Hits and failures
‘You can’t insure against failure. If you do you won’t ever create a hit because you’ll be so terrified of anything that feels different that you’ll never commission anything that might connect in a challenging and fresh way. Ultimately, hits are shows that audiences love for their distinctiveness and originality. In retrospect, people think hits are obvious. People think Call the Midwife and Sherlock were obvious hits. I assure you they were not. Some things are clearly bigger risks than others, but in their own mainstream way both these dramas were big risks for a variety of reasons. So, if you’re scared of failure, don’t commission these shows, but also don’t ever expect to have a hit.’
On commissioning
‘The questions to ask are: firstly, is it an idea that you feel the audience will engage with? No one turns on the television thinking, ‘I’ve no idea what this is about but I hope it’s good.’ You turn it on because you think that the idea is appealing. So you have to ask yourself: Is it an interesting idea? Is it fresh, is it distinctive? Secondly, you have to ask yourself the question: Is the script a complete iteration of its idea? Thirdly, do the team who are working on it, by which I mean the writer and the production team, have a completely clear vision of the show that they are making? Fourthly, do they have an unerring commitment to and passion for the show? Would they lie down in front of a train to make it? If every answer to one of those is yes, then you should make it.’
ITV
Recent or on-going output: Downton Abbey, Injustice, Love Life, Midsomer Murders, Scott & Bailey, Titanic, Whitechapel
ITV is the UK’s longest-serving commercial broadcaster. Drama is the cornerstone of the schedule, combining long-serving continuing dramas Coronation Street and Emmerdale with original post-watershed drama playing out at nine o’clock three or four times a week throughout the year. ITV’s flagship channel, ITV1, broadcasts the vast majority of the dramas, though ITV2 occasionally broadcasts original British drama such as Diary of a Call Girl, Trinity and The Witches.
ITV seeks to make as many of its own shows as possible via its independent production arm, ITV Studios, but it also commissions shows from other independent production companies.
Victoria Fea is a commissioning executive for ITV. In a 19-year career she has worked as a script editor, producer and executive producer including a spell as Creative Director at BBC Drama Production.
Victoria Fea, ITV Drama Commissioning Executive, on…
Sample scripts
‘An idea isn’t enough. I can have a good idea but I’m not a writer. Anyone can write an idea. Anyone can have a paragraph or half a page that they have come up with. The thing I always say to new writers in particular is that you have got to have a sample that is your voice. It needs to be at least 60 minutes and in an ideal world it has to be 90 minutes. You have got be able to write and structure and storyline a film-length narrative because that is going to be your calling card because whoever hires you, even if it’s as an episodic writer on another show or long-runner, if they can’t hear your voice in the first place they can’t tell. Certainly, I can’t tell what I think about a writer until I’ve read something that is theirs, completely theirs, not an episode of Casualty or an episode of Holby; I mean something they’ve written from the heart. When someone submits an idea and it is a writer that I don’t actually know or I haven’t worked with or read before, I will say I need a sample. I don’t mind whatever they’ve written on – if I don’t have first-hand experience of them, then I need to read a script that is not a series.’
Development
‘We do a lot of development here. It very rarely starts with a script on a desk – it is usually an idea in a room with a producer and the writer may or may not be in that room, but basically it starts with an idea. It is very, very occasionally that a script drops on the desk that has been developed elsewhere, that someone has done off their own back, but usually it is just the normal development process. I have an assistant who is a reader who deals with general submissions and if a script comes in that we don’t really know why it has come in or where it has come from, and we don’t have a relationship with that person, I will ask the reader to read it because it is less likely that it would be something we would want to do.’
Preferred writers
‘We’re always saying to producers: we don’t expect you to give the A-listers all the time. We’re waiting for them anyway. They’re on our slate. It’s just they are not free. If they are free, they are doing something for us. The only criteria we have is that the writer who originates a brand-new idea for us is capable of creating something that is commercial, that’s mainstream, popular telly. The only thing we need here is an audience. We don’t care whether the writer has written for television before. One of our frontrunner projects as I speak, although we’re not greenlit, is by a writer who has written a handful of plays but has never written for TV. So we don’t really mind about experience. The truth is you’re more likely be able to hit a sweet spot with ITV if you are an experienced mainstream writer. It is very rare to get straight off the blocks with a writer and have all those tools at your disposal to be able to create something from scratch that will speak to the ITV audience and be a hit. That is quite rare to do that without experience. It is easier to cut your teeth on things that don’t have that commercial pressure.’
What ITV wants
‘We are pretty loud and clear about what we want all the time, actually. We say it at every road show and we say it at every general meeting with an indie. A few times a year we go round the big agencies and we talk with the writers’ agents. ITV is a commercial channel. We need an audience. We’re not ashamed of that. That’s how all the channels operate in the States. None of us believe you leave quality at the door in order to get an audience because that would be a depressing thought. So it is a very clear proposition at ITV. It is very clear what we need to achieve. The stakes are very high. It is less clear at the BBC what they have to achieve. They have to have something for everybody. They have to be pluralist because we all pay for it. At ITV we need an audience. It is very clear what we need to do at this channel. It is very scary. The stakes are so high and it is pretty black and white. It is very easy to say no because if something is not naturally a commercial, mainstream idea we can’t do it.’
