James Graham, the creator of Sherwood, Dear England and Brexit: The Uncivil War, has urged the creation of “new universes” and greater risk taking in place of TV’s gatekeepers “falling back on tried and tested IP.”
Delivering this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival MacTaggart lecture, the prolific British scribe argued passionately for greater working class representation in the TV industry, along with criticizing commissioners’ ongoing temptation to opt for “source material, adaptations and expanded universes.”
Graham used the annual Edinburgh platform to plead for “new universes, which means – taking risks.”
He added: “New stories have to be at the heart of commissioning – scripted, non-scripted, factual, fictional … even in the most difficult climate, where the temptation, and we’re witnessing it, is to fall back on tried and tested IP.”
The industry should see “risk” as a long-term “vital” investment in the future health of the sector, Graham said, coming at a festival that has seen many British TV doyens urge greater risk-taking.
He said it is the public broadcasters – who make programming decisions “beyond commercial pressures,” who need to lead the charge, although he acknowledged streaming services have been “inventive” and “authored,” which the industry has benefitted from.
“But if a case is to be made – and it has to be made – in this modern, multi-platform environment, for the BBC, alongside ITV and Channel 4, Channel 5… then surely it is that,” he added. “Speak to American screenwriters or programme-makers, and they are bewildered at our complacency over our PSBs. They wish they had a BBC.”
The situation has been stymied by the last couple of years representing a “climate of extremes” in the TV industry, Graham went on to say.
Two years ago there was “over production” and “not enough crew to fill all the jobs,” he explained, while now it feels like “a drought, a desert,” with “many of my fellow writers … in limbo.”
He added: “Maybe at some point we can interrogate how it’s even possible for an industry that is manufacturing one of the most in-demand products on earth – content, entertainment, stories – how it’s possible to have drifted into a global business model where so few are able to make any money from something that’s never been in higher demand.”
Graham also used the opportunity to pour scorn on the idea that artificial intelligence will replace human creativity. “For all of AI’s so-called efficiencies, and its very real threat to jobs, I have every faith that it will in fact be audiences that reject its encroachment into ‘writing’, creating content and art,” he added. “AI cannot, and will never be able, to take hold of your hand. It will never feel quite the same. And we need to remind people of that.”
Gareth Southgate and a “crisis of storytelling”
Graham’s BBC drama Sherwood, which is loosely based on murders in a former mining town two decades ago, close to where the writer was brought up, will air its second season shortly, while he is also forging the BBC’s Dear England based on Gareth Southgate’s England soccer team, adapted from his hit play starring Joseph Fiennes.
Graham is fascinated by the England soccer resurgence under Southgate and said “Gareth identified early on that the crisis faced by England – the football team, but I would argue more broadly – was a crisis of storytelling,” which he used as a clarion call for UK creatives to return to their storytelling roots.
“I believe so much of the crises we have been facing, politically and socially in Britain over the past few years – has been a crisis of storytelling,” he added. “The paralysis, and stagnation.”
“Squeamish” on working classes
He argued passionately for greater working class representation in the British TV industry, with just 8% of people working in television currently from a working class background – a 12-year low. “We are squeamish about defining it, and as a result, we quite often still exclude it from industry measurements around diversity,” he said.
Along with his criticism of franchises and IP, Graham said long running, returning series and daytime dramas that used to be “training grounds” for working class voices have been “cut back or cancelled,” while there has been a “near collapse of the single drama as an entity.”
He floated the creation of a new Play for the Day format with the nation’s best working class voices such as Russell T Davies, Michaela Coel and The Responder writer Tony Schumacher.
“I know that your passion for work that is politically-engaged and socially-minded matches mine,” he added, addressing the TV commissioners in the room. “And if that work tends to sit more in the single TV films and the limited series, despite their lack of obvious or immediate commerciality – then we must fight for those. Those that shine a light on injustice – from the poverty of Cathy Come Home 50 years ago, to the Post Office scandal of today.”
On representation, Graham pointed out that BAFTA only just started including class within its diversity standards, and he set out a plan to improve the situation.
“I would join others in our sector and ask that we begin to recognise class as a consistent, and specific characteristic in our diversity monitoring forms,” he added. “That it becomes not only an aspiration, but a concrete part of industry tent pole organisations like BAFTA – who have already shown provable progress in these areas – when it comes to membership, and nominations.”
On cue, the festival unveiled a new Impact Unit to “create a permanent function which will help shape the way the TV industry works to make it open to all; a place where new perspectives, ideas and stories thrive.”
Last year’s MacTaggart was delivered by Louis Theroux. Other recent lecturers include Coel, Jack Thorne and ex-Channel 4 news chief Dorothy Byrne.