In the light of today’s news in the Guardian that Screen Yorkshire is potentially facing amalgamation into a larger regional agency this guest blog by writer David Allison is even more poignant.
Walking down the corridors of Yorkshire Television on the first day of my first TV job back in 1998, I was awestruck by the pictures lining the walls of past shows made at those venerable studios. In that squat, unassuming and rather ugly looking building on the Kirkstall Road, an incredible roster of dramas came to life: Rising Damp, The New Statesman, The Darling Buds of May, A Touch of Frost, Harry’s Game, The Beiderbecke Trilogy.
Though there was a sense that perhaps the glory days of YTV were behind them, when I started, it was still an exciting, buzzy place to work. In the month I started, as well as Emmerdale, there was At Home With The Braithwaites, A Touch of Frost, Heartbeat and a single drama called Lost for Words starring Thora Hird and Pete Postlethwaite. The place may not have the metropolitan edge of its London counterparts, but it was a brilliant regional centre that knew how to make great television.
The BBC has always been and will probably always be London-centric. It has the odd centre of excellence outside London, and perhaps in time the Salford move might change that perception, but ostensibly, it’s a London institution and it thinks like one. ITV was always the refreshing counterpart to that – it thrived on regional identity and was made of up an umbrella of fiercely individual regional companies, all making their own television. How proud I always felt to see that YTV logo on the end of programmes as a kid.
The writing was probably on the wall even before I worked there. As the individual ITV franchises won the right to buy each other, it was only a matter of time before the biggest ate the smallest and they became one big company. Yorkshire already owned Tyne Tees by the time I had started my job; then Granada bought us and our email suffixes became granadamedia.com and eventually ITV.com as the takeovers amassed into one ITV plc. In the meantime, YTV got run down, making fewer shows. Execs left and weren’t replaced, new investment never came and it began to look vulnerable.
Following ITV’s disastrous move into digital TV and its shocking decision to buy Friends Reunited for £175m (only to sell it for £25m four years later), it began looking for cuts, and now it was one big company, well, you can guess what happened next. The further away from London, the more vulnerable it seemed you were. Manchester was slashed to pieces but just about survived. Leeds suffered a worst fate: it was ‘mothballed’. YTV as a home of home-grown drama, apart from one soap, was dead.
I wasn’t shocked by the mute response the story got in the national press, but I was by the muted response in Leeds itself. I wondered if the city realised what it was about to lose. As a producer friend of mine said at the time, we might as well live in Grimsby now in TV terms – we’re no longer in a city with its own televisual culture.
Since then, agencies such as Screen Yorkshire have worked successfully to attract filming to the region – but, alas, it is not the same as making home-grown drama. DCI Banks: Aftermath and Married, Single, Other both filmed here in the last couple of years and both were made by London indie Left Bank Pictures. As a result, London execs, producers and directors hired their crews from London talent. I knew a London-based crew member on the latter who, like most the crew, was being put up at the Metropole at great expense. In the meantime, local crews with decades of experience were overlooked by producers who don’t know about local talents – and in a generation’s time that talent won’t exist.
I think it was a very short-sighted decision. Not only does it make more economic sense to invest in a local centre of production, it means you’re more likely to make a wider range of programmes that appeal to a geographically diverse demographic. Yorkshire used to be a place that made its own drama: it’s now a location for London indies to use when they fancy it. Personally, I always fight to try and set my work in Yorkshire, but I only have so much power. My series Boy Meets Girl was originally set in Leeds, but as it was made by ITV Manchester, that inevitably moved over the Pennines. Ditto Bedlam, the show two other writers and I have co-created that hits the screen next month: it was once set in Leeds but Manchester won out because that’s where the indie that makes it is based. I’m currently developing an idea set in Whitby – I’ve chosen it at least partly because I want to make the sense of place and the story so entwined that it has to be shot in Whitby and nowhere else. But in the end, I may not get the final say.
I wish I end on an optimistic note, but I’m struggling to do so. I’m sad that YTV seemed to go without much of a fight. I don’t know if it was just accepted with a phlegmatic Yorkshire shrug, or whether fighting was useless anyway. But one thing’s for sure: we lost something very precious and we’ll probably never get it back.
