How BBC chief plans to take on Netflix
The BBC’s new head of drama Piers Wenger tells Anita Singh how he plans to take on Netflix, and about his debt to Victoria Wood
Piers Wenger says his parents still don’t quite know what he does for a living. “W1A is the only way I can get them to really understand what my life is like,” he says with a laugh, referencing the BBC mockumentary that pokes fun at the workings of New Broadcasting House.
In fact, Wenger holds one of the most powerful jobs in British television. He is the BBC’s new head of drama, responsible for 450 hours of programming per year, commissioning new projects while maintaining old favourites such as
Call The Midwife fe and Casualty. With Netflix and Amazon elbowing their way onto the scene, ITV on a roll with Victoria and The Durrells, and Sky Atlantic bringing HBO hits to a British audience, there has never been more competition.
He was chosen for the job because he has an impressive track record and, in the words of his boss, Charlotte Moore (the BBC’s director of content), “great taste”. Certainly, his first drama slate has class. There are adaptations of the Rumer Godden novel Black
Narcissus and H HG G Wells’s The Warr of the Worlds, an examination of the scandal that brought down Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, and Giri/Haji, a thriller about a Tokyo detective who travels to London, which Wenger describes as “Lost in Translation in reverse”. It is a “critical moment” for British drama, and for BBC drama in particular, he says. “The BBC used to be one of a small number of places where British creatives could take their work. Now we’re one of a vast number.” His solution is not to position the BBC as a rival to the Netflixes of this world, but to emphasise their differences. “I want BBC drama to be the antithesis of the algorithmic, data-driven approach to commissioning – the ‘If you like that, try this’ sort of approach. Because I think that just feeds people’s tastes back at themselves.” There are no new commissions of Dickens or Austen, because “it would be entirely pointless doing another adaptation of PridePr and Prejudice”. As a publicly funded broadcaster, he says, the BBC has “an obligation to try the different and the new”. That includes one standout commission: an adaptation of A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth’s doorstop novel set in post-Partition India, with a screenplay by Andrew Davies. There will not be a single white face in the cast – a first for BBC period drama, and something of a gamble in the important Sunday night BBC1 slot. British dramas set in that part of the world usually focus on the Raj, with Indian characters very much second tier. Wenger hopes the story’s “universal themes” – love and family – will play to a broad audience. It also meets another need: the head of Ofcom recently warned that the corporation is seen as too middle class, middle aged and – the cause of much BBC hand-wringing – too white.
Seth had batted away attempts to adapt the book in the past, and Wenger says he “had to audition, really, to persuade him to allow us to dramatise it”. He read the book the year he graduated from Exeter University. After a job as a magazine writer, he fell into television in his twenties. He took a year out to help at home after his father suffered a serious car accident, and found freelance work as a script reader.
Ask how he made it to the top, though, and he comes back with one name. Growing up in Stoke-on-Trent in the Eighties, Wenger fell in love with Victoria Wood. He adored her comedy but could see something beyond it. While working as a lowly script editor at Granada in 2003, he wrote her a “fan letter”.
“I just told her that I knew her work verbatim and that I could see she was someone who loved characters who were three-dimensional enough to carry stories, not just carry sketches. And so I wrote to ask her whether she’d be interested in exploring more dramatic work.”
To his delight, Wood wrote back. It was the beginning of a fruitful working partnership: their first collaboration was on the Baftawinning Housewife, 49, based on the wartime diaries of Lancashire wife and mother Nella Last. “It was a couple of years after her divorce, and she had this real desire to write about a marriage but didn’t want to write about her own in a very revealing way,” he says. “She was so good in it because she was able to put so much of herself into it.” Over the next decade, they made the Morecambe and Wise film Eric and Ernie, the drama Loving Miss Hatto, and Wood’s final writing
project, That Day We Sang. “I’d go to her house, we’d sit on the floor of her office and write out a description of each scene on index cards, then work out what order to arrange them in,” he recalls.
The pair were kindred spirits, and her death last year, at the age of 62, has affected him deeply. He was one of the few close friends who knew she had been diagnosed with cancer. “I spent a lot of time with her in the weeks up to her death,” he says. “It was really shocking; she wasn’t ill for that long.
“She was the first person who made me believe that I could be a producer,” he continues. “That made me incredibly loyal to her. So even when I was doing different jobs, whether it was Channel 4 or Doctor Who, I always wanted to read what she’d written because it was always extraordinary.”
Wenger, now 45, oversaw the revival of Doctor Who while at BBC Wales. He moved to become head of drama at Channel 4 in 2012, before returning to the BBC last year on a salary of £240,000. “I would say that if I looked through my old pay slips, I’ve taken a cut to do this job,” he says vaguely. He certainly doesn’t fit the stereotype of a media executive living large at Soho House: his last recorded expenses claim, for an external business meeting, was for £8.55.
He is convinced that BBC drama has a strong future. Recent shows have been unremittingly dark: Happy Valley, Line of Duty, The Missing, The Fall. But he points to two forthcoming series that will be jollier: an adaptation of J K Rowling’s Cormoran Strike novels and The Last Post, set on a military base in Sixties Aden, and starring Call The Midwife’s Jessica Raine. “There needs to be a good mix, but everything we do should be a celebration or reflection of British authorship and British life.”