It wasn’t until the 1970s that they began producing 26 or fewer episodes of a series. In the 1950s and 60s the standard was 39 episodes! Over the summer13 episodes considered the strongest would be rerun, or the show might take the summer off entirely and 13 episodes of a “summer replacement” might be aired. Oftentimes the networks would run a string of unsold pilots.
Generally, esp. after 10 PM if you want R rated material, there’s something worthy on one of the BBC’s and a netflix-ey guide to iPlayer. There is also ITV and I could be wrong - yet it’s what’s on only.
Because of this your query, I saw I missed “David Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster” which is on now. The man is a treasure.
eta: We only have broadband “TV”
We only see the very best of British TV, there is a lot of drek also.
For example- Hole in the Wall., Heil Honey, I’m Home! and others.
Notice how few of those are shows you have heard of? Bill Bryson talked about how bad British TV was in one of his books- turning it on in his hotel rooms and finding nothing worth watching. Mind you American TV isnt any better- just that there’s more and more choices.
It seems misleading to talk about the top salaries - what’s a median salary for an actor on US TV vs. median on UK TV?
I think that’s a question that appears very sensible, but doesn’t have a good answer without so many caveats, exceptions, and qualifications as to make the answers meaningless.
Take American tv. Is the show a drama or a sitcom? On network tv, a premium cable channel, a second-rank cable channel, or streaming? Are we talking about the first named actor or the others in the cast? A newcomer, a experienced player, or a star? The first season of the show or after the renegotiations or at the end of a long-running hit? A regular cast member, a featured or recurring character, or a guest star? A show made for the network, or acquired through a pilot? A star showrunner or creator or someone just starting?
Since I mentioned The Big Bang Theory before, take that as an example. Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki got $60,000 an episode for the first season, while the other three, Kaley Cuoco, Kunal Nayyar, and Simon Helberg, got $45,000. Galecki and Cuoco had been on previous hit sitcoms, the others were less known. There were 17 episodes, so $1,020,000 for the leads, $765,000 for the others. The creator, Chuck Lorre, was the name behind Two-and-a-Half-Men so he was hot and CBS wanted every show from him, although TBBT had a bad pilot and a rocky start.
Does that make any of these numbers meaningful? We really only know them because the show became a huge hit. Cumberbatch was playing the title character on a prestige show created by Stephen Moffit, who had a huge hit as showrunner, but not creator, of the modern Doctor Who. Does that make for a good comparison? In terms of total earnings for a season, American tv stomps all over its British counterpart, especially for a hit. Cumberbatch, of course, got vastly more expensive after the show made him a star, but the American movies he starred in were the biggest factor in that. What did Martin Freeman, already a major movie star, make as Watson? Nobody knows.
British actors have been griping for decades about the lower salaries available to them at home, that I know. The numbers I can find suggest that the difference is very real.
Back in the ‘60s, Nichelle Nichols and the other actors (“day players”) on Star Trek were making around $700 per episode and “guaranteed” only 6 or 7 episodes out of every 13 (one half of a season). IIRC, Shatner was getting $5000 to start with, plus a piece of the show. Nimoy got a similar deal in the second season, once he became the series’ main “draw.”
On Mission: Impossible (another Desilu production), I believe Martin Landau and Barbara Bain got a combined salary of around $9000 after the first season.
Such incomes weren’t all that great even in the '60s, but the actors were happy to be working.
FWIW, I was watching Doctor Who on PBS out of Chicago when I lived in Indiana from December '75 to April '76. Jon Pertwee was The Doctor in those episodes. Tom Baker must have replaced him shortly before, since he was doing the show when I arrived in Britain that spring.
Chicken feed by U.S. standards is a swell deal by most of the world. Most actors don’t ever make much, just like most musicians, authors etc.
First of all, I appreciate the data provided by @Exapno_Mapcase, as well as the point that circumstances vary wildly. I’m still left feeling pretty ignorant about what working as an actor is like financially for 90% or the profession.
That’s certainly my impression. The fact that a large absolute number of big names make most of the money echoes the situation in many “arts and entertainment” fields. Within that reality, I’m sure the median in one market is going to be different from the median in another, but I also suspect that “barely ekeing out a living” level of income varies similarly.
I’m not expecting anyone to have that kind of data, though again I do appreciate the effort!