A very insightful and moving article. I’m originally from Chesterfield, where we had the choice between YTV or Central. I remember my dad choosing YTV because the news was ‘better’, the issues more relevant, the people on it being more down to earth.
I had no idea that YTV made so many different programmes. Local students and graduates would really benefit from a creative centre like that now.
It’s ironic that having allowed ITV to completely destroy it’s local services, and pushing the BBC to make similar cut-backs (with regional specialist radio shows being cancelled and merged) the current government is now tendering for a new generation of local TV stations – although more around the model of low-budget local news & chat, like German and American city stations, than meaningful local drama production.
I think where we’ve obviously made a misstep is in not helping to develop indigenous independent production – there must have been a real brain drain of the talent previously employed in the region – and as Manchester shows, an indigenous media industry helps create a lot of secondary jobs.
I think the govt’s new micro-local station idea is a load of drivel, to be honest, Jules. It’s a piece of window dressing – like the ‘pupil premium’ in education – that makes them look like they have a few ideas amongst all the savage cuts. It’s a really half-arsed, ill-thought through notion, though one would expect no better from Jeremy Hunt.
I’d agree that the region neglected developing a televisual drama culture around YTV – though it’s important to note that’s not true in all fields, e.g. True North Productions’s success in documentary making. But it’s also not true to say all is rosy in Manchester, and outside of Red and a couple of others, there isn’t much of a drama culture. The big difference is the Salford move, which, despite the cack-handedness of the BBC’s attempts to move departments, may well flourish into something permanent and important for the North. Alas, not for this side of the Pennines.
One thing I’d add is that I think the death of YTV illustrates a lack of cultural leadership in the city. Screen Yorkshire put out a brilliantly combative and supportive press release in response to the news and worked tirelessly to limit the damage in all kinds of practical ways. The Council just shrugged and made some mumbling noises about what a shame it was (just as they did about the Corn Exchange). And I didn’t hear a peep from almost any other important cultural institution in the city offering support or voicing opposition.
If we are to cherish the many important cultural institutions we do have in Leeds, we have to work together and we need to find leaders and vocal activists to stand up and fight when times are tough. This was a common theme in the Leeds Initiative get together I attended last week. Let’s not kid ourselves – these could be very bleak years ahead under this Government. We need each other and we need to work together.
I regretfully turned down a job at ITV last year – the cuts they were facing meant they couldn’t match my salary, it was a real shame and a very, very tough decision to make. I have always wanted to work in TV and the prints of 70s TV stars on the walls of the interview room only made the decision more difficult, but I had a feeling times were hard at the Kirkstall Road studios and were not about to improve any time soon. Such a great article, thank you.
Incidentally, I have apparently been shortlisted for consideration when BBC North starts recruiting – it looks really exciting.
YTV is over – let it die and let’s encourage a thousand flowers to bloom on its resting place. What if the talent that made TV tick for the last few decades turned its head to producing great online video.
Look at the success of TED.com – free, high quality, well-produced, web-based video content has huge global audience and lucrative sponsors. Why didn’t YTV even experiment with that?
If you’re in media and not publicly experimenting and innovating digital services – then everyone else will eat you up.
Imran, surely there’s room for both traditional televisual content and web based video? Wouldn’t it have been great if we’d had both. As for the idea of YTV experimenting with it…. er, let’s just say it was a pretty old school place. That’s putting it lightly.
TV generally is a real dinosaur of an industry. It’s bewildered by the pace of change and, on the whole, doesn’t understand new media very well (Ch4 being a notable exception). Most ‘new media strategies’ employed by broadcasters are just decorative trimmings and don’t exist at the heart of their ideas.
Having said that, the death of TV is vastly overestimated. People’s viewing habits have changed much less than doom-mongers had predicted and viewers still take a real pleasure in ‘appointment viewing’, despite the rise of Sky Plus and the hard drives. Commissioners have realised that drama in particular adds quality and distinctiveness to a channel like nothing else. And making drama remains the most time consuming and expensive way of making television – and it’s also the genre that generates regional pride most powerfully. That’s why, for all the developments in new media and the explosion in web based broadcasting, the death of a production centre for making television drama in our region is still something to be mourned.