Television risks the âcatastropheâ of losing a generation of creative talent to digital start-ups unless it makes significant changes to its working culture [ ] I believe that the single biggest threat facing our industry is the loss of talent to digital. If we donât attract the right kind of people today, we wonât make the right kind of programmes and services tomorrow.UKTV CEO Darren Childs, speaking at the Creative Week Industry conference, 2 June 2015.
The warning that Darren Childs, CEO of the UKTV network of television channels, issued to the UK television industry back in 2015 highlighted one of the challenges the industry was then facing in an age of increasing competition. It also prompted me to investigate a long-held interest I had in how talent is valued and defined in differing industries and cultural sectors. For me, it was a starting point for this research project focused on the UK television industry and how (if indeed it has) the shift to a multi-platform environment has changed the ways in which the industry identifies, nurtures and develops both on- and off-screen talents.
In the preface to the second edition of John B. Thompsonâs (2017: vi) work on the publishing industry, he noted that:
Writing about a present-day industry is always going to be like shooting at a moving target: no sooner have you finished the text than your subject matter has changed â things happen, events move on and the industry you had captured at a particular point in time know looks slightly different.
In many ways, the UK television industry presents the same challenges for a researcher. Meanwhile writing in 2006, Ronnie Corbett (part of one of British televisionâs most popular on-screen partnerships with Ronnie Barker in the BBCâs long-running programme The Two Ronnies, 1971â1987) reflected on how the business of television and its relationship with talent had changed over the course of a career that had started in the late 1950s. For Corbett, there were two major changes; the first was that television no longer felt like a young industry where artistic judgements would trump purely financial calculations. The second was that when he started out in acting the idea of pursuing a creative or artistic career was generally frowned upon by society, you were seen as an outsider. He continues:
Now everyone wants to do it. Everybody I meet tells me their son is doing media studies at university, or their daughter wants to be a director or has gone on a writing course. Itâs as if the people who want to be chartered accountants are now the freaks. (Corbett 2006: 302)
In many ways, these two connected perceptions are themes that run through this book. I argue that the shift associated with television talent, once defined largely by its artistic value to now being defined more by its monetary/financial value, has been important in shaping cultural production in the industry. The meritocratic myth that anyone can now have a successful media career has intensified in the digital age. The rise of a range of accessible platforms that allow content creation and distribution, and broader shifts in cultural values and the economy have helped legitimise this myth.
Against this backdrop, the book is an original intervention that seeks to explore and interrogate how digital multi-platform delivery is affecting the role performed by cultural intermediaries responsible for talent identification and development such as broadcasters, commissioning editors, producers, platform operators, programme makers, talent agencies and public relations firms. It investigates whether the process of digitisation can really offer new pathways to capture and nurture a diverse talent base within the UK television industry. The concept of âtalentâ has emerged within creative industry policy discussions as central to unlocking economic success within the creative economy. Yet as Roussel (2017) notes in her examination of the television industry in Hollywood, the study of talent agents remains largely absent from the plethora of academic studies around televisionâs culture and industry. This book sets out to significantly enhance our knowledge about how talent is identified, valued and managed within the contemporary UK television industry and the key role played by agents and other intermediaries in this process. In so doing, it develops the body of work around the wider creative economy and also argues for the importance of studies of the television sector to be placed within a historical frame of understanding.
The main sources of evidence used in this research are historical and current policy statements relating to talent development within the television industry and other secondary source statistical data; historic and contemporary media commentary; and, above all, the original testimony and expertise of key individuals involved in the television industry engaged in talent identification, management and development (see Appendix 1).
The Changing Political Economy of Television
While the key empirical focus of this book will be on the UK television industry, it is of course recognised that television has always been to a lesser or greater degree an international business. As a result, reference in particular to the US television industry and its practices and organisations are made throughout the book where appropriate, although the key focus is on the talent industry within the UK.
It is important to remember that television is at its heart a collaborative industrial and creative process, so the notion that any one individual (or talent) is solely responsible for a television programme is of course nonsensical. Yet ongoing tensions between structure and agency are well illustrated in contemporary television practice, and the shift from analogue to digital has perhaps not shifted the balance (in favour of the latter) to the extent that might have been anticipated. An overarching conceptual dimension to understanding the contemporary industry is the ongoing legacy of Beckâs (2000) argument around the insecurity of work and the development of a patchwork (or portfolio) approach to working lives.
The shift within the UK industry around a freelance work culture has as I argue in Chapters 2 and 4 become marked and had profound consequences for conceptualising the value of on- and off-screen talents in the industry. This more fragmented work environment has run in conjunction with what Littler (2018) has argued has been the discourse of âmeritocracyâ, a common refrain in the creative economy, that while promising opportunity and social mobility has in fact often been complicit with broader neoliberal structural change that has actually created new forms of social division.