It has been my WAG and pet theory that when TV was first a thing the British government was terrified of it. It wasn’t what American’s saw as entertainment, it was a direct threat to upper classes by changing the minds in anyway of the lower classes. It had to be controlled. So, they taxed the public for public programing that could be decided by the government. It was slow and expensive and there were never many channels or programs but the quality was good and there were no dangerous ideas. Just Benny Hill.
Fast forward to today, modern British audiences expect quality and don’t think to even ask for quantity. They could do more episodes, but it’s expensive and the audience doesn’t need them.
According the statistics I found on a search, only 2% of actors in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world make their living by acting. So what do they do? They take a day off work to be an extra in a movie. They take some time off to appear in a local play. 98% of them eventually realized that they will never make a living off acting. This is rather like people who want to write fiction for a living eventually find out.
The publicly-owned channels (i.e., the BBC channels) are only a small proportion of all the channels available in the U.K.
Daytime broadcast channels are a lot of lifestyle and light entertainment shows, so yes, cheap to produce. Evening viewing is a mix of news, lifestyle and drama. Of course, we’re also overloaded with streaming channels like Netflix. I hardly watch live broadcast TV any more, unless I want to catch the news.
Here’s the channel guide for one of our broadcast companies, ITV. They do produce some fantastic drama which is available via their streaming service as well as via broadcast, but you’ll see here that there’s still an awful lot of cheap light entertainment stuff.
And for balance, here’s the BBC’s channel guide.
The might and omnipresence of American advertising has been largely ignored in this thread. Until the rise of premium channels and streaming platforms, American TV was all about keeping you glued to the set (and their advertised products) for as many hours as possible. That wasn’t the mandate of the BBC, and what little advertising-supported TV there was in the UK was weak sauce compared to the monster that was/is Madison Avenue.
The reduction in TV advertising revenue caused by streaming has actually had a positive effect on drama production in the UK, as commercial broadcast companies ITV and Channel 4 have turned to exporting quality drama to fill in the shortfall in domestic ad revenue.
I do recall it being said that when Absolutely Fabulous ended despite being popular, it was claimed that in Britain is was typically preferred to end series while they were still doing well, basically ending on a high note. Instead of dragging them out as quality declined until they couldn’t get it renewed the way America generally does.
Assuming that’s true it would produce a general pattern of quantity over quality, especially near the tail end of a show’s run.
You missed the perfect opportunity to say “a piece of the action”…
I’ve heard economists call these “glamour careers”. Jobs where a few people make a huge amount of money, and the vast majority earn very little. There are many examples, but the arts is a particularly good one.
I’m told that being a college professor is somewhat this way. At many colleges, many of the professors are actually adjunct professors. This means that aren’t on the tenure track. They are paid rather low salaries. They would have to have an additional job, perhaps teaching at another college, to make a living.
Also of note is the tremendous amount of influence advertisers had over the shows that they sponsored. The hierarchy was basically the executives who ran the show, the network executives above them, and the almighty sponsor lording over them all. In the early days of television it was even common for shows to be named after the sponsor, or for the sponsor’s name or product to be part of the intro. The intro of I Love Lucy had to be changed for syndication to eliminate the ad that opened every show.
The movie Being the Ricardos, about the development and production of I Love Lucy, provides some good insights on sponsor influence, the major ongoing sponsor there being the tobacco company Philip Morris. One of the most controversial moments during the show’s run was when Lucille Ball got pregnant IRL, and Desi Arnaz pushed hard to just portray her that way in the show and write the script around her pregnancy, which both the network and the sponsor’s rep vehemently opposed. So Arnaz appealed to the ultimate power, the chairman of Philip Morris. This may be apocryphal but according to the movie, the chairman wrote to all the staff at the company and at CBS, “don’t fuck with the Cuban”.
Here is a list of anthology television shows on English-language television. A lot of them were named after the sponsor. This happened in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s:
I will tell you the same thing. My wife has been a prof for two decades, not a tenure track in sight and budget constraints mean a lack of credits every semester. My wife replaced a tenured prof to do this job. If you are ever lucky enough to control purse strings in academia you will have loads of instant friends only some of which you can help. This seems to concentrate decision making and pay roll all into a few people.
Modern trends and the Federal government are not helping, but the Ivory Tower was already well on it’s way of selling out education for more cash.