British dramas The Fall and Top of the Lake show British small-screen drama is stronger than ever, despite its uncertain future

Award-winning writer Chris Chibnall pitched the idea for his drama Broadchurch 10 years ago.
It was Broadchurch wot won it. One programme has a habit of dominating the Broadcasting Press Guild awards in recent years. Last year it was Tom Stoppard’s BBC2 adaptation, Parade’s End; the year before that it was the same channel’s Tom Hollander sitcom, Rev.
This year it was Chris Chibnall’s ITV murder mystery that captured our members’ imagination. Everyone compared Broadchurch to The Killing. Well, everyone except Chibnall, who first pitched the idea for the drama 10 years ago.
Broadchurch took a hat-trick of prizes at today’s awards, sponsored by Discovery Channel, including best drama series, the best writer’s prize for Chibnall and best actress for Olivia Colman, who starred opposite David Tennant, for her extraordinary turn as DS Ellie Miller.
Kevin Spacey told last year’s Edinburgh TV festival that the small screen had entered a new golden age, and in UK television drama there was evidence of that in spades. Not just Broadchurch but The Fall and Top of the Lake, both on BBC2 (and both BPG nominees), Utopia and Southcliffe on Channel 4 and intriguing one-offs such as BBC2’s The Wipers Times, co-written by Ian Hislop, another BPG winner.
Broadchurch will be back, as will Allan Cubitt’s The Fall, starring the winner of this year’s BPG breakthrough award, Jamie Dornan, two of the most eagerly awaited dramas of the year. The first series of Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty on BBC2 missed out at awards time two years ago; expect it to loom large next year.
The BPG awards, now in their 40th year, are unique because they are the only ones voted for by people who write about TV and radio for a living, including reviewers, feature writers and media correspondents.
If it is a golden age for television then it is also an uncertain one, with a revolution in the way we watch TV in the Netflix/iPlayer/Sky+ era. Linear TV still rules – witness the outcry over the looming closure of the BBC3 TV channel – but the shift to on- demand gains pace, with a record 3bn TV and radio programmes requested on
the BBC’s iPlayer, led by the reassuringly old-school, BBC2’s Top Gear.
It is a shift reflected by the BPG’s innovation award, which this year went to BSkyB, reflecting 25 years of pushing the envelope, from its innovative coverage on its news and sport channels to Sky+, HD and 3D, with particular recognition from our members for its mobile TV apps.
The way we fund our biggest shows is also changing, with UK broadcasters looking overseas with increasing regularity to fund their blockbuster dramas – witness BBC2’s Top of the Lake (again), made with the Sundance Channel in the US and UKTV in Australia/New Zealand, and another BPG winner, Sky Atlantic’s The Tunnel, the most literal of cross-border tie-ups between Sky and Canal+.
Greg Dyke used to talk about the “800lb gorillas” in UK broadcasting – the BBC, BSkyB and ITV (until its dramatic ITV Digital weight loss). Now the challenge is coming from overseas and tech giants such as Google, Apple, Netflix and Amazon.
The BBC’s drama chief, Ben Stephenson, told journalists last month: “With Netflix and Amazon, I think there are 94 broadcasters, to use a conventional word, making drama in America … I see them as things that make us better.” Forget about the late Sir David Frost’s global village – welcome to the worldwide living room.
Other themes of 2013? Channel 4, after a year or two in the doldrums (Paralympics aside), staged a critical revival, if not yet a commercial one, a triple BPG winner with Educating Yorkshire, the most moving television of the year; Syria: Across The Lines, some of the most disturbing; and one of the simplest – and most innovative – formats of them all, Gogglebox.
Former Channel 4 chief executive Michael Grade has argued that the broadcaster should be able to compete for a slice of the licence fee because advertising would no longer cut the mustard (a suggestion politely refuted by C4).
What happens to the licence fee, and the role and remit of the BBC when its charter is renewed, will be one of the great topics of discussion in the months (and years) ahead.
How today’s TV landscape would look to a time traveller from 1974, and the first BPG awards, is hard to imagine; how television will look in 2054 tougher still.
Back in 1974, Doctor Who fans were eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new doctor (Tom Baker) after Jon Pertwee stepped down, and the final series of Monty Python came to an end on the BBC. With Peter Capaldi about to take over the Tardis from Matt Smith, it is reassuring to know that some things don’t change.
Broadcasting Press Guild awards 2014 winners
Best single drama – The Wipers Times (BBC2) Best drama series – Broadchurch (ITV) Best single documentary – Syria: Across the Lines (Channel 4) Best documentary series – Educating Yorkshire (Channel 4) Best entertainment/comedy – Strictly Come Dancing (BBC1) Best multichannel programme – The Tunnel (Sky Atlantic) Best factual entertainment – Gogglebox (Channel 4) Best actor – Chiwetel Ejiofor for Dancing on the Edge (BBC2) Best actress Olivia Colman for Broadchurch (ITV) Best writer – Chris Chibnall for Broadchurch (ITV) Breakthrough award – Jamie Dornan (The Fall) Innovation award – Sky TV for 25 years of innovation Harvey Lee award for outstanding contribution to broadcasting – Andrew Davies

John Plunkett – theguardian.com, Saturday 29 March 2014

When Kevin Spacey showed up at the Oscars as a presenter earlier this month, he came prepared with a very shrewd bit, adopting the persona of Frank Underwood, his character on “House of Cards. “And I sing,” he drawled from the stage, to the evident delight of Jennifer Lawrence and the like, “because it’s nice to be out of Washington and here with all my Hollywood friends.”