ITV being the crime channel
‘We’re always saying we don’t want to be the crime channel. That’s why we have Downton Abbey. That’s why we made Marchlands. That’s why we make five singles a year. We’re constantly saying we really don’t want to be the crime channel. We have to deliver crime because that’s what our audience responds to but we have had a moratorium on detectives for months now. That’s why Downton was so brilliant for the channel. In one hit it suddenly declared we’re not just crime!’
Pitching to ITV
‘People sometimes email us a one-liner or a paragraph, or in a general meeting people will pitch us things – we look at verbal pitches. They’ll send us a page or two pages. Sometimes someone will send me a sample and say ‘This writer’s brilliant. Do you agree?’ and I’ll say ‘Yes, I love that sample – it’s fantastic’ and please encourage them if they’ve got that natural ITV voice. I will probably also inquire about their experience because if I read a sample that’s brilliant and that person has written a couple of episodes for a couple of series, they have kind of cut their teeth on the process of what it is like to write because in television it is a process, and then I’ll be really excited. Basically, we’ll respond to an idea and we’ll kill it straight dead or we’ll encourage it to bits.’
Calculated risks
‘We take calculated risks. It depends on the taste of the Director of Television. Peter Fincham has got very sound mainstream tastes but he likes to take creative risks. So you can tell with the Marchlands format that is an accessible idea because it’s about a family across decades. There is a slight genre thread but it is about the death of a child so that is goin
g to hook in our audience. The families everyone can relate to that – there’s a kind of accessibility to it. There was a spookiness to it and actually, was it all just in their heads? There actually wasn’t a ghost in Marchlands but it felt different enough. It sort of stood out. So that was a really clever calculated risk. There was a way in for our audience but at the same time we were pushing them towards something unexpected for the channel. So that’s what you can do on ITV – you can do calculated risks every now and again. You have to be confident to take risks. You have to be in a place where things are going OK.’
Pushing ITV’s parameters
‘It is far better for the writers and indies to push us and for us to pull them back because wouldn’t it be boring if everyone self-edited all the time? You’re never going to get breakthrough surprise shows like that. When Downton Abbey came here there was a moratorium on period drama. Then Gareth Neame said: “What about Julian Fellowes writing the series of Gosford Park?” ITV went: “OK we’ll just have a look at that.” So you want people to ignore you quite a lot of the time but then trust you when you say: “That was really brave but actually it just isn’t going to get an audience.” That hopefully sets up a relationship whereby you are encouraging people to follow their passions and go for their instincts and allow writers to write what they want to write while you act as the editor.’
Original period drama
‘A BBC period show is usually, in the eyes of the audience anyway, literary and more often than not a literary classic and an adaptation. Both Laura Mackie and Sally Haynes who commissioned Downton Abbey were very much of the view that ITV don’t do remakes and ITV don’t do adaptations. Now ITV does original period writing. They wouldn’t have done Upstairs, Downstairs – it was a remake. We do Downton Abbey because it is original writing and it’s very authored.
Year-round commissioning
‘Obviously we’re commissioning for very specific slots, so we might commission all year round but we know what we’re aiming for.We don’t commission willy-nilly. You commission for a slot and you commission for a season. So in November we commissioned a raft of things for next autumn.’
Greenlighting a show
‘What we’re pretty strict about is, we won’t greenlight a series idea without two scripts. We’ll commission a serial quite often on Episode 1, but a series idea we will greenlight after we’ve read Episode 1 and 2 and the storylines, but there’s rarely enough time to develop all the scripts before you shoot.’
Recommissioning
‘These days the magic number is five. If something is consolidating – I mean not just the overnights but the catch-up as well at well over 5 million – it’s a bit of a no-brainer. Even then you usually wait until the end of the run. It has to be massive for us to recommission during the run. Why would we? If you wait, you can get the research and look at all the consolidated figures – sometimes they go up 1 million, 1.5 million with catch-up. You can get some focus group stuff done. Obviously, things like that are really valuable when things are sort of on the cusp. We want to discuss it. We don’t actually leave people hanging on for very long.’
The first episode
‘The first episode has to declare what the series is going to be because you can’t put subtitles saying: “Stay with us – this is going to happen in Series 3.” The audience only has the first episode to judge. Really, they’ve only got the first ten minutes!’
Audience reaction
‘The brutal reality is that the audience decides very quickly. They decide in the first 15 minutes of Episode 1 of a brand-new series and it’s very unusual to claw back from that. It’s quite difficult to decide if something hasn’t hit the sweet spot in its first run – are you really going to risk taking it back and watch the figures go down even more in a second series?’
