What we can learn from British television

From Top Gear and Planet Earth to BBC News and Sherlock, British television can offer lessons to India, the world's second largest TV market

What is it about British entertainment? On Tuesday, Jeremy Clarkson, the irreverent and intemperate host of motoring show Top Gear, was in the middle of another controversy following allegations that he punched a producer on the sets. Within 24 hours, more than 280,000 fans had signed a petition asking BBC, which has dropped the show, to bring back Clarkson. By Friday this figure had reached 700,000. Among those who signed were people from Denmark, Sweden and Thailand and 212 other countries where the show is a huge hit.

Another popular British export is Sherlock, a brilliantly done contemporary take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic. It is, arguably, responsible for pushing drama’s share of BBC Worldwide’s revenues from one-third to half of its billion pounds top line. There were just three episodes of 90 minutes each in the first three seasons of Sherlock. The online wait for the fourth season is almost breathless. Lead star Benedict Cumberbatch is busy basking in the Oscar nomination for The Imitation Game and his recent marriage. He is in no mood to begin filming. Both he and Martin Freeman who plays Watson have become “so big,” sighs producer Susan Vertue.

Top Gear, Sherlock, Mr Selfridge, The Musketeers, Downton Abbey and even BBC News are among the surprisingly popular imports into the US where the media veers more right than left and which has grown up on Hollywood’s sugar-coated look at reality. America is the single biggest buyer of British TV shows. Large parts of Western Europe, particularly France, form the second biggest. In Asia, China is the fastest growing market for British drama and shows. Within 24 hours of its release, the third season of Sherlock was watched by 80 million people on YouKu, the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.

Then there are the formats. Britain’s Got Talent, British Idol and Strictly Come Dancing, which Indians know as India’s Got Talent, Indian Idol and Jhalak Dikhla Jaa, respectively, are among the dozens of formats that the UK’s independent production firms create and export, making it the largest seller of formats globally. “The UK speaks English. And producers are always taking creative risks here since they get to retain the IP (intellectual property),” says Cecile Frot-Coutaz, CEO, FremantleMedia, one of the largest TV content firms in the world. Tim Davie, CEO, BBC Worldwide, the biggest distributor of British content, adds, “There is an incredible history in the UK of storytelling and writing that fosters the creative industry.”

BBC's Planet Earth

The world agrees. In 2013-14, broadcasters in 200 countries spent more than £1.28 billion buying British comedies, reality (format) shows, natural history programming and other content, says a report of trade body PACT (Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television). That is a little less than half the £2.8 billion revenue that the independent production industry generated in 2013. This makes the UK the world’s second largest exporter of TV programmes after the US.

How did an industry that was shrinking just a decade back become the toast of the global entertainment economy? The reasons are a mix of hard policy decisions and softer, more textural ones. Both offer lessons for India, the world’s second largest TV market and the largest maker of films. At 160 million TV homes, 800 million viewers and 800 channels, India should be a rocking market for TV programming. It isn’t because pay revenues and industry structure play spoilsport. More than 70 per cent of the programming is commissioned. There are thousands of one- and two-man shops that operate as work-for-hire. The result is a hyper-fragmented, low-margin, TV production industry that cannot scale up and is not particularly creative.

This is what the UK independent production industry looked like a decade ago. The big broadcasters commissioned 90 per cent of their programming. A bulk of this went to their in-house production arms. By 2001, the profits of the top 50 independent producers had less than halved according to a PACT report. To push the growth and evolution of the independent production sector the Communications Act of 2003 changed the terms of trade. The biggest change was to mandate that IP would be retained by the production house.

In the UK, “a broadcaster cannot acquire an IP-only licence it, and this makes all the difference,” says Helen Jackson, chief content officer, BBC Worldwide. It was the single biggest trigger for the change in UK’s TV industry. IP ownership pushed independents to create programming that could travel across broadcasters and markets as they sought to scale up to recover their money. Till 2003, the only big format show out of the UK was Celador’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire. After that it was like a tap had been turned on. From £1.6 billion in 2004, the independent production sector went up to the current £2.8 in revenues, a chunk of this from exports.

Could moving away from the commissioned model to one where IP is owned by producers help Indian producers in building scale and improving programme quality? Broadcasters are opposed to the idea. Producers too are ambivalent. “We don’t have the infrastructure to monetise IP,” says Jamnadas Majethia of Hats Off Productions. Viacom18, for instance, syndicates its commissioned content in dubbed or sub-titled form to local channels in 125 countries. This requires manpower and money that the average production house with a top line of Rs 5-10 crore simply doesn’t have.

If monetising IP is a game for the big boys, how does, say, Hartswood Films which has just eight people make money on its show Sherlock? This brings in the second reason for the UK creative industry’s global success. This may seem strange for most Indians but BBC, ITV and Channel 4, which air some of the best shows and dominate viewership charts, are public service broadcasters. It was their work-for-hire attitude that caused the problem. When the IP laws changed many had to rethink their role.

BBC Worldwide, BBC’s commercial arm, now calls itself a content distributor. It buys rights to distribute, air or resell from more than 250 independent producers in the UK. It then uses its events such as Showcase, a content market in Liverpool every year, to hawk these shows. This year more than 700 buyers came to Showcase to sample shows such as Wolf Hall or Shark. BBC Worldwide is also a sort of venture capital investor in several small content firms that may have great ideas. It then gets the first right of refusal and a share of profits like it did in, say Wallander, a critically acclaimed show.

You could argue that Star India or Zee could play that role. But “a lot of it has to do with the way BBC is funded,” thinks David Weiland, executive vice-president, Asia, BBC Worldwide. British TV owners pay an annual licence fee that is used for public service broadcasting in the UK. While BBC Worldwide has nothing to do with this technically, it monetises the content that BBC commissions in order to support the licence fee.

Damian Lewis in Wolf Hall

But the licence fee does help the mothership, BBC, to take calls most private broadcasters would not. For example Shark, a co-production between BBC’s Natural History Unit and Discovery, took over two years and high-end camera technology to capture sharks courting each other, giving birth or cleaning their teeth. Time, effort and investment of this sort usually results in a quality that the world likes digging into. A BBC Worldwide survey of over 10,000 people in 10 key markets showed that British humour and content quality are the biggest draws for audiences.

And that brings us to the third set of reasons why British content works — the English language, the resonance that English literature has and the fascination for all things English that this breeds. “British drama is a marketable version of Britishness — like (James) Bond or Sherlock or Dr Who,” quips Steve Moffat, television writer and producer (Dr Who and Sherlock).

The Indian market lacks both: a corporate body that aggregates IP across genres and producers, and the English connect. A global aggregator of Indian TV content, a la BBC Worldwide, can happen only when the huge domestic market matures enough to want high-end local drama. Even at the high-end, Indian drama will rock only in local languages, so the markets it will tap into are the ones with cultural affinity – the West Asia, Asia and parts of Africa.

This one then is going to be a long journey for Indian television. Watching British television may be a one way of spending the intervening time.