TV nods to diversity – but it’s never been more elitist
The Edinburgh Television Festival is the perfect place to work out what we’re all going to be watching for the next few years. There are the ideas TV people say they want us to watch, and then the raft of announcements revealing what it is we’re actually going to watch. These rarely match.
Going by what was said at this year’s festival, the future will be about championing new voices, taking risks and more working-class writers and performers. Sherwood and Dear England writer James Graham, Carol Vorderman and consumer champion Martin Lewis agreed that the elites were boring. The historian David Olusoga said TV executives are surrounded by people drawn from a tiny percentage of the population, just like them.
Netflix boss Anne Mensah told the festival that “the industry is a closed circuit and a closed shop. The people who watch TV are not in this room and until we admit that, we won’t move forwards.”
So are we in for an exciting future – another Cathy Come Home, perhaps? A sitcom set in a prison-like Porridge? A look at precarious Zero-hours employment like Boys from the Blackstuff? Well, no. Turns out what the industry actually wanted was 1990s pop nostalgia, more Ant and Dec and a reality series about the opening of a new Gordon Ramsay restaurant made by... Gordon Ramsay’s Studio Ramsay.
Indeed, celebrities making shows about celebrities is the real theme of our future viewing. There’s a Netflix documentary about Victoria Beckham’s fashion and beauty brands made by Studio 99, which happens to be David Beckham’s production company (one producer of the Beckham series, who was also behind Netflix’s documentary on David, sits on Victoria’s board). James Corden’s company Fulwell 73 is delivering a “behind-the-scenes documentary” for Netflix about Take That, the boy band featuring Corden’s “old friend” and sometime songwriting partner Gary Barlow.
In drama, Netflix announced the casting of Anya Taylor-Joy in its adaptation of How to Kill Your Family – produced by Lizzie Rusbridger, daughter of former Guardian editor Alan, and written by his other daughter Bella Mackie. (Although Netflix UK has also renewed Supacell, from Deptford-born former rapper Andrew Onwubolu and commissioned Lockerbie, starring Eddie Marsan and Connor Swindells.)
ITV has the Accidental Tourist in the works for 2025, with Catchphrase and Deal or No Deal host Stephen Mulhern heading to Asia while Ant and Dec test his boundaries and also make the show with their Mitre Studios production company.
And to cement the rise of the working class voice, Discovery+ has a Kardashians style docusoap about Jacob Rees-Mogg, while ITV is following Prince William in a new documentary, We Can End Homelessness, and Her Majesty the Queen in Behind Closed Doors, a series spotlighting the monarch’s charity work raising awareness of sexual and domestic abuse in the UK. The latter is made by the Royal Family’s preferred production company Love Monday.
The industry, in other words, hit all the right talking points and then announced a lot of shows about very rich people made by very rich people. It’s not just irritating, it’s bad for our TV health.
“It’s an unsettling development when all our documentaries are becoming celebrity documentaries where the subject of the documentary is in some way controlling production,” one documentary maker tells me. “That’s an extraordinary high level of control – and pretending that’s a proper journalistic exercise is troubling.”
“People talk about the golden age of documentary,” Dan Cogan, who produced 2008’s The End of America, warning of the rise of fascism in the US, and 2022’s Harry and Meghan, said recently. “We left that three or four years ago. We now live in the corporate age of documentary.”
Celebrities prefer to give access to themselves or their mates. Ideally themselves. Studio Ramsay, for instance, makes Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars for Fox in the US; Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars for BBC One; Gordon, Gino and Fred: Roadtrip for ITV; Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted for Disney + and a bunch of Gordon’s YouTube shows including Idiot Sandwich and Ramsay in 10. Now he’s landed a Netflix doc, Being Gordon Ramsay, following the chef as he prepares to open five restaurants in London’s 22 Bishopsgate. Indeed, it’s getting harder to find any cooking shows that don’t involve Gordon Ramsay.
When James May’s hopeless cooking videos took off on YouTube, Will Daws, who runs the indie Plum Pictures, behind shows like Michael Mosely’s C4 Secrets of the Big Shop and various James May docs, suggested May write a cookbook then pitched a show based on the book and videos. No-one was interested, so they used the book advance to fund a very cheap series – Oh Cook – which was finally picked up by Amazon Prime.
“In times of entrenchment, everyone is playing it safe, going for the familiar and I don’t necessarily agree with that but I understand it,” Daws says “I don’t blame the commercial channels so much for that. They are nervous about new talent. Most commissioners would love to take risks with something new and a bit dangerous. But it has to go through committees and accountants saying we’re spending this much...? are we sure? But it’s up to the channels to provide some slots for not the same old faces or we’ll just see the same people again and again.”
It is sometimes hard to find the celebrities’ involvement. Eyebrows were raised by The Real Mo Farah, the BBC documentary which revealed the Olympic athlete had been trafficked into the UK from Somaliland, as it aired just two years after Panorama revealed accusations of doping by Farah’s former coach Alberto Salazar. Whilst the runner’s name doesn’t appear on the credits, the show was made by Atomized Studios, the production arm of Farah’s PR company Freud Communications. It would take quite a bit of searching to find this out – the BBC credits don’t mention Farah’s name at all.
The problem is the collapse of the old-style documentary or factual series that used to be the bread and butter of TV schedules and production company income. UK broadcasters and international streamers have been short of cash for the past couple of years and there’s no sign of the boom years returning.
Alongside true crime, celebrities have become the most reliable source of gold – “if an alien landed in the UK today and turned on the TV they’d think the entire population are serial murders of celebrities,” according to Channel 4’s chief content officer Ian Katz.
“It’s a tough market for viewing and monetisation which means everyone wants to derisk, so programming shifts towards those things and people already known to be popular,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “This makes things very difficult for smaller production companies but also makes the output very safe and derivative – think Jamie Oliver doing an air fryer show on Channel 4.”
Indeed, in August, Manchester-based media news site Prolific North announced Channel 5’s news factual commission thus: “Great and Small with Dan and Helen begins Thursday 12th September on Channel 5, and will be approximately the 1,479,312th show with “Yorkshire” in the title to screen on the channel.”
The result of these missing shows and the preponderance of the same old faces means the UK production sector – once the most vibrant in the world – is “massively stressed with closure, restructures, people looking to sell, revenues down and people holding on though they can only hold on so long,” says John McVay, chief executive of producer’s trade body PACT.
“British indies are set up by all colours, all creeds, all classes, just like the controllers say they want,” he explains. “Anyone can set up a business and have a go – that’s why Thatcher supported it. It’s a punk industry. We keep hearing broadcasters and streamers want high-value, high-impact shows then lots of low-cost high volume. That’s not good enough. My members have propped up and invested in British television for 30 years. Saying we’re sorry, here’s the door is irresponsible, immoral and means it’s only the rich elite who can afford to stay in the TV game.”
For the viewer, says Harrington, this means more of the same only more so. “Non-objective celeb docs is part of a wider embrace of branded content on TV,” he explains. “Brand-funded entertainment is hardly new but getting advertisers to invest in programming in a more holistic way is now seen by some as a bit of a panacea for TV. A celeb producing and probably partly deficit funding a series featuring themselves is no different from a brand investing in a drama that mythologies its origins or a cooking show funded by M&S about M&S.
“There’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of this, assuming certain things are declared to the viewer. But it means more programming that is pedestrian and unlikely to challenge us.”
