‘Wolf Hall’ Director Peter Kosminsky Says British Dramatists In Danger Of “Insidious Self-Censorship” Amid Funding Crisis
EXCLUSIVE: Peter Kosminsky, the BAFTA-winning television director and writer, has claimed that the funding emergency for British dramas is the “greatest crisis we’ve ever faced in my working lifetime.”
In an exclusive interview with Deadline, the Wolf Hall director claimed that the industry is in danger of self-censoring provocative, public-interest series because of the risk that they won’t secure the necessary finance to enter production.
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The funding crisis is dominating discussions in the UK scripted community, as executives lament a perfect storm of issues, including U.S. streamers pulling back from co-production, shrinking international sales advances, persistent inflation, ad revenue declines, and BBC funding cuts.
Pact, the UK producer trade body, estimates that there are around 15 British series that have been greenlit but are unable to enter production because of funding shortfalls. The BBC has admitted multiple shows are in “limbo,” with Deadline revealing that one series experiencing issues is A24’s adaptation of Booker Prize-winner Shuggie Bain.
Kosminsky is concerned that the problem is going to get worse before it gets better. “It’s not because projects will pile up in limbo without enough money to complete their funding, but because more won’t even get to that point,” he said. “Producers, directors, and writers won’t bother trying to submit them because they know there’s no chance of making them.”
He described this as becoming “silent, insidious self-censorship” that could lead to the “invisible” decay of shows including Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama that caused political outcry and expedited a fight for justice, and Three Girls, the BBC grooming gang series.
Kosminsky compared the crisis to the closure of steel factories in the UK, resulting in a skilled workforce retraining, retiring, or losing work. “There’s a real danger that we lose the habit of making these kinds of dramas,” he said. “We’ve got one of the proudest traditions of television in the world and if our industry has got to the point where we can’t make that kind of drama anymore, because streamers don’t think it will travel internationally … we’re in a desperate situation.”
Kosminsky pointed to a personal example of a series he has funding concerns over. Almost two years ago, the BBC greenlit a three-part drama about the Grenfell Tower fire, a national tragedy in which 72 people perished in a devastating blaze at a London housing block.
Work is ramping up on Grenfell following the public inquiry and the BBC remains committed to the project, but Kosminsky is uncertain he would have embarked on the series in the current climate. “It will be a complicated drama involving special effects and visual effects and probably quite a large cast. And it’s not unreasonable to ask: how’s this going to get made? Currently, we’re voyaging hopefully.”
The director, whose body of work includes BAFTA-winning limited series Warriors, was speaking after his headline-grabbing evidence to lawmakers last week, in which he revealed that Mark Rylance took a significant pay cut to get Season 2 of Wolf Hall made for the BBC. Kosminsky said he worked on the Tudor drama “completely unpaid” for periods and felt a duty to get the show produced to honor the memory of author Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022.
Kosminky’s solution to the funding crunch is to require streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to hand over 5% of their UK subscription revenue to a cultural fund for British content. He pointed to 17 other territories, including France and Germany, where similar schemes are in place.
Kosminky has met with the government to discuss the idea, which he first raised in 2018, but ministers appeared to have ruled it out as a solution. Sir Chris Bryant, the creative industries minister, said on Tuesday that “we haven’t got any plans” to follow other European countries in introducing a so-called streamer levy.
There are concerns that a levy could disrupt the UK’s screen ecology — including the high levels of investment from the likes of Netflix and Apple TV+ in series including The Gentlemen and Slow Horses — though Kosminky is not persuaded by this argument. Either way, the BFI is carrying out a review of streamer levies, which is expected to report over the summer.
Kosminky is clear that expanding tax credits is not the answer. He argued that tax breaks for lower-budget series would not be enough to plug funding gaps and could drive up rate inflation as streamers take advantage of incentives in the UK to make stories for a global audience.
Netflix has shown, however, that the two are not always mutually exclusive. Although they are not about urgent and uniquely UK issues, series with a distinctly British flavor, like Baby Reindeer and Fool Me Once, have scored massive audiences around the world.
Kosminky said: “I don’t think that streamers have set out to crush trouble-making drama. This destruction of a time-honored strand of our British programming is an unintended consequence of their of financial model.”
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