Independent television production companies (or âindiesâ as they are commonly known) have become the central means for delivering audiovisual content to broadcasters, in both commercial and public service broadcasting (PSB) environments.1 In the UK, the independent television production sector (ITPS) is one of the most economically significant cultural industries, producing content across a wide and growing range of media and platforms. From humble origins, over the last three decades, the indies have been transformed from a cottage industry to a global media industry.2 This remains an under-researched media industries sector, although there have been a number of important local studies carried out since the late 1980s (Lee 2011, 2012a, b; Sparks 1989; Zoellner 2009).
This book aims to provide a comprehensive account of the history and culture of the ITPS in the UK, and is based on interviews and extensive fieldwork with production staff working in the sector.3 It is motivated by a set of interrelated research themes that intersect throughout. Broadly, these fall into three areas: the political economic transformation of the indie sector since the early 1980s; the dynamics of creative labour within the industry; and the cultural value of the media content produced by the ITPS. In addressing these key themes, the book is structured in a broadly chronological and thematic fashion, focusing in turn on industry transformation, working conditions and creative output. In so doing, it aims to connect a political-economic account of a specific media industry with a production of culture perspective, a challenge increasingly being taken up by researchers in the field of media production studies (Paterson et al. 2016a, b). These themes are outlined in more detail below.
Broadcasting Transformation
Firstly, this book is concerned with providing a political-economic analysis of ongoing and deep transformations of the British indie sector, and broadcasting more generally. This analysis is provided in detail in Part 1 of the book, which explores the political-economic transformations within British independent broadcasting from the early 1980s onwards. Chapter 2 offers an account of the history of the British indies and Channel 4, and examines the emergence of the indie sector in the UK. It considers the relationship between the creation of Channel 4 in 1982 and the early British independent production companies. Chapter 3 takes this story further and investigates the emergence of creative industries policy in the late 1990s, the rise of the âsuper-indiesâ and the current wave of mergers and consolidation that has swept through the industry in recent years.
Television production in the UK has undergone a series of profound changes. These changes are economic, technological and cultural, and represent a clear challenge to broadcast televisionâs cultural hegemony in a period of increasingly diverse and rich, cross-platform digital media content. Economically, the means of funding broadcasting is threatened by disruptive technological innovation. In the commercial sector, broadcasting has traditionally relied upon television advertising to fund production and generate profit. However, multi-channel television means that there are fewer viewers watching specific channels, leading to a dramatic fall in advertising rates (BARB 2016; Ofcom 2004).
Technologically, the rise of the Internet, and high-bandwidth download capacity, means that fewer people are watching live television, further impacting the advertising revenues that commercial broadcasters can command. However, the rise of television apps, the accelerating uptake of time-shift viewing of media (up from just over 6% in 2010 to 13.2% of all media consumption in 2015) and the growth of subscription viewing via services such as Netflix and Amazon have all increased exponentially (BARB 2016).
Public service broadcasting is also facing intense challenges. For the BBC, funding cuts since the turn of the 21st century have been intense and ongoing (Lee-Wright 2010; Martinson 2015). This has led to job cuts across all departments and to new institutional developments in response, such as the creation of BBC Studios. This latter development, with its requirement for competitive tendering for all new and ongoing commissions, has accelerated the hollowing out of the corporationâs internal production capacity (DâArma 2017; Harvey 2015a). Overall, the BBC is moving increasingly towards a broadcaster-publisher role, akin to Channel 4, driving the commercial growth of the ITPS even more rapidly.
Culturally, television is also facing a challenge to its dominance. Technological innovations through the Internet, computer games, social networking and other forms of multimedia content are attracting growing numbers of people. For example, television shows such as Coronation Street could command audiences of 27 million at their peak (Barker 2005). However, year on year, television viewing figures are down, as new forms of delivering and receiving content proliferate, and as new forms of entertainment appeal to more people. Now, it is extremely rare for any televised event or programme to be watched by more than 10 million people (BARB 2016). As Anstead has noted:
However, if we consider television in a âpost-broadcastâ context then consumption is growing exponentially. As Freedman shows using international data, television viewing is increasing, although in some cases it is not clear how much of that viewing is taking place online or across non-television platforms (Freedman 2015). A recent survey of television audiences in the UK claims that the average viewer watched 3 hours, 51 minutes a day in 2015, 5% more than in 2005 (Thinkbox 2016). The phenomenal success of BBC iPlayer, an internet-based application which allows viewers to watch the majority of BBC programmes online for up to a month after being broadcast, is emblematic of this shift. Launched in 2007 with the promise of âmaking the unmissable, unmissableâ, uptake has been remarkable. In February 2017, it received an average of 9.9 million daily requests with a total of 277 million requests for television content across the month (in comparison to 11.2 million requests for the whole month of January 2008) (BBC 2017).The media market has become atomized, not only because many homes have many more than the five terrestrial channels, but also because of the development of DVDs, computer games and the Internet. (2007)
Independentsâ Transformation
The transformation of broadcasting has been mirrored by the equally rapid transformations within the independent sector, which have been gathering pace over recent years. The indie sector, which emerged because of the creation of Channel 4 in 1982, was initially made up of many small to medium-sized companies, predominantly based in London. These fledgling companies were run by small, largely permanent âskeletonâ teams (often the owners and a production manager), and they expanded or shrunk in size according to the demands of productions. Their creative labour was generally carried out by mobile, freelance workers undertaking key production roles such as producer/director, researcher, assistant producer, camera operator, sound recorder and film editor. These companies were extremely vulnerable to the shifting tastes of commissioning editors within the broadcasting companies (especially Channel 4, which provided most indie commissions), and there was a high turnover of companies, with business survival rates often low.
This early period witnessed a series of innovations across the televisual form, in areas including news, current affairs, documentary, drama and talk television. Such innovations were the product of the combination of a unique set of factors, including early Channel 4âs commissioning and programme strategy, the restless creative spirit of the early indies, and the historical and political climate of the time. The widespread commercialisation of broadcasting in the 1990s, however, led to the restructuration of the indies, with the decline of the âcottage industryâ ecology and, in its place, the rise of the so-called âsuper-indiesâ such as Endemol and RDF. These companies were much larger and they focused intently on the development of returning series, formats and ...