From Netflix to Comcast, the US takeover of UK broadcasting now looks unstoppable
Marking its 70th birthday two months ago, ITV talked with justifiable pride of “seven decades at the forefront of high quality, unashamedly entertaining, popular television”. But barely had the champagne corks stopped popping than ‘the third channel’ announced it was in discussion to sell its media and entertainment division to US telecoms giant Comcast. That’s the network that brought us Brideshead Revisited, The World at War, Inspector Morse and Spitting Image falling into foreign ownership.
And while the news might have been good for the company’s share price, it can’t help but feel like another nail in the coffin of the British television industry, where the BBC and ITV – who have effectively enjoyed a duopoly over the nation’s living rooms for the best part of a century – already face an existential threat from the rise of US-based streaming services. (And, in the BBC’s case, from the circling sharks of its many political enemies – which now include the President of the United States of America’s attempt to litigate it into oblivion.)
While Hollywood has always been the centre of gravity for the film industry, television has proved much more robust at resisting US cultural hegemony, and from BBC News to Downton Abbey, broadcasting remains a beacon of British soft power throughout the world. But for how much longer, now that power is draining away from places like Shepherd’s Bush and Salford in favour of Los Gatos, California (the home of Netflix), Seattle (Amazon Prime) and Los Angeles (Disney+)?
In the case of ITV, a buy-out by Comcast (who already own Sky TV in the UK) would mean a once proud regional network, run out of great cities like London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Belfast, Aberdeen, Norwich and Cardiff, now being headquartered in Philadelphia – where it’s hard to imagine they have a deep emotional attachment to Emmerdale and Loose Women, let alone Granada Reports and Wales at Six.
It’s true that, for now, most streamers seem committed to investing in at least some content native to their various overseas territories. Indeed, on the surface, you could be forgiven for thinking British TV drama has never been in ruder health – or enjoyed such a huge global audience. The four most-watched shows around the world on Netflix last year – Fool Me Once, Bridgerton, Baby Reindeer and The Gentlemen – were all “British” (though Bridgerton is actually as British as root beer and mom’s apple pie), with One Day also making the top 10. Apple TV+’s biggest hitters, meanwhile, include Slow Horses and Ted Lasso, while Jilly Cooper’s Rivals did good business for Disney+ – and Netflix’s Adolescence is surely the first Pontefract-filmed drama ever to top the US streaming charts.
But the bottom line is that these streamers are all still American companies, whose success ultimately only consolidates Silicon Valley’s cultural and economic stranglehold. On top of that, the streamers’ deep pockets have had an inflationary impact on the British broadcasting ecosystem, leaving the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 struggling to match the talent fees on offer from the big tech disruptors.
Of course, we shouldn’t write the traditional broadcasters’ obituary quite yet. You only have to look at the phenomenal success of The Celebrity Traitors, or last year’s Gavin & Stacey Christmas special, to see how linear, free-to-air television can still unite the nation around a shared cultural experience. But such winter flowers are increasingly rare, and are only going to get rarer – not least because television also has a very big age problem.
While the average BBC One viewer is now north of 60, young people are deserting old-school linear telly at an alarming rate. According to Ofcom’s 2023 Media Nations report, children and young adults under 25 have decreased their average daily viewing of broadcast television by an astonishing 73% since 2012. (Among four-34-year-olds, broadcast TV engagement fell by 21% between 2021 and 2022 alone.) Hence the broadcast regulator’s warning that the BBC faces an entire “lost generation” of viewers.
But this isn’t just about who gets to make television in the multi-channel era. It’s also about the type of stories we get to tell about ourselves. And if the TV screen is, to an extent, a mirror held up to society, then in the UK that mirror is in danger of shattering, ushering in considerably more than seven years’ bad luck.
Programme makers are under siege on all fronts. A recent Deadline report on British TV’s new “austerity era” outlined how broadcasters are caught in a perfect storm of funding cuts (including the squeeze on the BBC licence fee), plummeting ad revenues, high inflation and a sharp fall in co-production money. As a result, domestic production spending fell by a quarter last year – and that’s not even taking into account the ticking demographic timebomb.
