In two months’ time, almost six years to the day that BBC Three became a solely internet network in order to save money, the service is returning as a linear channel. Arguably, it’s not a moment too soon. For, along with every other traditional broadcaster, the BBC is grappling with how to attract younger audiences and compete effectively with the streamers.
Bafta award-winning production designer Joel Collins, whose credits include BBC One/HBO fantasy drama His Dark Materials, was in conversation with Falmouth University’s head of television and film, Kingsley Marshall.
Collins explained that the role went way beyond an “opportunity to sketch and draw, visualise stuff and wear a cravat”. Instead, Collins explained, “you’re like a ringmaster of a circus, which is really more complex than anyone realises”.
When Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game launched on 17 September, for viewers outside its algorithmic pull, it was buried deep within Netflix’s content offer. But, over the next four weeks, this idiosyncratic show snowballed to reach 142 million households (there’s a viewership figure that Netflix didn’t mind sharing), overtaking Bridgerton to become the stream- er’s most-watched series launch ever.
Little, it seems, has changed in the 36 years since Edge of Darkness was first shown. Conspiracy and cover-up, environmental devastation and the threat of nuclear destruction were stitched into the fabric of the 1980s and are no less relevant now.
If this were all that Edge of Darkness had offered, however, it wouldn’t be so fondly remembered or, indeed, recognised by many critics as British TV drama’s finest moment.
Many TV producers have been making great efforts to cut their carbon footprint over the past few years. There is still much more to do behind the camera, but more attention is now being given to environmental messages on-screen.
The panel assembled for an RTS Cymru Wales event this month boasted the two winners of the Edinburgh TV Festival Green Award. Roger Williams’s bilingual cop series Bang won the inaugural award in 2020, while Sky Sports, represented on the panel by its manager for responsible production, Jo Finon, won this year.
This will be my third time presenting the Paralympics. I was a pundit for the BBC in Beijing. In 2012 and 2016, I was a presenter in London and Rio for Channel 4.
To prepare, I have been updating my knowledge of the athletes. I still play wheelchair basketball at club level. Quite a few of the players, such as Gaz Choudhry and Helen Freeman, who are in the national team, I know well. I trained some of them as they worked to get into the team.
It is regarded as the BBC’s biggest transformation in decades, as the corporation prepares to further shift its centre of gravity away from London in favour of the likes of Birmingham and Newcastle.
In March, Director-General Tim Davie pledged to better reflect the UK’s nations and regions by moving expenditure amounting to £700m by March 2028 and hundreds of jobs outside the capital as part of a new “Across the UK” strategy.
Picture the last few female Muslim characters you saw on television and you’re bound to include one of the following stereotypes: a conservative mother, an oppressed adult or a woman in a burqa with no dialogue or personality.
The obituary of TV advertising has been written many times since the 2008 financial crisis and, each time, it has confounded the doomsayers. The television ad market suffered its steepest downturn on record between April and June 2020. There were declines of close to 50% during the worst of the pandemic, yet it has bounced back.
ITV has told investors it expects its ad revenues to be up as much as 90% in June – thanks in part to the Euros, rescheduled from 2020, and the return of Love Island.
Bringing a cherished project to television can take several years’ hard graft; for it to take decades is much more unusual. But, thanks to BritBox, an adaptation of The Beast Must Die – written by Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis under his crime-writer pen name, Nicholas Blake – has finally reached the TV screen.