I also argue throughout the book that we are entering a new staging post in the development and evolution of the television industry in the UK. The initial phase of linear Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) enjoyed hegemony from the 1950s to the late 1980s and early 1990s. The landscape began to alter with the advent of satellite and cable delivery systems and an ideological Conservative government keen to increase competition within the broadcasting sector. However as is often the case, a combination of political, economic and technological factorsâoften only really evident with hindsightâcomes together to shape the particular trajectory of the television industry. The second phase of televisionâs evolution in the UK is dominated by the free-to-air (FTA) and Pay-Tv channels that exist from the early 1990s through until the mid- to late 2000s. While the seeds of the industryâs current phase were being laid down with the transition from analogue to digital and the rise of the Internet and the development of companies such as Amazon and Facebook (most of whom initially would never have imagined they would end up in the television business), it is really only in the last 5/6 years that the long third phase has begun to crystallise.
We are now in the age of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) with the rise of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google (FAANG) as international players in the television content business, and we have a more fluid and competitive television environment (Dunleavy 2018; Landau 2016; Lotz 2017; Wolk 2015). This often makes drawing the boundaries of the once relatively stable television sector in the UK more and more difficult as the over-the-top (OTT) delivery of television combined with a robust infrastructure of delivery and mobile access poses challenges for all creating and delivering television content. In a speech to BBC staff in March 2018, the Director General (DG) of the BBC Tony Hall warned that the US technology companies mentioned above all pose a significant threat to British broadcasting and more widely the shaping of British popular culture. He suggested that these commercially orientated companies enter into the television market and âpluck established talent wherever they can find it, but their business isnât to inspire the next generation of British talentâ. Rather, that role, he argued, remained one of the main drivers of the BBC (Davies 2018).
This matters because increased competition within the UK television sector leads to increased competition for talent or particular types of talent within the industry. As noted in the book, Pay-Tv channels, television multi-channel networks such as UKTV, are also in the television content commissioning arena, as are new OTT services such as Netflix and Amazon. Between 2008 and 2013, for example, programme spend from just Pay-Tv channels alone in the UK increased by 57%, something that was crucial for the UK independent sector at a time when television advertising revenues went through a severe recession with a downturn in spend from ITV (Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates 2015: 28). Hence, the contemporary television sector has witnessed increased competition not simply among on- and off-screen talents, but in terms of senior management talent who as cultural intermediaries play a crucial role in identifying and commissioning different types of talent-driven television content. For example, 2018 in the USA saw Fox Network television producer Ryan Murphy, creator of television shows such as Glee (2009â2015), Nip/Tuck (2003â2010) and American Crime Story (2016â) sign a ÂŁ216 million exclusive five-year contract with Netflix, to create new shows. He joined Shonda Rhimes, creator of some of ABCâs hit shows including Greyâs Anatomy (2005â) who along with others is no doubt attracted by Netflixâs ÂŁ5.7 billion annual budget (Sweney 2018). While in the UK, distinguished television executive Jay Hunt left Channel 4 in 2017 to join Apple Video as its European Creative Director. Hence, concerns around television retaining top talent exist not just on-screen but significantly off-screen as well. In addition, new types of IT base skills and expertise around television app development and web-based delivery of content have all become more important to the television sector in recent years, so the type of talent the industry needs has expanded.
Another key backdrop to this book is the widely held concern about the migration of younger viewers away from television and towards the social video or YouTube media space. In the UK, the average age of mainstream television viewers has been getting older. In 2017, the average age of an ITV viewer was 60 and even the youth-orientated E4 channel found that here the viewer average age was 42 (Enders Analysis 2017: 3). A combination of declining mainstream viewership among young people (16â34), a rise in popularity of online social video (often in the YouTube space) and increased competition from a plethora of SVOD channels including Netflix, Amazon Video and Hulu have all rang alarm bells in the UK television industry. At the core of this has been a concern in the television sector around engaging with a younger audience and also capturing new on- and off-screen talents into the industry, when it appears that a career as a social video YouTuber may be both easier to achieve and financially more lucrative.
Agents of Change
Given the importance of the talent agent as cultural intermediary within the broader network of relationships that inform and shape the field of television organisation and culture, they remain remarkably under-researched. Work on the film industry and the role of agents most notably (Roussel 2017) only serves to highlight the lack of academic attention focused on this part of the television food chain. As Kuipers has argued:
Cultural intermediaries are easily overlooke...