How did TV get so bad?

Why isn’t TV very good anymore? It’s a question doubtless asked every year since they switched to colour and viewers could finally figure out what was going on in snooker. Yet, when Ed West asked it of his X followers recently, referring to the scarcity of the great expansive documentary series of the past like Civilisation and Ascent of Man, I felt unusually qualified to answer. 

For a number of years, I was a TV producer, working my way up from an assistant producer on Dispatches to jobbing producer/director, via a stint assisting Louis Theroux, among others. I’ve worked on bastions of light factual entertainment, like the One Show (average viewer age 57) down through the age groups with BBC Three and E4, while also nurturing the couch potatoes of tomorrow at CBBC. Though I haven’t properly worked in TV for a few years, I’ve had enough bad and disappointing experiences to provide some explanation. 

Starting at the top of the foodchain, we have the commissioners. The commissioners are the executive producers and channel controllers who hold ultimate power in what gets made and how it gets made — rarified figures in the ivory towers of New Broadcasting House and Horseferry Road. The main problem is they think their audiences are idiots. More specifically, they feel that audiences cannot follow complex narratives and so constantly try to simplify their programming. Genres, for example, should not mix. When Dominic Frisby and I tried to pitch our film about Adam Smith’s economic theories told through the history of the Edinburgh Fringe, the commissioners were baffled that we didn’t just want to do a straightforward history of the Fringe, which, by sheer coincidence, they commissioned someone else to do a few weeks later. 

The big channels would much rather focus on people, rather than ideas. For instance, war documentaries tell the individual stories of soldiers and their missions rather than the grand overarching narrative of how the war was fought — which in the case of WWII would involve an awful lot of discussion about industrial processes and procurement if you really wanted to explain how the Allies won.

Many commissioners come up through development (coming up with ideas for and researching new programming) rather than having made films themselves. A lot just aren’t very good, riding the waves of fast track career schemes. You see these people hanging around the BBC — failing upward, a body of work one disaster after another. It’s extraordinary. 

A related problem is that the people who make television genuinely think introducing viewers to concepts, people or events they are not already familiar with will cause them to turn off. This is especially bad in children’s television. It even comes down to music choices. A CBBC executive told me that “children don’t like to hear things they haven’t heard before” when I tried to slip You make my dreams come true by Hall and Oates into a training montage (one of the all time great montage songs). It’s a bizarre statement when you consider that children haven’t heard most things at their young age, and presents a tautological problem of how did they come to like anything without, at some point, hearing it for the first time. 

All the usual criticisms about TV producers wanting to educate their viewers in left wing values, oft repeated to the point of tedium, are nevertheless true. Diversity quotas are real. On screen, I’ve had perfectly able contributors dismissed out of hand because they are white men, forcing me to go back, waste more time, and find female and minority contributors who just weren’t as good. I’m not saying they can’t be, of course — just that for those projects, they weren’t. Creativity and artistry are now subordinate to political messaging and hiring policies, overt and covert, that privilege ethnicity and ideology over ability.

It is a surprisingly conservative industry — not politically obviously, but in its general aversion to risk-taking and novelty

I’ve had discussions as to whether a half Filipino or an Iranian raised here count as “diverse”. “Does he play as diverse?” — an actual thing that was said. And behind the camera, I’ve been told, to my face, that they’d love to have me as director for a project but the director had to be black. Try being a white bloke, the wrong side of 50 in the industry. They struggle. Curiously, the poshest survive. One director I knew managed to get on a BBC career scheme reserved for diverse talent. The production manager helped him fill in the form, claiming he had “anxiety” which counted as “mental health” (diverse, in other words). He was a white guy who went to Eton.

Across the board, from researcher to executive producer, one notices a lack of hinterland or intellectual curiosity

Yet it is a surprisingly conservative industry — not politically obviously, but in its general aversion to risk-taking and novelty. New formats are seldom adopted if they haven’t been shown to work elsewhere, and when finally something new does break into the mainstream, it is imitated relentlessly. When Serial broke new boundaries of boredom and tedium in its attempt to prove that podcast producers are better at solving crimes than the police, TV commissioners were falling over themselves to uncover similar cold cases, with similarly boring and tedious results. 

