Everyone is talking about Adolescence, the television drama focused on toxic masculinity that has triggered a continuing social and political debate. But only a handful of people are talking about what the hit drama says about the real-time crisis unfolding in the British television industry – and that needs discussion too.
Adolescence is everything public service broadcasting should be: hard-hitting programming featuring the kind of people often ignored in TV drama – in this case, white working-class families in the north – discussed at the school gate and in parliament. After its British writer, Jack Thorne, met Keir Starmer in Downing Street, it was revealed that Adolescence was to be rolled out for free across all UK secondary schools.
The free bit needs emphasising because, unlike traditional public service broadcasters behind classic hits from Cathy Come Home to Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Adolescence was commissioned by Netflix, one of the US-based streamers whose subscription models have appeared like missile-loaded drones landing on cash-strapped British broadcasters.
For many of the 66 million viewers who helped make Adolescence the most-watched UK title on Netflix ever, such a statement will come across as typical through-a-glass-darkly Britishness, when such brilliant TV should only be a cause for celebration. Using British talent to tell universal stories to a global audience should be win-win. Netflix also deserves huge credit for trusting the brilliant Stephen Graham, as well as Thorne (who also wrote the platform’s recent hit Toxic Town).
But Adolescence is still a rarity for US giants like Netflix. Far more common a phenomenon is streamers such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney ratcheting up production prices for domestic broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV, which are already struggling with declining revenues. In their bid to produce more and more content to keep their global users happy, streamers spent £2.82bn on British-made content in 2024, up £600m in a year. Such investment has driven up production and talent costs, with the total spent on high-end TV produced in the UK up 11% last year, despite more than 40 fewer premium projects being undertaken. So more money has to be spent making fewer shows.
Faced with real-terms funding cuts of more than a third since 2010, the BBC announced on Monday that it would cut spending on content by almost £150m in the next financial year. It blamed this “unprecedented content funding challenge” on the fact that, as well as driving up prices, streamers such as Netflix no longer agreed to share costs and revenues with UK broadcasters in so-called co-production deals. Latest figures from the British Film Institute suggest that total spending by all domestic broadcasters last year fell to the lowest level of investment since 2019, ( once you have stripped out the anomaly of 2020, when Covid shut down all film and TV production).
Does any of this matter, given the glories of current British television and the fact that when savings are made on screen, it is often only insiders who notice? Of course it matters. Thorne indicated that one scene on Adolescence which used 300 extras – the school fire drill – would have been too expensive for a public service broadcaster. Peter Kosminsky, the much-garlanded director of Wolf Hall, admitted that on the BBC expensive outdoor scenes had to be axed and the most highly paid people behind the award-winning drama, including himself and lead actor, Mark Rylance, had to take significant pay cuts to get it made. Kosminsky warned that, without intervention, the British TV industry would get squeezed out of the big TV drama market because of “the inflated cost environment created here by the streamers”.
The Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television (Pact) – the lobby group for the whole industry – reveals that 15 TV dramas greenlit by UK public service broadcasters were then mothballed because of escalating costs. We hear about the impact on drama, but no less affected is factual entertainment, and series such as David Attenborough’s Planet Earth. They too are feeling the squeeze because of the death of production deals.
So what can be done? Kosminsky has lobbied MPs for a 5% levy on all UK subscription streaming revenues, with the proceeds collected for a British cultural fund to spend on television content. This system would not only bring in more money than the existing, slightly complicated tax credit system for so-called high-end TV, but would help end the argument that everything should be done to encourage global streamers and their ilk to invest in UK talent.
Politicians must also do their bit. Although keen to have tea with Thorne and the Adolescence creators, Starmer and his government have so far done absolutely nothing to address the issue facing British television, or to harness its soft power potential.
Because if not now, when? We stand at one of those moments when a TV show reminds us why television matters: television that is more than entertainment, television that makes us think and reflect on ourselves, television that moves the dial. That never came cheap, it never will – but it’s hard to overestimate its value.
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