Were Britain’s Emmy wins really ours to claim?
Homegrown stars may have swept the board but, says Stephen Armstrong, the victory belongs more to the US broadcasters who’ve bought into our best talent
This year’s Emmys were a wake-up call. Partly because the results were being read out on the Today programme as my alarm went off, and partly because of the endless parade of British voices gratefully accepting their gongs: Ewan Mcgregor, Kate Winslet, John Oliver, Michaela Coel, The Crown stars Olivia Colman and Josh O’connor, Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddington and Brett Goldstein…
And behind the camera we had the Scottish writer Allan Scott, aka Allan Shiach, the former chairman and chief executive of Macallanglenlivet turned creator of The Queen’s Gambit.
Indeed, the only Emmy winner this year without some British DNA was Hacks, a comedy about two generations of stand-ups beloved by US critics but yet to receive a UK transmission date.
In all, 14 out of the 27 awards this year were won by Brits. Yet it feels like a Pyrrhic victory. Of these triumphs, actual UK broadcasters can claim just one – Michaela Coel, who won for writing the BBC drama I May Destroy You, a co-production with US cable channel HBO.
Even though Ted Lasso and The Crown are ostensibly British – for those without Apple TV+, Ted Lasso is about a US football coach hired to train struggling British club AFC Richmond – it’s impossible to imagine them being made by British broadcasters. The BBC did get a shot at The Crown, but wanted so many changes and offered so little cash that the UK production company Left Bank found the millions of dollars and total creative freedom that Netflix offered somehow slightly more attractive.
To really see what’s going on, it’s instructive to compare this year’s winner’s podium with the Emmys of a decade ago. Kate Winslet, bless her luvvie heart, nabbed Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie then and now – for Mare of Easttown in 2021 and Mildred Pierce in 2011. We’ll always have Kate Winslet.
Back in 2011, we also had a healthy crop of British nominations: Kelly Macdonald, Archie Punjabi, Alan Cumming and Hugh Laurie were all shortlisted, as were Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs and Sherlock. The US remake of The Office, which possibly counts as British under WTO trading arrangements, is there, as is Episodes, the Matt Leblanc comedy by British production company Hattrick co-starring British comedy treasures Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan. The rest, however, is much the same as it had been for years – NBC, ABC, CBS and a handful of sly winks to HBO and FX.
Today, the winning channels are mainly streamers. Apple TV+, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and Hulu have all filled their cabinets thanks to British performers. The Crown’s seven wins, Ted Lasso’s four, John Oliver’s two and Kate Winslet’s one total more gongs than the major networks added together. Which, given all the major US networks between them only won one award for Saturday Night Live, means Kate Winslet is as successful an Emmy winner as the whole of the US network system.
So whatever happened to the Brits at the Emmys?
Take another look at those British shows that were nominated in 2011:
Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs and Sherlock. Two about posh Brits in big country houses, and one about a weird Brit dealing with frightfully British institutions. Do you see what the streamers have done? They made
The Crown, about posh Brits in big country houses, and Ted Lasso, about a weird American dealing with frightfully British institutions. How did these outlier tech companies storm Hollywood? By sending in the British. American streaming services have stolen our television.
But – and here’s the crucial point – not by sending us in on our terms. Alongside the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, there’s an almost invisible collection of golden raspberries, one for each confident British assertion that we’re in the game now.
You can still see poor Colin Welland now, the Chariots of Fire screenwriter whose 1982 Oscar acceptance speech included the ralling cry that “the British are coming!” Chariots’ production company Goldcrest just didn’t have the reserves to cope with three flops (the barely remembered Revolution, The Mission and Absolute Beginners) and was sold, nearly bankrupt, in 1987.
Working Title Films – which gave us Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually, as well as film versions of Ali G, Mr Bean and the Lloyd-webber musical Cats – was born from the death of Polygram Filmed Entertainment in 2000. The next great British independent film-making hope, Film4, collapsed in 2002. We get knocked down, but we get up again… and the Americans are always there to pocket the pieces.
Right now, the British production sector is booming – thanks, it must be said, to tax breaks introduced by Gordon Brown and enhanced by George Osborne. The first half of this year saw a combined total spend on film and high-end television production in the UK of £3.6 billion from 300 productions, roughly the same as the previous 12-month record high of £3.62 billion for the whole of 2019, according to figures from the British Film Institute.
Last month, the owners of Sunset Studios in Los Angeles, where the likes of When Harry Met Sally and La La Land were filmed, announced it had bought a 91-acre plot in Hertfordshire and planned to turn it into a £700 million “world-class” film and TV studios facility. Earlier this summer, Pinewood Studios outlined a £450 million expansion, which would help create a “screen industries global growth hub” to develop the UK’S entertainment industry workforce. We’re opening new studios. We’re making more movies and high-end television than ever before. The next explosive instalment of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible franchise has been filmed, with majority British crews, in locations as exotic as a vintage railway in Yorkshire and a disused quarry near Stoney Middleton in the Peak District. The Flash, a new DC Comics superhero film, is the latest Hollywood blockbuster to be filmed in Glasgow, in the footsteps of Indiana Jones and Batman, with the Merchant City being an adequate stand-in for downtown New York. So great is the demand, we’re desperately short of crews and equipment. It’s as if we’re literally living in Hollywood, but without the sunshine and excellent food.
And yet, it’s mainly US studios that are bankrolling the good times; in 2019, American networks and streamers launched 532 new scripted shows. In 2020, in the middle of the global pandemic, they still managed to push out 493 brand new series. They are still pumping it out – and yet it’s the Brits that get the gongs (if not the cash).
Why? The US training system simply does not deliver consistent quality for demanding long-form TV storytelling.
Hollywood comes over to the UK and buys our talent once it’s been properly cooked – after the taxpayer has subsidised young playwrights and actors, after the licence-fee payer has developed programme styles and production companies, and after Channel 4’s remit has forced creatives to think differently just to get their shows on air.
In this country, we still only have a handful of people who commission the television we watch, and the combined BBC and ITV entire programme budget of £3.4 billion isn’t close to Netflix’s $17 billion (£12.5 billion). Indeed, Netflix spends $1 billion on Uk-produced shows, making its UK arm the same size as the whole of ITV.
Hollywood believes great talent deserves lots of money; what UK broadcaster could come close to the $4.5 million HBO reportedly paid Kate Winslet to play a dowdy detective in Mare of Easttown? In the UK, we take the view that artists shouldn’t want to be rich. Look at that vulgarian Damien Hirst…
What we do about this depends on how much you care. You just want the balance of payments to work out? Fine, take the money. Don’t worry about the report from research firm Enders Analysis that found these shows erase their Britishness.
This is something for Nadine Dorries to ponder on as begins her new job as Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
What are we willing to sell, Nadine? And what do we get in return?
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