I GOT A NEW BADGE or BREAD AND BUTTER

So ever heard the phrase ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’?  

Well, I’m kinda feeling a little bit that way this week.

I’ve been a producer and director of documentaries and reality tv for over ten years, but when you hop the fence and actually own the company that makes the show, you can see just how hard it is to make ends meet in TV.  

It might surprise you that with all the cigar chomping, champagne swilling fat cats you see at awards shows, everyone, from the smallest indie to the biggest multinational are feeling the same.  

In the olden days a tv broadcaster would ask you how much a show was going to cost – you’d tell them some nice huge figure, and they’d give it to you… Houses for everybody.  

Then, when the tv bosses realized that Reality TV could, in effect, buy THEM even more houses than they used to – made as they are by non-union, fresh out of film-school kids eager to work for less and less each week – they jumped at the opportunity.  

However all this happened right about the same time that multinationals were opening up digital channels and soaking up even more of the money they’d really wanted to keep for themselves.  So, what to do?  Well, make these shows cost EVEN less, of course!  

Now, it’s a bit more complicated than all this – but imagine the big decision at the networks: “Rather than giving them a chunk of cash, let’s give producers less money, let’s audit every penny and split the underspend with producers (so giving them an incentive to make the show for even less – AND we still make money), and let’s take all the international sales for ourselves while we’re at it, (because if we don’t take it, the producers will – and if we take it, what are the producers going to do? They might whine a bit – but we’ll have their money, and they’ll have a bad mood. We win again!).” 

So, now producers had a stark choice. With every revenue stream cut off for them, either they survive on the small, line-item, commission they get from the budget, or go out of business. Make tv or don’t.  The image I can’t get out of my head is of the stupid lumberjack, stuck a hundred feet up, way out on a tree’s limb, sawing through the bough holding him up with all his might. “Wow! This is awesome”, he says, “Think how much money I’ll get for this branch!”.  

You see, from this side of the fence – I can tell you that producers are facing this extraordinary question - how to continue making tv, while still paying for our staff, paying rent on our offices, paying for the development for new shows, (another area networks used to cashflow but no longer do in any meaningful way) – and all while still having enough in the kitty for a birthday cake for Joan from business affairs on a Friday?  

Yes, these every day expenses are costs that you simply can’t put in the budget for season two of ‘When Trees Attack’, and until I come up with a new “WIPEOUT”, or “WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE” – I’ve just got to take from an ever shrinking well. 

You see, the saddest thing of all this week is that while I was sitting at my desk clipping, snipping and slicing this budget, is that there IS only one place you can cut costs – and that’s by cutting the pay of your crew, the people without whom you wouldn’t even have a show. But, as I polished my new Gamekeeper Badge, part of me, if I’m totally honest, was congratulating myself on a job well done.  

I finish this week by posing a question of my own, a question I’ve been posing for myself every night – ‘When an industry is built on a formula that means we’re producing tv for less and less each year, in an environment where we can only survive by cutting costs and making tv even cheaper… how cheap can you make TV before people stop watching?’

And will anyone notice?