STEPHEN VOLK
THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE
News from the Western Front (i.e. Shepherd’s Bush) last summer declared that the BBC was announcing 1,000 job cuts, while George Osborne made no secret of wanting to force the “imperial” organisation to pick up the cost of free license fees for the elderly – effectively eviscerating a fifth of its annual budget. The writing was on the wall, the death knell chimed…but who at the BBC was listening? Nobody, as far as I could tell.
Predictably a flotilla of star names, like Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, took to the barricades. “Save Our BBC!” they exclaimed, begging us to remember the glory days of Andy Pandy, Steptoe & Son, The Wednesday Play, and I was with them, though jaundiced by recent times I’d seen Auntie shoot herself in the foot, dragging her feet in sacking the oaf Clarkson, and pussyfooting around the bombastic expenses of overpaid wall-leaner Alan Yentob.
The trouble is, maddeningly, the Beeb is its own worst enemy. A cosseted environment which should breed risk-taking excellence (and an all-important safe place to fail), instead it seems to put most of its efforts into being a law unto itself.
I once asked some drama producers I was working with if they were targeting the core BBC audience of women 50+ or aiming to attract another, say, younger viewership? They looked at me like I was bonkers. “We don’t ever think about that,” they said. “We just make what we like.” Which, to my mind, is great thinking for an arts body, but completely mad for a massive media corporation aspiring to be a world entertainment player.
But apparently the BBC has a different set of rules, possibly thought by some to be liberated from the constraints of capitalism, but in the end, anything but. Viewing figures, for instance, matter desperately to the corporation. If they made things for an audience of one man and a dog they’d be pilloried by the press and the Tories: yet if they commission commercial fare for the masses they are accused of abandoning Reithian ideals. They literally cannot win. Which is the paradox at the centre of its present-day existence, playing into the hands of those who want to destroy it.
Yes, it produces some of the best drama in the world, consistently, from Jonathan Strange to Line of Duty, but, as I always say, BBC Drama is a place where, uniquely, very clever people are made to behave stupidly.
“What does Ben think?”
The endlessly repeated mantra so astutely summing up a system based on endemic second guessing, with Commissioner of Drama Ben Stephenson (as was – he’s now at Bad Robot) at the mid-point in the hour glass, the filter through whom your script has to pass to get to the channel heads.
What’s wrong with that structure? Only that no lesser mortal has a view or a will of their own. Everything is deferred upwards for validation. Result? Everyone is disempowered and 99% of your time as a writer you spent doing notes for script editors who, by their very job description, have an opinion which counts for absolutely nothing. (As they say on Game of Thrones: “Never trust a eunuch.”) Hence you can work for eighteen months on an endlessly tweaked and interrogated treatment – only for it to be rejected by a producer for a reason they could have easily given half a lifetime and a billion headaches ago.
Indeed, the abiding image I have for the whole process is Tom Six’s Human Centipede – scripts digested and passed from one person to another, via an endless digestive tract, slowly converted into faecal matter. The only difference being with a human centipede you don’t have to endure six-hour phone calls, day in, week out, until your left ear is red and throbbing – a method of torture I think would be more suited to Guantanamo Bay.
“Do we like him?”
This phrase one high-up drama executive liked to use when a writer’s name was mentioned, the implication being that you either had the ear of the king (or queen) or were persona non grata.
Such individuals learn to perfection the BBC art of passive aggression – never saying “no” to a project but simply giving impossible, soul-destroying notes that prolong our agony. How such people get in places of management I cannot say, except that they cunningly attach their reputations to successful shows they didn’t write, direct or produce, but merely said “yes” to. The very most these people do of a day is sort the wheat from the chaff. And mostly choose the chaff.
“SF and Horror is a niche audience.”
This said to my face by a top BBC honcho even as The Walking Dead was powering to world domination. Case in point. The BBC’s 2008 rosy reboot of Survivors failed dismally because, all PC and dinner parties, it tried to make the apocalypse palatable, whereas TWD knows and relishes its genre roots.
Shockingly, I once mentioned Brian Clemens in a meeting and the development exec unapologetically didn’t recognise his name. What hope do we have if our reference points are Penda’s Fen or The Stone Tape (written by one of BBC TV’s finest, Nigel Kneale) which I mentioned to one producer who’d never even heard of it. Nowadays you’re lucky if the younger generation of TV producers know what was on last week, let alone last year. But if you don’t know the medium’s history, how can you hope to know what’s a new idea from what’s derivative?
All these things contribute to making BBC Drama a frustrating entity to deal with for writers. And perhaps for those within it. All I hear on the streets is that the best people leave – to Sky, to ITV, to Company Pictures. Which is sad, because I’d like the BBC to be the place people want to get into.
Does it need to change? Undoubtedly. In a world where Netflix and Amazon are getting into quality production, and everyone is binge-watching and streaming online, it seems absurd to be obsessed with the overnight figures. But then the BBC must be confused about what it’s here for, if it’s not to exploit its programming commercially (BBC Worldwide) or spread its wings (BBC America) or seek new audiences (BBC3). In wanting it to slim itself down will it be, ultimately, scuppered and denuded, finding itself finally a shadow of its former self in the media marketplace, a shrivelled pubcaster with wildlife, shiny floor shows and the odd Agatha Christie with nice frocks?
I hope not. I want to defend “our Hollywood” – which can still make spellbinding drama like The Fall and Sadie Jones’ The Outcast – against unconstitutional government bullying, but it’s hard when the BBC itself seems to be doing little to tell politicians to back off. And I wish the mouthpiece of the nation would be less craven in allowing dramatists the space to rail against the present government’s policies.
“Writers are at the centre of what we do.”
But sadly, to quote Jimmy McGovern, only if we write what they want. Andrew Davies once joked at an RTS award ceremony that his scripts are not actually written by him but “as everybody knows” by a gaggle of girls at BBC Drama. When you’ve experienced it first hand, it’s hard not to agree.
The basic fault is that the system allows for neither freedom of thought nor autonomy. Richard Broke once told me a story about the BBC in the 1980s. Director Roland Joffé was making a TV play of Shaw’s Saint Joan when the Head of Drama passed him in the corridor and asked, “How goes it?” Joffé said, “Oh, we’ve dropped that idea and we’re going to make ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore instead.” The Head of Drama simply nodded: “Oh. Jolly good. Carry on.”
A scenario about as likely to happen in today’s micro-managed and double-thinking structure at the BBC as pigs flying. And to the BBC’s detriment, in my opinion.