Arguably no single programme illustrates British TV’s current malaise more starkly than Mr Bates vs The Post Office. The most-watched drama of 2024, and the biggest new drama in more than a decade, it was a cultural and social phenomenon that succeeded in making the political weather. So you might think that, at least, would give ITV something to celebrate. But the programme actually made a loss of around a million pounds, and ITV managing director Kevin Lygo has admitted it probably wouldn’t get commissioned now. Why? Because a miscarriage of justice against British postmasters doesn’t have sufficient global appeal to attract the foreign investment and international sales that are increasingly the topline requirements of any UK drama.
“During the course of my career, we’ve become incredibly dependant on international finance and co-pros,” Jack Thorne, the multi-BAFTA-winning screenwriter of Adolescence, told BBC Radio 5 Live recently. As a result, he added, writers were being “discouraged” from telling uniquely British stories.
Elisabeth Murdoch, co-founder of Sister, the production company behind another recent British Netflix hit, Black Doves, has issued a similar warning, telling The Guardian: “British producers are making excellent content for global platforms, with British talent, set in the UK – but those aren’t the same stories that the BBC or Channel 4 seek out. Those stories, from all corners of the British Isles, are struggling to be made in today’s economic reality.”
Not even prestige, BAFTA catnip like Wolf Hall is immune, with director Peter Kosminsky revealing how cast and crew had to take a pay cut to get the recent sequel series made.
It isn’t just posh telly that’s under threat, though. If you want to know why ITV, once the home of popular, beloved comedy-dramas like Minder and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, now churns out an endless diet of identikit crime dramas, it’s because crime is a universal language. And out-of-work Geordie brickies sharing a hut in Dusseldorf doesn’t travel so well to Borneo and Buffalo Springs.
Who, then, will tell British stories in the future, if American streaming services are the last players standing? Where will the next Cathy Come Home, Boys from the Blackstuff or Edge of Darkness come from? To say nothing of Countryfile and The One Show?
So far, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has proved to have a tin ear when it comes to possible solutions. Last December, she appeared to suggest the flight from traditional broadcasters to streamers was a diversity issue, telling The Guardian: “If the shows that [they] make don’t look and feel like the country, if they’re not relevant to people, then they’ll switch off.” In other words, the best way to ensure traditional broadcasters are able to keep telling stories about Britain is… to tell more stories about Britain? Thanks for that.
But there are signs some politicians may finally be waking up to the scale of the problem. In April, Parliament’s cross-party Culture, Media and Sport Committee concluded “urgent action” is needed “to protect distinctly British content”. The committee recommended a five per cent levy on foreign streaming services, saying the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney should “put their money where their mouth is”. It’s fair to say that Netflix’s response – that the UK is its “biggest production hub outside North America, and we want it to stay that way” – had a distinctly threatening tone to it. (And how Donald Trump’s proposed new 100% tariffs on films – and possibly, by extension, television – “produced in Foreign Lands” will impact this production hub, is a whole other can of worms.)
Free market cheerleaders, of course, might argue that this is simply a matter of consumer choice. But the truth is that, since the dawn of television, British viewers have always overwhelmingly chosen British stories. For all the miles of newsprint devoted to the likes of Breaking Bad, Mad Men and The Sopranos, it is rare for foreign imports – including American imports – to trouble the UK’s top 40 most-watched programmes of the week. If you want to find the last year when a non-British programme was our most-watched TV show, you’d have to go all the way back to 1980, when almost half the country tuned in to see who shot JR Ewing in Dallas.
Instead, what did we watch in our millions? We watched Dirty Den serving divorce papers on poor, tragic Ange in the Queen Vic. We watched Hilda Ogden say a last goodbye to Coronation Street. We watched Del and Rodney finally become millionaires. We watched cup finals and royal weddings. We watched Benny Hill and Benny from Crossroads, and Vera Lynn on the Royal Variety Performance. We watched Eric and Ernie, Wallace and Gromit, Gavin & Stacey. In their different ways, all of these programmes and national moments tell a story about Britain. Let’s hope it’s a story we’re not about to turn the final page on.
If you want to read me banging on about UK telly at eye-watering length, you can buy my latest book, Notes from a Small Screen: Watching British Television, 2015-2023
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