BBC fight against Netflix is like Drake taking on the Armada, says Lord Hall
Lord Hall turns his Royal Opera House magic to the public broadcaster to reach out to a wider audience, writes
THE BBC “cannot win” against the financial firepower of US giants such as Netflix and Amazon and must become a “lighter, simpler” organisation, the corporation’s director-general warns today.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead says the BBC, with its drama budget of £220million, cannot hope to compete with Netflix, which has announced plans to spend $5billion (£3billion) this year on original commissions, such as Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards.
Likening the arrival of American internet competitors to the threat posed to Britain by the Spanish Armada, Lord Hall said the corporation would need to emulate Sir Francis Drake, who saw off the Spanish fleet in 1588 with lighter, nimbler English ships.
He told The Sunday Telegraph: “We can’t win against a Netflix or an Amazon because their budgets are just so much bigger and they can concentrate their firepower on one or two or three things a year, whereas we’re delivering a service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We have to think differently. We have to think like Drake’s ships. We’ve got to think lighter, simpler.
“But if you look at what we offer in drama, for the cost of one of these big-budget Netflix things, we’re offering hours more and many more, high-class series.”
Lord Hall’s admission that the corporation’s competitors are no longer confined to ITV or Sky comes after the BBC notched up a run of highly successful dramas, including The Night Manager and War and Peace.
At nine o’clock tonight, more than six million people will settle down into their sofas, and tune their televisions to BBC One, for the penultimate episode of The Night Manager.
Whether it is down to Tom Hiddleston’s clean-cut good looks, John Le Carré’s scintillating plot, or the cinematic qualities afforded by its blockbuster £20million budget, the show is a bona fide hit, to the delight of executives at Broadcasting House, the BBC’s central London headquarters. Following hot on the heels of War and
Peace, another lavishly funded Sunday-night epic, the corporation is currently enjoying a purple patch in drama, which insiders credit to a decision by Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the director-general, to raid tens of millions of pounds from the budgets of other departments, funnelling licence fee cash into the genre. The drive to create such high-end, hugely popular shows will come as no surprise to those who have followed the career of the director-general. As chief
executive of the Royal Opera House, the post from which he was poached to head the BBC, he spearheaded a drive towards attracting a much broader audience, arguing that it was necessary to justify the organisation’s public funding.
Hit dramas are also, as some observers note, the kind of programming that appeals most to the BBC’s middle-class heartland, the audiences that the corporation needs to hold close as it fights for a favourable settlement for its next Royal Charter, which is due to expire in December.
“The public associates the BBC with great drama,” said Lord Hall, in an
interview with The Sunday Telegraph. “It’s something that’s in the lifeblood of the BBC. It’s just crucial to us as a creative and cultural organisation. I made this a priority when I came back to the BBC, because I believe in the BBC being in drama.”
While at the ROH – where shows under his tenure included Pavarotti’s farewell performance and
Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, a collaboration between the Royal Ballet and National Gallery – the executive oversaw a series of initiatives to grab new audiences, setting up big-screen relays of productions, which he said would allow 50,000 fans around the country to see the shows, and signing an exclusive deal that meant that tickets for the first night of one top performance were available only to the readers of a tabloid newspaper.
While the moves ruffled the feathers of some traditionalists, Mr Hall, as he was then, insisted that he had to increase opera audiences, to shore up the case for the organisation’s public funding. Are the BBC’s drama forays part of a similar strategy? “This is not a Royal Charter issue,” he insists. “It’s not a licence fee issue. This is what we’re here to do, and I don’t think it’s just about middle England.”
While the BBC has always been known for its dramas, it is widely acknowledged to be on a roll at the moment. Data from overnights.tv, the ratings agency, shows that seven of the 10 most-watched shows of 2016 are BBC dramas. “They are smashing us,” says one senior executive at ITV, which has complained about the BBC’s decision to close BBC Three, handing its £30 million budget to the drama department. “[This] will take the BBC’s drama budget beyond anything which the commercial sector could justify,” the commercial broadcaster said in a parliamentary submission.
In fact, the corporation’s drama budget has stayed flat, at £220 million, for nearly a decade, according to several senior BBC figures, and is roughly equivalent to that of its main commercial rival.
Charlotte Moore, the controller of the BBC’s television channels, says that the additional funding will do no more than cancel out the cuts that the drama department would otherwise have faced, after six years of a licence fee freeze. Even a share of the additional £100million of savings that Lord Hall has announced must be made elsewhere – which will be diverted to drama and sport – is unlikely to push the budget up significantly, such are the cuts that the whole corporation must find.
“The last years we’ve been operating on pretty much the same budget we’ve always had,” Ms Moore said. “All of those things were to compensate for money that’s been taken out of budgets, and we’ve got more cuts to come.”