Even a decade ago, a guy with Spacey’s stature would not have been so eager to remind the A-list movie crowd that he currently was working in serialized television, especially for a network hitherto best known for its delivery services. My, how times have changed. Some of those fixed smiles greeting Spacey at the Academy Awards were accompanied by the tacit acknowledgment that Spacey’s hit Netflix TV series had generated far, far more interest than most of the movies on the slate of honorees.

These are, people like to say, the golden days of television, which really means we are seeing a renaissance of serialized, long-form drama: “House of Cards,” “True Detective,” “Mad Men,” “Girls” and on and on. This form is hardly new — you can trace the origins of serialized drama back to at least the 17th century — but its renewed impact on creativity in general, and top-tier dramatic writing in particular, is only just beginning to be felt. On Wednesday, the venerable Sundance Institute announced that its prestigious writing labs would expand their portfolio to include writing for TV and online platforms. The first so-called “episodic story lab” will be held this fall in Sundance, Utah. They will not be focused on training people to write for sit-coms and soap operas.

The most telling words there are “episodic story.” That appears to be the wave of the moment. Certainly, the discriminating consumers who see themselves as far above the consumption of procedurals are, demonstrably, becoming very fond of a form that gets much of its exposition and introductions out of the way in the first couple of episodes, and then can set its familiar characters free to range in a wide variety of juicy situations and complications. I even sense a new frustration among audiences with single movies or plays, which have to start their storytelling from scratch and that complete their narrative arc in one fell swoop, offering only an act of viewership that does not require the thrill of the binge. Single stories are starting to feel minor.

These days, all the cool kids are penning, and watching, long-form serials.

The last time this happened — in 19th century England, after Charles Dickens figured out the lucrative pull of narrative serialization — the novel changed for good.

Writers suddenly began to get better at making their chapters stand alone, as well as work within a larger whole. They learned how to give the newspapers and magazines publishing their work the same-sized chunks each time, plugging the same hole (the equivalent of air time, really). Some of these scribes knew how their story was going to end before the audience had read Chapter One, for they already written the whole shebang. Others evolved their yarns as they went, responding to the their readers in something like real time. They also quickly learned the importance of both several plot strands moving at once, and of having emotionally resonant central characters.

With his Pip, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and the like, Dickens was a master of this skill, creating a bevy of long-lived malcontents upon whose fate an audience would hang with the rigor they now apply to the doings of Don Draper. And Dickens certainly came to see the pleasures of not needing to explain himself, or the fruits of his imagination, every time. He liked the money, too.

That Victorian trend petered out, though. The single novel reasserted itself, once publishers figured out to make it cheaply available. What about this time?

That’s a fascinating question. You could argue that today’s serialization mode is, per the Netflix model, very much on the consumer’s terms, not the publisher’s, which has changed the very nature of serialization, perhaps almost beyond recognition or even that definition. Maybe these serialized cable dramas will end up repeating themselves one too many times and lose their centrality in the cultural conversation. Maybe.

Things change fast these days.

But to a large extent, long-form drama is in vogue now precisely because we are consuming ever smaller chunks of so much else in the cultural marketplace. Long-form is the antidote to the ubiquitous viral video, the one-minute laugh with the cat or the hapless local TV anchors with their mistakes and malapropisms that can liven a day spent in a cubicle. Too many 30-second, social-media bites of a toddler with a puppy are enough to make you crave an eight-hour binge of “True Detective,” duration and its implication of substance being a not insignificant factor there.

It’s also worth noting — and Sundance surely has noticed — that writing for these high-end serialized TV dramas requires a different skill. Most of the shows we are talking about are written by scribes who started out penning works for the theater.

But some of them thrive in writers’ rooms while others flail (and quickly get fired) Aside from the issue of some writers just playing better with others, one of the great advantages in writing for television is that (unless you are the show-runner) you are freed from the tyranny of the big idea, or the lack thereof. How many potentially fine writers have been felled by that particular hell? Many is the playwright (or Hollywood screenwriter) whose work has been torpedoed by structures or plotting that fall apart or don’t excite a crowd.

But if you hire that writer and let him or her work on an established show with a pre-existing structure, you may well find that talents can soar, just like a nervous franchisee who ends up with a thriving Subway. Think about it: it is easier to write the dialogue and subsidiary action to a pre-ordained plot. Some writers, of course, need the plot to be their own. But others do their best work when they do not have that particular burden. In fact, by requiring a different skill-set, these shows are revealing sides of former playwrights we never saw in the theater.

It all does beg the question: why is that increasingly famous TV writers’ room (no longer so populated by anonymous figures these days) not often used to write movies or plays?

If the success of some of its products is a guide, it’s actually a more efficient division of creative labor. One person has an idea, guides the ship and worries about the big picture. Others fire off individual sections of the plot, or focus on dialogue or little touches of character. There is no inherent reason why this should be the modus operandi only of serials.

Of course, teams long have shown up in dramatic writing. Plenty of ghostwriters have saved Hollywood movies. Plenty of evidence shows that William Shakespeare had his writers’ room, too; it’s just that his friends didn’t get any credit in the First Folio.

Now, they’d all have agents, a demand for executive-producer credit and, maybe a career within which they’ll never have to come up with a complete story again.

Chris Jones – Chicago Tribune – March 20, 2014