The director of hit BBC period drama Wolf Hall says the government “needs to have enough guts to stand up to the bully in the White House” to protect the future of public service broadcasting.
Peter Kosminsky told Sky News’ Breakfast with Anna Jones that calls for a streaming levy to support British high-end TV production was urgently needed to stop the “decimation” of the UK industry.
His comments follow the release of a new report from the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) committee, calling for the government to improve support measures for the UK’s high-quality drama sector while safeguarding the creation of distinctly British content.
Specifically, the report calls for streamers – including Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+ and Disney+, all of which are based in the US – to commit to paying 5% of their UK subscriber revenue into a cultural fund to help finance drama with a specific interest to British audiences.
Kosminsky, who made the case for the levy and gave evidence to the committee in January, called global tariffs recently introduced by Donald Trump “the elephant in the room”.
He said he feared they would make the government reticent to introduce a streaming levy, but said it was a necessary step to “defend a hundred years of honourable tradition of public service broadcasting in this country and not see it go to the wall because [the government are] frightened of the consequences from the bully in the States”.
The second series of Wolf Hall, starring Mark Rylance (L) and Damian Lewis, nearly didn’t happen. Pic: BBC
Kosminsky also noted that the streamers would be able to apply for money from the fund themselves, as long as they were in co-production with a UK public service broadcaster.
Earlier this year, a White House memorandum referenced levies on US streaming services, calling them “one-sided, anti-competitive policies” that “violate American sovereignty”.
In response to the call for streaming levies, a Netflix spokesperson said such a move would “penalise audiences” and “diminish competitiveness”.
They added: “The UK is Netflix’s biggest production hub outside of North America – and we want it to stay that way.”
The Association for Commercial Broadcasters and On-Demand Services (COBA) said such a levy “risks damaging UK growth and the global success story of the UK TV sector,” and “would risk dampening streamers’ existing investment in domestic content and would inevitably increase costs for businesses”.
Pic: BBC
COBA said it welcomed the committee’s support for targeted tax breaks for domestic drama.
Kosminsky also told Sky News the second series of Wolf Hall was nearly called off just six weeks before it was due to start shooting due to financial pressures, adding: “It was only because the producer, the director, writer and the leading actor all agreed to take huge cuts in their own remuneration that the show actually got made.”
He said that both he and the show’s executive producer, Sir Colin Callender, had “worked on the show unpaid for 11 years on the basis that we would get a payment when the show went into production”, calling it “a bitter blow” to see that disappear.
Working in public service broadcasting for his entire career, Kosminsky said it was “absolutely heartbreaking for me and others like me to see that the industry we have been nurtured by and we care about is being decimated”.
While he said he was a “huge fan of the streamers”, he said it was their “very deep pockets” that had “driven up the price of what we do”, to the point where the traditional broadcasters can no longer afford to make high-end television.
Adolescence. Pic: Netflix
Just this week, Adolescence, created by British talent Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, became the fourth most popular English-language series in Netflix’s history with 114 million views.
But while some very British shows might get taken on by the streamers due to universal appeal, Kosminsky said dramas including ITV’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office and Hillsborough, and BBC drama Three Girls about the grooming of young girls by gangs in the north of England were examples of game-changing productions that could be lost in the future.
He warned: “These are not dramas that the streamers would ever make, they’re about free speech in this country. That’s part of what we think of as a democratic society, where we can make these dramas and programmes that challenge on issues of public policy that would never be of any interest in America.”
Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Pic: ITV/Shutterstock
The CMS report comes following an inquiry into British film and high-end television, which considered how domestic and inward investment production was being affected by the rise of streaming platforms.
Chairwoman of the CMS committee, Dame Caroline Dinenage, said “there will be countless distinctly British stories that never make it to our screens” unless the government intervenes to “rebalance the playing field” between streamers and public service broadcasters (PSBs).
A DCMS spokesperson said: “We acknowledge the challenges facing our brilliant film and TV industry and are working with it through our Industrial Strategy to consider what more needs to be done to unlock growth and develop the skills pipeline. We thank the committee for its report which we will respond to in due course.”