Across the board, from researcher to executive producer, one notices a lack of hinterland or intellectual curiosity. They just don’t know that much about the world. In the New Broadcasting House reception (home of BBC broadcasting), I once saw a researcher walk straight past Natalie Bennett, when she was leading the Green Party, and go up to another woman and ask “Natalie Bennett?” You would think political TV researchers would know who the leaders of national political parties were by sight, or at least have enough initiative to google them. But you’d be wrong. It’s worth remembering that the young man was doing a job most politics A Level students would have given their left arm for. 

Executives don’t like it if TV people are interested or skilled in lots of different areas. A director who also edits is seen as suspect. Editors are regarded as technicians and larger productions insist a producer sits beside them telling them exactly what to do. When you look up a producer’s credits on the Talent Manager (the industry jobs board), it’s either all food, or all police, or all hospitals, or all sport. The attitude is “let’s not risk this programme on a director who hasn’t done the exact same thing ten times before.” It’s a creative cul de sac. 

The channels and executives are obsessed with “the talent”, or the presenters and reporters as you would refer to them, not necessarily actual talent. These days, having a large Instagram following is almost a prerequisite to presenting a programme on anything. The natural endpoint is documentaries being more about the presenter than their subject matter.

Lots of TV is now made with a view to “engagement”, or noise on social media. These factors make TV more hyperbolic and less thoughtful, like how the biggest voices on social media are often quite stupid and boring in real life.

My first film, which I’m still very proud of, was a thoughtful look at why young people without kids get sterilised. It was converted by the commissioner (a couple years younger than me) into a story about young people with mental health issues sterilising themselves because they didn’t want to pass on their mental health problems. I felt this misrepresented the motivations of the contributors, who very bravely entrusted me with telling their stories. But “every time we do something on mental health, it pops on social media”. BBC brain. 

There are all the usual problems with bureaucracy you get in any large organisation, since really, if you think about it, the BBC is another arm of the civil service. To top it off, we have the All Seeing Eye of Ofcom scrutinising everything, since there needs to be a state regulator checking everything that gets broadcast for standards and political balance because that’s the way we do things in Britain. However, in the circular industry of television, leftward thinking is the centre. Diversity quotas which are wildly at odds with actual demographic proportions are normal. Platitudes about immigration having built Britain are doctrine. Climate change science is settled. This cannot be questioned. As GBNews has found, Ofcom complaints can and will be used as political weapons by the left. 

Great stuff still gets made and there are some exceptionally talented people around — but that is the setting they work in.

It is no wonder then that the political right has fled to, and thrived in, the open waters of the internet. There was nowhere else for it to go. Yet television had a benchmark of quality and professionalism that you just don’t get with someone babbling into a webcam about the WEF on TheTruthNews or whatever. 

The next step must be quality filmmaking for the online right. This is why I started Outpost, which I founded with fellow right of centre documentarian James Glancy. The documentaries I made for The Telegraph’s Youtube channel with Steven Edginton showed there really is an appetite for this sort of work, and I believe will help with the, err, credibility problem the online right has. High production standards have a way of making political arguments somewhat more compelling. Plus, I simply realised the mainstream wasn’t going to let me make the films I wanted. 

In the years to come, perhaps the only place to find quality filmmaking will be the free online direct-to-consumer marketplace. Substack, where we host Outpost, is now a very welcoming and lucrative home for our favourite thinkers, journalists and polemicists. 

As platforms like Substack expand into video, we see the established channels retreat from filmmaking. How ironic, that GBNews set itself a mission to emulate the major broadcasters, only to see Newsnight eschew its films in favour of sitting around a table discussing the news, and in so doing, emulate GBNews. 

As news discussion, no doubt for reasons of budget, crowds out almost everything else, properly planned and shot documentaries will be the only way anyone can differentiate themselves. 

As the cameras get ever more cheaper and powerful, and AI brings Hollywood standard effects within the amateur’s grasp, let’s hope the next Ascent of Man is being edited right now, on a Macbook Pro, in someone’s bedroom.