The success of high-end dramas, despite the flat budget at the BBC, comes as a new generation of international competitors – the online platforms Netflix and Amazon – ramp up their activities in Britain, attracted by generous new tax breaks. The development means that the BBC must look beyond its traditional competitors of ITV and, more recently, Sky, as it seeks new audiences.
Lord Hall describes it as a “flight to quality”, and says that the corporation cannot hope to match the spending of an organisation such as Netflix, which plans to spend $5billion (£3.5billion) on original commissions this year.
“We can’t win against a Netflix or an Amazon because their budgets are just so much bigger,” he says. “They can concentrate their firepower on one or two or three things a year, whereas we’re delivering a service 24 hours a day.”
Likening the battle to the fight against the Spanish Armada, Lord Hall said: “We have to think differently. We have to think like Drake’s ships. We’ve got to think lighter, simpler.”
Audiences can expect more coproductions, such as The Night
Manager. The BBC only put up around £6million of the £20million it cost to make, with international partners funding the remainder, and taking a chunk of the revenues from selling it to other broadcasters. “It is these big, key dramas that foreign broadcasters want to join together to co-produce, and that can provide a huge return,” says Peter Kosminsky, who directed
Wolf Hall, which was co-produced with PBS, the American public broadcaster.
“In crude economic terms, drama is instrumental to the funding model on which the BBC is built.”
Lord Hall says that such a strategy helps the BBC to drive up investment and quality, allowing the corporation to attract huge international stars such as Hugh Laurie, reputed to be the bestpaid actor on American television, and Tom Hardy, the Oscar-nominated actor, who is currently making a new show for the broadcaster.
“I think the reason we’re doing well at the moment is that people see
‘We can’t win against a Netflix or an Amazon – we’ve got to think differently, lighter, simpler’
quality and they want quality,” says Lord Hall. “I used to love the National Trust poster from some years ago that said ‘Time well spent’. In an era when time is precious, people want quality, and that’s what we’re delivering.”
Critics of the BBC claim that, while its hit shows are undoubtedly high quality, some are too mass-market.
“The interesting point is to what extent they are doing slightly lowhanging fruit that will super-serve a middle England audience that they can guarantee will help with the approval ratings,” says a very senior executive at one of the BBC’s commercial rivals, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“I think The Night Manager, frankly, is not very good. But it is just challenging enough; good escapism, but not so intellectual that it will alienate the heartland audience. Goodquality stuff that is inoffensive will undeniably do a job.”
Such an allegation is fiercely denied by Polly Hill, the BBC’s drama chief. “Tackling Le Carré, that’s not easy, it’s incredibly hard,” she says. “And it’s rewarding when it works. Bringing Le Carré to screen is no small thing.
“The whole point of the BBC is the range of drama. You can go from Call the Midwife to The Night Manager, into Happy Valley. You’ve got the Shakespeare season, you’ve got The Missing coming back, Sherlock coming back, Anthony Hopkins in King Lear. I don’t think you get that mix on any other channel.”
The challenge from Netflix is real, but the BBC does have its own digital juggernaut, iPlayer. The online service is seen as one of the biggest assets in the BBC’s locker, and a way of drawing key talent away from rivals, says Peter Bowker, who wrote Marvellous, the Bafta-winning drama that starred Toby Jones as Neil Baldwin, Stoke City’s eccentric kit man. The programme got two million viewers when it aired on BBC Two, but was seen by an extra 825,000 people on iPlayer.
Bowker said: “BBC iPlayer versus ITV Player, there is no contest. I think it’s cost ITV dearly in terms of catchup, which is where you really build an audience. Marvellous just built and built with word of mouth. ITV is only just catching up.”
Online technology brings in younger viewers, but many of the industry’s big players are still attracted to the mass audiences that the 9pm Sunday-night slot can deliver.
Peter Moffat, whose previous hits include Criminal Justice and Silk, has the task of filling the slot left open when The Night Manager finishes in a week’s time. His taut political thriller Undercover stars two black leads, Sophie Okonedo and Adrian Lester, a first for a British prime-time drama.
It is a bold choice for a slot recently dominated by Tolstoy and Le Carré. “Like me, I think people’s first impression will be ‘blimey, they’re not all white’,” says Moffat. “Then you’ve got five hours and 59 minutes where you just don’t think about it because they’re just bloody good actors.
“Call me old-fashioned, but I like the feeling of all those people sitting down together. That is much, much more attractive than the more disjunctive notion of people all experiencing it in a different way, on the internet. I do know that, as a writer, I want to write for six million people on a Sunday night on BBC One.”