What a good ITV script needs
‘Good story, character and dialogue. They’re the three things to worry about. Here at ITV it has to be entertaining and that means it grips the audience, it invites them in, it starts a story that they find accessible, that they understand but which also might surprise them and reward them. Our pieces have got to be entertaining. Entertaining means it can make you cry and it can make you laugh, and it could involve murder and detection and revolution but in the end it has got to be entertaining. It has got to be a good journey to go on for our audience.’
Other channels’ content
‘I think everyone is conscious of what the opposition is doing. Each channel has a different role to play and a different role for the audience. Audiences come to different channels with different expectations, which is why you can do things on ITV that you couldn’t do on BBC1. You couldn’t have made Appropriate Adult on BBC1. The BBC could not have been seen to make a drama about Fred West, but we felt it was a story that demanded to be told and done sensibly and was the absolutely the right thing to do for our audience, and it was. We wouldn’t have done an adaptation of South Riding. We wouldn’t do Great Expectations. So there are different expectations from the audience and the only difference is that ITV is the only channel that has to get a mainstream audience. The BBC partly has to do that but it also has to do lots of other things.’
The effects of a hit
‘Sherlock on BBC1 and Downton Abbey on ITV have both had a very positive effect on the drama industry. As everyone has realized that you don’t have to follow convention; you don’t have to tick certain boxes. You can surprise people; you can still take creative risks and have a big hit. I think a lot of people; have found it quite refreshing and found it inspiring that the goal posts have moved.’
ITV2
‘ITV2 is also a mainstream channel so its shows need to have a broad appeal but it is younger-skewing. It’s inclusive, it’s entertaining, it’s warm and it’s inviting. It’s not too cool for school.It doesn’t say: grown-ups are not allowed here. It is just a different version of the main channel, which is why we can’t do things that clash with the main channel. ITV2 has to complement the main channel but it is the same DNA in many ways.’
Channel 4
Recent or on-going output: Serials – The Promise, Top Boy, This Is England; Series (often comedy-drama) – Shameless, Fresh Meat (both C4), Misfits, Skins (both E4)
Channel 4 is a publisher-broadcaster, which means that they don’t make programmes themselves. All of their commissioned content is made by the independent sector. In terms of drama, Channel 4 currently commissions single films (one or two per year), serials (two or three per year in two, three, four or five parts) and series, while its sister channel, E4, concentrates on series.
Ben Stoll, Head of Development at Channel 4 Drama, on…
Drama series
‘Series tend to be comedy-drama; they tend to be at the funnier end of the spectrum: Shameless and Fresh Meat on Channel 4; and these are broad brushstrokes because obviously those shows do deal with darker storylines as well. On E4 Skins and Misfits tend to skew younger. Again, there is a lot of room for comedy even if they do deal with some dark material, too.’
Singles and serials
‘When it comes to the singles and serials, the singles often have something serious to say about the world. We don’t want to beat the audience over the head with an issue. We don’t want to be didactic but we do want to ask awkward and interesting questions.’
Distinctive drama
‘One of our challenges and one of our ambitions is to stay fresh and surprising. We hope that we commission ideas and scripts that perhaps wouldn’t get commissioned elsewhere, for example Top Boy and This Is England. We think this is a natural home for projects like that. We’re after what we hope and believe to be the best projects.’
The difference between drama on C4 and E4
‘E4 certainly skews younger and there is certain flexibility in the playing around with genre. Take Misfits, which sits well on E4 but perhaps wouldn’t sit so well on Channel 4. These are self-imposed boundaries and they are part of our rules. There has
got be an element of instinct and examination at what is really at the heart of a show. Fresh Meat plays on Channel 4. It could be argued because it has a core cast of younger characters that it should sit on E4, but it felt like it was dealing with issues in a grown-up world, in the real world.
The commissioning process
‘That’s an on-going thing. Those are on-going conversations we have every day with independents and writers. I guess one of the most important things for us is to be talking to producers all the time and, of course, our priorities will shift and change according to the shows that get greenlit. Not massively and radically but there are always nudges in one direction or another.’
What C4 looks for
‘Fundamentally we’re looking for the best material. There are a hundred different ways of going about that. People will pitch us ideas all the time or we might have a sense that we are interested in a territory and we will talk to people. We don’t know what it could be but it is a two-way conversation.’
Preferred indies
‘We work with bigger independents who make programmes for all the major broadcasters and we also work with much smaller and newer independents who are just finding their drama voice, their drama feet. It is always project-dependent. It’s not about the company as much as the project.’
Commissioning writers
‘We commission a writer through an independent. We actually contract the company, who will in turn contract the writer. That’s how the structure works. But yes, we’re in touch with writers all the time. Ultimately, the writer’s most important relationship isn’t with us; it will be with the producer. It will be down to them and who they want to work with.’
Writing Television Drama Page 20
