One could be forgiven for thinking that British television is at the strongest it has ever been. More than 12 million of us tuned in to watch the Gavin and Stacey finale. Mr Bates vs The Post Office sparked a wave of national anger and forced the government into action after years of journalist trying to raise awareness of the Horizon Post Office scandal. Baby Reindeer, Adolescence and Toxic Town have all been enormous successes on both sides of the Atlantic. But those at the very top of the industry are worried.
“We’re in dire straits,” Peter Kosminsky, one of the UK’s most highly respect TV professionals and the man behind the BBC’s Wolf Hall, told the New Statesman podcast. While we are able to watch a variety of high-quality programming, dramas that are “peculiarly British” are under threat of extinction. The likes of Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and Apple TV will not make them. “The streamers say they’re speaking to an international audience, and they make programmes that are of interest to an international audience,” Kosminsky explained. “What they actually mean is American audiences.” “Mr Bates vs The Post Office doesn’t get made” in this world, he warns
Kosminsky has worked in the television industry for 45 years, and for all of the UK’s major public service broadcasters. A director, writer and producer, he has won every accolade possible: multiple Baftas, Royal Television Society awards, Golden Globes along with individual recognition for what he has personally contributed to British television. His most recent triumph was the final part of Wolf Hall, broadcast in 2024.
But the cost of making high end drama, documentary and comedy has soared in recent years – “by a factor of five or six”, Kosminsky says. Not because of inflation, but because the streamers have driven up the costs. “They’ve arrived here, competed to use our crews and our facilities, and they have deep pockets, and they pay a lot of money.” The homegrown sector – BBC, Channel 4 and ITV – have been priced out. They can’t compete.
“It’s interesting talking to Patrick Spence, the producer who developed Mr Bates vs The Post Office,” Kosminsky says. “He said he wouldn’t develop it now. Why? Because there would be no prospect of it getting made. And that’s really worrying.” Both Mr Bates and Wolf Hall were turned down by all the big streamers, Kosminsky told the New Statesman. Actors and executives on both took significant pay cuts to make sure they even made it to screen. Both Kosminsky and executive producer Colin Callender waived 90 per cent of their production fee. Peter Straughan who wrote the adaptation and actor Mark Rylance who played Cromwell “also made a huge financial sacrifice”.
Kosminsky dismisses those who cite the success of Adolescence or Toxic Town – both written by Jack Thorne and both snapped up by Netflix – as a challenge to his argument. “Adolescence was a fantastic drama, and I applaud Netflix for making it. But just stop and think for a moment. What’s adolescence about at root? It’s about a murder carried out in a school of one pupil by another pupil. Not a problem they’re unfamiliar with in America.” The same goes with Toxic Town, Kosminsky says of the drama depicting the fight by a group of Corby mothers to get justice for their children damaged by contaminated waste from the nearby steelworks. Stop again and think about the subject, Kosminsky says. “Anyone watched Erin Brockovich recently?”
Reflecting on his career, Kosminsky is someone trying to “challenge the orthodoxy”. He wants to ask uncomfortable questions of the rich and powerful. A television maker, yes, but a public service journalist at heart. Audiences don’t want to be “harangued all the time”, he says, “but occasionally it’s our job to say, hang on a minute, have you thought about it like this? And actually, are you really comfortable with this? And if not, what could we possibly do about it?” He has made powerful dramas on the Israel-Palestine conflict (The Promise), British peacekeepers who bear witness to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia (Warriors), the experience of young British Muslims post 7/7 (Britz), and the role of scientist Dr David Kelly in the run-up to the Iraq War (The Government Inspector).
Kosminsky places the blame for the British TV’s current predicament firmly at the Government’s door. He says they “refuse” to help public service broadcasters make these programmes by rejecting the idea of a streamer’s levy. A levy would make it compulsory for the streaming giants to pay 5 per cent of all money earned from British subscribers into a separate fund to be used to make programmes where a UK public service broadcaster is part of the commission. Similar schemes are in place in 17 European countries, including France and Germany where Netflix unsuccessfully tried to take legal action to prevent the levy being introduced. “When I asked one of the founders of Netflix, whether they would challenge it in the court if it was brought in here in this country, he said, ‘No, as long as it was a level playing field across all the streamers,’” Kosminsky said. So why is the Government saying no? “Because they fear that it would be perceived by the current administration in America as a tariff.”
This misses a fundamental point, he stressed. The streamers can get some of the levy back if they partner with UK broadcasters on productions. “So, it’s not a tariff,” Kosminsky insists: no other tariff allows you to get some of your money back. “And the British government has failed to make that argument… I think the truth is that… the British government currently is disappointingly craven,” Kosminsky said in a damning rebuke. “There’s a proud 100-year tradition of public service broadcasting in this country. Stand up for it. Defend it. Don’t just say, ‘Yes, Donald; you’re not very happy. Allow us to bow down and lick your boots.’ It’s pathetic. It’s embarrassing.”
