A new ‘scandal’ for BBC screenwriter Davies

THE writer of the BBC’S successful drama A Very English Scandal has complained that the drama is being screened worldwide by the “tax-dodging b-------” Amazon.

The mini-series, which starred Hugh Grant as the disgraced Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, was first shown on the BBC last year but is now available globally via the US streaming service – to the fury of its writer, Russell T Davies.

“A Very English Scandal went out on Amazon [because] they came in with money afterwards,” he said. “I have problems with that because they’re taxdodging b------- and I’m not remotely happy having gone out on their network. I’m serious. Every company has some fingers in some stinking pies, but Amazon absolutely doesn’t pay its taxes on a vast scale and I do object to that.

“Hospitals should be built out of what they should be giving us and there’d still be a profit. It’s so wrong.”

Amazon’s UK logistics arm paid just £4.6million in corporation tax in the year ending December 2017, despite its operating profit growing to £79 million. The company’s tax arrangements are entirely legal but it is regularly criticised. It has previously said that it pays “all taxes required in the UK and every country where we operate”.

Davies’ new BBC One project is Years

Years, a drama starring Emma Thompson as a populist politician. It is likely to prove controversial, set in a near future in which Donald Trump threatens nuclear war against China.

The writer said the BBC had placed no limits on what he could say about the US president.

“They knew what they were getting – a bold and risky piece,” he said. “Actually, they knew it couldn’t be any madder than the real world.”

Years and Years begins on May 14. The nightmarish political events are seen through the eyes of one family in Manchester.