{spotlight} feature reports

Edinburgh International Television Festival 2008
Owen Thomas, Savalas' Head of Marketing, writes about how the TV Festival truly reflects the priorities of British broadcasting.

May you live in interesting times. Working in television in Scotland, there's more money around right now, more jobs, a new channel launching. But will it last? What happens as independence approaches, arrives…or doesn't?

A year ago the First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, made public the privately obvious; Scotland is enduring a declining share of BBC - and all other broadcasters’ - network commissions.

BBC Director General, Mark Thomson, offered a constructive - if hasty - engagement, announcing an additional annual £75m for BBC Scotland. If genuinely implemented, this would raise Scottish spend from the current low of 3% of UK total - having fallen from a historic average of 6% - to a proportionate 9% of UK total.

Michael Grade at ITV was less politic. Scotland gets what it deserves; it lacks investable talent.

As Savalas’ new Head of Marketing, this was the background to my first time at the TV Festival. I went to hear about developments and trends, to gain insights into the regional implications of national broadcasting policy and regulation. I wanted a vision of the future.

No such luck. Other than Gok Wan wearing a kilt, you’d have no idea you weren’t in W1 or Wood Lane, or that devolution prospers and that regional broadcasting still underpins public service remits.

Whereas Savalas -- - like any successful ‘provincial’ player -- - has built a business by looking outwards, beyond Scotland and the UK, to win work from around the world, there was no sense of the UK TV industry having an awareness of audiences and stories - of money to be made - beyond London.

Collectively, the industry is many hundreds of individuals and small companies throughout the UK all looking for work where they can find it. Yet the lead given by executives and channel controllers, by policy-makers and lobbyists is to draw all of television back to a cosy monopoly of London interests.

Not one session or event on the Festival agenda related directly or incidentally to regional broadcasting. This is astonishing at a time when all political forces are centrifugal in their effects. Nonetheless the process of dispersing -- - devolving -- - power and resources to the regions advances, even if only to ensure future claims of legitimacy for the license fee. British broadcasting persists in spite of leadership, not because of it.

This was the ironic lesson of the Festival; change is the result of the regions asserting themselves, not the centre doing the right thing. Attempting to foresee the implications, I had two discussions that made the event worthwhile.

For a facility company like Savalas there’s little business to be done in Edinburgh. Delegates are either too corporate or too busy pitching to be concerned with actually making the stuff. There are though some people around to buttonhole so as to become a little wiser about the context of television.

I spoke to Blair Jenkins, chair of the Scottish Broadcasting Commission. His report, due imminently, will set the agenda for television in Scotland. He was clear on two issues: full restitution of the license fee spend should be by 2012, rather than the mooted 2016, and Channel 4 must make a comparable commitment on Scottish spend.

I then met Tim Gardam of Ofcom and asked how the regulator anticipates possible Scottish independence. He said the organisation doesn't take a view. So I asked what view they took leading up to the referendum. He said they don't take a view on that either; he conceded they are waiting on the Scottish Broadcasting Commission's report.

This is a remarkable turnaround. For once, it's ours to lose. To rebut Michael Grade: if the talent isn't in the regions it's because the centre has systematically denied the periphery. By claiming our due we win back the jobs, skills and earnings that allow us to compete for production entirely on merit.

By then, we really will be living in interesting times.

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