On 22 July, the Guardian reported that Kosminsky had written to the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, accusing her of trying to “bully” the BBC over its Gaza coverage. In recent weeks, Nandy has levelled intense criticism the corporation, refusing to say she has confidence in the leadership of its director general, Tim Davie, and asking why no one has lost their job over the broadcast of a documentary about Gaza, narrated by the 13-year-old son of a Hamas official. The letter reminded Nandy that past attempts by government to place political pressure on the BBC had ended badly. “There’s a dreadfully dishonourable tradition of this,” he told the New Statesman. (He cited both the suicide of David Kelly shortly after being revealed as the source for a BBC’s reporting on the dodgy dossier behind the Iraq war, and the Thatcher government’s attempt to pull a 1985 BBC documentary on Northern Ireland.)
“I think you have to be very careful as a government when you hold the purse strings of what is supposed to be an impartial broadcaster whose job is to speak truth to power in a democracy,” Kosminsky said. “When you call for sackings and by implication the sacking of the chief executive of the BBC, I think that is deeply troubling… It feels like you’re placing financial pressure on the organisation. You’re saying, ‘Do what I’m asking you to do and otherwise you won’t get the money that we all know you want.’”
Was the Culture Secretary really “bullying” the BBC, or was she simply saying to its upper echelons, on behalf of the nation, “get your house in order; we’ve had enough”? Davie’s tenure has been plagued with difficulties. Soon into his role it emerged that the BBC religion editor Martin Bashir had misled Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, to secure a Panorama interview with her 25 years earlier. Davie bears no responsibility whatsoever for the original misdemeanour. A host of scandals followed: the failure to tackle multiple and ongoing complaints against former MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace; bullying allegations levelled at senior staff; serious criminality on the part of former news anchor Huw Edwards. Others involved editorial failures, including the live broadcasting of an anti-Semitic rant by Bob Vylan at this year’s Glastonbury and the broadcasting of a Gaza documentary linked to Hamas.
Does Nandy speak for the public when she says the corporation has “a problem of leadership”? A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport told the Guardian that license fee payers rightly expect “serious failures” to be acted upon so that they don’t happen again. “The BBC is operationally and editorially independent of government, and we will always defend this principle. However, there is an important distinction between being independent and being accountable.” If something has gone wrong, Kosminsky counters, it is for Ofcom or the BBC Board to hold the corporation to account. It is not the job of government. “What I’m worried about is the chilling effect of this. You can see [it] in other Gaza programmes that the BBC has backed away from in recent years,” Kosminsky says, referring to the BBC’s decision not to broadcast Gaza: Doctors under Attack, leaving it instead to Channel 4. Programmes like these, he says, are “just too hot to handle because they’re nervous of what the reaction will be in certain quarters. We need a BBC that is brave enough to not care about ruffling a few feathers.”
Few would disagree with that final sentiment. But there are many in the industry, both inside the BBC and out, who see a wider problem. That perhaps the exodus of senior, long-standing editorial staff over the past five years has left the corporation depleted. There is a lack of diversity of thought, and years of both editorial and life experience have been lost, providing a vacuum at times in sound editorial judgement. “Just because I’m saying the government should lay off the BBC and let [the board] and Ofcom do their job, it doesn’t mean I’m saying I would personally endorse everything that’s going on at the BBC. The two are not linked,” Kosminsky explained.
While having the “highest respect” for Tim Davie “as a person”, for example, Kosminsky expressed his “surprise” that “a man with no journalistic or editorial experience in his past” should have been made the BBC’s editor-in-chief. “If I’d been asked my opinion of the appointment – and I knew Tim well as head of BBC Worldwide – I would have said, ‘No, I’m not sure that is quite right.’ He’s a great bloke, fantastic asset to the organisation, but I don’t think he has enough editorial experience. I think the governors got that wrong.”
For Kosminsky, the failure of the government to address the impossibility for UK public service broadcasters to compete with the streamers and its recent criticism of the BBC are inextricably linked. “It seems to be the tentpole of our foreign policy is to butter up the Americans and unfortunately our domestic broadcasting is going to be the casualty,” he said. “Lisa Nandy has had virtually nothing to say about all the problems that broadcasting is facing in this country… The only time she’s popped her head above the parapet is to start calling for sackings at the BBC.” While this “may get lot of sort of nods from certain quarters” – the US – “it’s extremely dangerous”.
Kosminsky believes we have a government “too susceptible to pressure from outside” and unwilling to stand up for and defend our national institutions. Instead, it is “prepared to grovel to outside forces for reasons of limited financial and political gain”. And, Kosminsky believes, this attitude comes from the top. “We have seen the way our Prime Minister behaves around Donald Trump… Actively fanning the ego of this man in the way he has been is really quite an unpleasant thing to observe and it filters down through everything. Anything that might upset Donald Trump and therefore by extension anything that might upset Israel is stamped on. And dear old Lisa Nandy, in my opinion, is part of this government. Keir Starmer is her boss and she’s performing her role.”
We are in a delicate place. When broadcasters can no longer make programmes that hold truth to power, “that’s just a little bit of our freedom of speech gone”, Peter Kosminsky argues. And while future governments might be relieved about that, “our democracy is the worse for it”. Perhaps a streamers levy is not the answer, but the government does not seem to be coming up with any solutions of its own. If it does not intervene, we will “end up with a situation where the editorial decisions about everything we watch here in the UK on our television, are made half a world away in California,” Kosminsky warns. “I regret that.”
Hannah’s full conversation with Peter Kosminsky is available as a New Statesman podcast.
[Further reading: The BBC is afraid]
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