pounds-per-minute medium.

The producer role encompasses elements not only of the civil servant but of a latter-day Renaissance Man, capable of playing all the parts. The producer ideally should be good with both words and pictures, the two main building blocks of television. He or she needs some basic grasp of TV technology, of tape against film, of sound, lighting and sets; requires (usually extensive) specialist knowledge of the particular programme genre, such as drama or news; needs to be able to juggle ideas against finance; needs plenty of sheer energy; needs some performance skills—the ability to enthuse and activate others during a long working day; and needs diplomatic skills to smooth ruffled egos and to persuade outsiders to do things at different times and for less money than they would prefer.

This civil servant, macho-military, Renaissance Man, creative manager was in practice usually a man—a white, responsible, British male who could be trusted to do a decent job in difficult circumstances. Some of this tradition has now changed in ways favourable to women—if not to ethnic minorities—but the point remains that the producer role was traditionally conceived as male.

FROM INTEGRATED-FACTORY PRODUCTION

Until 1982 British television consisted of just two vertically integrated organizations (BBC and ITV) which each made the bulk of the programmes in its own factories (or studios), assembled the schedule and transmitted it over a national network. This ‘integrated-factory’ approach derives from BBC radio, where the radio studios could be tucked quietly away in the basement. In the case of television the studios were larger, but were still placed at the lower levels of buildings; above ground were the programme-makers’ offices and on the top floor were the senior managers. British television was vertically integrated both as an industry and within its own buildings.

There are two other possible production systems which in the 1990s are both increasingly important. In 1982 Channel Four introduced the ‘publisher’ concept to Britain; it ‘published’ (assembled and transmitted) programming commissioned and acquired from other producers. By the early 1990s, on government direction, this publisher model was also increasingly followed in both ITV and BBC television.

There is also a third model, that of the ‘packager’, which prevails in cable and satellite systems. Cable did not get far in 1980s Britain, but from 1990 satellite offerings did attract customer-households in increasing numbers. These satellite and cable channels are typically themed to one specific genre such as news, sport or movies. The cable or satellite provider typically packages the channels with programming acquired in bulk from large suppliers of news, sport, movies, and so on.

By 1990 the Channel Four publisher model was well established and, along with it, a distinction between, on the one hand, ‘commissioning editors’ inside Channel Four, and, on the other hand, outside producers who actually made the programming. The packager model was also starting to become entrenched; the packager, of course, only directly employs very small numbers of producers.

Up to about 1990, however, the integrated-factory system of production remained the normal and dominant pattern. In the 1970s the British TV producer had been largely insulated from fierce head-to-head competition and from harsh financial pressures. For a period of eighteen years (1964–82) there were just three channels, with the audience in effect amicably shared 50/50 between one ITV channel and two BBC channels. The audience was offered large rations of educational and informational programming as well as entertainment. There was plenty of money—with all the booming advertising revenue supporting just one channel, and a steadily growing licence fee (as consumers switched to colour sets) going to the BBC; British television in the 1970s was much more generously funded than was western Europe’s television overall.

Television producers lived a sheltered life within a system based on consensus and cartel. There was a consensus between the political parties and between broadcasters schooled in the BBC and ITV versions of public service. The trade unions also played a central role, favouring good-quality British programming, a broad mix of programming genres, and strict quotas of cheap programme imports. The unions got secure employment for their members, with extremely generous levels of manning and overmanning.

The ITV network was a cartel of non-competing regional companies which had a monopoly on TV advertising; the regulatory body, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, required it to carry quotas of non-entertainment, mainly factual, programming. Each of the ITV companies bargained fiercely to keep its share of programming air-time, which meant that even ITV’s entertainment programming was supplier-driven and less than 100 per cent market-orientated.

British TV schedulers were required by the system to seek both audience ratings and prestige. Schedulers were expected to put some ‘serious’ programming into the high-audience times; buttressed by generous finance, and perhaps ‘hammocked’ between a previous popular programme and a following popular programme, some serious programmes did quite well in both prestige and audience terms. However, both BBC and ITV deliberately spent heavily on some programming (such as serious drama and arts features) which had quite modest ratings appeal. British television cautiously adopted cheap-but-popular American formats such as the quiz or game show and the soap opera and placed a quota of these into high-audience and early-evening times. Consequently, there were huge differences in cost per million of audience, with one programme costing—in these terms—ten or even twenty times as much as the adjoining programme in the schedule.

While a few established (popular or prestige) successes might run for 25 or 35 weeks per year, most British TV series conformed to a mini-series pattern of as few as 6, and no more than 13, programmes per year. Popular situation comedies, for example, could take 15 years to accumulate 100 episodes. This mini-series emphasis fitted both ITV cartel-bargaining and BBC deference towards TV writers; it fitted also with...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TELEVISION PRODUCERS
• COMMUNICATIONS AND SOCIETY
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF TABLES
• CHAPTER 1: PRODUCERS IN BRITISH TELEVISION
• PART I: FACTUAL
• PART II: FICTION AND ENTERTAINMENT
• PART III: PRODUCERS AND ORGANIZATIONS
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY