UK TV industry in crisis, says Wolf Hall director
The director of acclaimed period drama Wolf Hall says filming of last year’s second series was nearly called off weeks before it was due to begin because of budget pressures.
Peter Kosminsky told BBC Two’s Newsnight they eventually opted to axe costly exterior scenes in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light, meaning almost everything in the Tudor drama, screened by the BBC, became “conversations in rooms” instead.
He argues public service broadcasters including the BBC and ITV can no longer afford to make high-end British drama.
The Bafta and Golden Globe-winning director is calling for a 5% levy on UK subscription streaming revenues, with the proceeds collected for a British cultural fund.
Kosminsky told the BBC that six weeks before shooting began, having already cut certain props, locations, costumes and cast members, he and the producer decided the gap was still “too great” to go ahead with making The Mirror and The Light.
“That’s not something that has ever happened to me before, in all the years I’ve been making programmes, that you actually have to stop six weeks from production.”
Kosminsky has previously revealed that he – alongside Sir Mark Rylance, who played Thomas Cromwell, executive producer Colin Callender and Oscar-winning writer Peter Straughan – took significant pay cuts to get the programme over the line.
He said the original script “had many scenes set outside, many scenes involving horses, we had a whole joust, an extraordinary scene as conceived by Hilary Mantel, the original novelist – and we had to cut everything”.
He said he was still “incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved, and the response overwhelmed us all”.
But the original concept was a programme with “more fresh air in it, where you got more of a sense of Tudor society out in the world, and the lives these people lived when they weren’t in the throne rooms, palaces and beautiful dining rooms”.
Kosminsky said things had got worse since he filmed the drama, which was broadcast in November.
Now, he argues, public service broadcasters would not be able to afford to commission Wolf Hall or Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the landmark ITV drama about the Post Office scandal.
One day in the not too distant future, he warns, British audiences will notice these types of programmes are “gone”.
Kosminsky also believes there is “no way” the BBC or ITV could afford to make Adolescence, the current hit show from Netflix about a teenager accused of murder.
Adolescence writer Jack Thorne thinks traditional broadcasters could have made the drama, but they would have had to cut some of the most expensive scenes.
“It would have been a slightly different version of it,” Thorne told the BBC.
“In episode two, I wrote a fire drill that involved 300 extras. Those 300 extras had to be employed for 10 days. That is an awful lot of money. So all these things would have been difficult on a public service budget.
“I think we could have done it, it just would have been very different. And truthfully, it probably would have needed co-finance from abroad, and the problem at the moment is that finance has disappeared.”
The impact of Covid and the 2023 US actors’ and writers’ strikes, as well as higher energy costs, are some of the reasons often given for the increasing costs of TV production.
And Kosminsky is not alone in arguing that the advent of streaming platforms has inflated prices so dramatically that the public service broadcasters have been unable to keep up.
Patrick Spence, the executive producer behind Mr Bates vs the Post Office, told the BBC this was “a serious issue”.
“Not only would Mr Bates not get funded today, but I wouldn’t even have started developing it,” he said.
Former subpostmaster Sir Alan Bates, whose story was central to the programme named after him, said it would be “a real shame” if these kinds of dramas could no longer be made.
Mr Bates vs the Post Office meant “a lot of people saw for the first time the sort of hell going on in the background in the Post Office, the real miscarriage of justice going on right across the country”, he said.
Spence said the price of making dramas had risen at the same time as the international funding model had dried up for these types of shows. Later this year, his ITV drama The Hack, about the phone hacking scandal, by Adolescence writer Jack Thorne, will air in the UK.
Spence said there was “no way” he could raise the money to fund that programme now.
Streaming levy
Figures out last month from the BFI showed £5.6bn was spent on high end TV and film production in the UK in 2024. But domestic UK programmes accounted for £598m, down 22% on the previous year.
Kosminsky argues that a levy on the streamers would put the UK in line with some other European countries that use the proceeds to fund domestic content, such as France and Denmark.
But with many streamers based in the US, would the UK government take on Donald Trump’s administration?
In February, a White House memorandum referenced levies on US streaming services, calling them “one-sided, anti-competitive policies” that “violate American sovereignty”.
On Thursday, as she accepted an award from the Broadcasting Press Guild, Jayne Featherstone, executive producer of Netflix’s Black Doves, said the UK was “at risk of losing the very stories that define us”.
“We are in the 45th minute of the pilot episode, and we’ve got five minutes left to stop the bomb from going off,” she said.
She recently told a House of Commons committee she would like to see an uplift in tax relief for high end television, similar to the one already given to the film sector.
