Why so few episodes of British TV series?

Cafe Society
41

That’s true of virtually every occupation. America is much richer than the rest of the world, and probably measures success in dollar terms more than anyone else.

A common meme today is that the median salary of Mississippi, the poorest state, is higher than the median salary in almost every other western country. Should that be of any comfort to the people who live in Mississippi, especially those below the median? Cost of living is the other half of that equation; people always leave out half the balance sheet making any such argument meaningless.

Most actors, as Wendell said, don’t make a living wage just from acting, a major reason for the actors’ - and writers’ and directors’ - strikes in recent years, trying to claw out better residuals and get guarantees they won’t be replaced by AI “actors”.

British actors, unlike, say farmers in the South Sudan, can fairly easily move to the U.S. and get jobs that pay them far more money. Shows and movies are flooded with British actors using very good American accents.

When the Internet started, pundits enthused over the “Long Tail” that would evolve, meaning that since everything would become a click away, the millions of books and songs and shows that had been overlooked would be back in the public eye and make money for their creators. That happened, but you don’t hear much about the Long Tail these days because what also happened is that the top sellers became even more gigantic and culturally dominating. Rowling and Martin and King don’t just sell well, they are billionaire fonts of media empires.

The poor salaries of 90% of the actors is not an answer to the question of “why so few episodes of British TV series?” The salaries of the top actors is a vital piece of that answer, though.

42

Actually it didn’t happen; they were crushed into oblivion by copyright. If they aren’t literally erased, they are kept inaccessible in storage.

43

The BBC is the exact opposite and goes out of its way to avoid even a hint of advertising. Top Cat was renamed Boss Cat so that it didn’t look like an endorsement for a popular cat food brand.

44

As a book collector, I strongly disagree with this. If you want to argue this further, I suggest you start a new topic rather than continue a hijack here.

45

It’s my understanding (and I welcome gentle correction here) that British or at least BBC shows are developed and budgeted for a fixed number of episodes, and scheduled so the actors and crew have sufficient time off to take outside work to augment their relatively meager salaries.

By contrast, traditional American television is a complete gamble for everyone involved. A studio can pitch a show. Maybe the network will give them development funds. If that doesn’t happen, the studio loses on square one. If the network commissions a pilot, the pilot costs almost certainly won’t cover the actual production costs. At that point, the network and studio both have something to write off..

If the show actually makes it to air, troubles can come up everywhere. Maybe it’s just a bomb; maybe it attracts a loyal niche, but not an audience advertisers are interested in. Maybe the star gets busted for something heinous, or worse, dies. You have to either pull the plug or risk a reboot. Either way it costs more money. Even when the show is a hit, everything costs more each year - production costs, stars’ salaries, keeping old writers or breaking in new ones, having a star suddenly decide they’re worth a lot more than than their contract, etc.

Financially it’s in the best interest of the studio and networks, not to mention the producers, cast and crew who enjoy regular paychecks, to keep the show going as long as practical and hope they can finally get enough episodes to sell it in syndication. Even then, the buyers may decide the cost is too high, and they’ll just keep rerunning I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show.

46

A factor not mentioned is that UK shows often have a single scriptwriter or scriptwriting team for the entire series. Fawlty Towers; Allo, Allo; Keeping Up Appearances; Are You Being Served?, As Time Goes By, Misfits, et al. are just some examples (It seems to be more common in comedies, though).

I also believe the BBC wants a full season of scripts before they produce it.

That’s a rough pace. It’s not impossible for someone to produce 22 quality episodes in a year (Babylon 5), but most American shows use multiple writers, allowing them to write more episodes.

47

Hmmm?

48

Legend has it that Carl Reiner and Gene Roddenberry had a full season of story ideas when they finally sold the Dick Van Dyke Show and Star Trek, but those were plots or outlines, not completed scripts.

In American TV, network approval comes in about late April for a series, with premiere dates in October (formerly mid-September.) That leaves roughly 30 weeks to commit to a cast, assemble a production company, sign the prospective cast to firm contracts AND find someone to write multiple scripts in time to get them approved, into the production schedule and actually produced.

As the creative types used to say when I was in marketing, “You want it fast, good, and cheap. Pick two.”

49

The low budgets made classic Doctor Who special to fans.

The flimsy set walls would move anytime a actor brushed against them. The alien costumes for the Cyberman and Daleks were cheesy. But they worked great for a scary kids show.

I’ve wondered if 1960’s BBC actor’s salaries (per episode) were considerably lower compared to William Shatner, Robert Vaughn, and Dick Van Dyke in America. They were the stars of Star Trek, Man from Uncle, and Van Dyke show). They had to work in more episodes and that requires more salary. But William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton were very popular at the same time in England.

How do the limited number of BBC episodes work? Do they just endlessly repeat for viewers?

50

Quite simply they are fundamentally funded differently. And all the attributes that brings.

When you refer to “British TV”, you mostly are referring to BBC TV (and it dominates so much that the other channels pretty much work the same way). This is publically funded, you get commissioned to do a few episodes, and then after a while some more. There is no advertising to support this. Ratings do matter, but not as much.

In the US, it is fully advertising funded, and the advertisers do have a lot of say and will flock to the slots with a popular show. With the money involved. The TV Networks want as much of that money as possible, so will start with the endgame of having about half the year covered by one specific show (you can’t drive your actors forever, especially when they’re making you that much money), with multiple hit shows in succession and overlapping.

Thus ratings are king. The shows in the US are seeded with the idea that “will this be somewhat successful” with pilots (I’m not sure, but is there a pilots season?), which is a hurdle a show has to clear before getting to those 24 episodes a season (not even a given, a few network shows i liked had varying number of episodes, perhaps because they are successful enough to keep going, but not enough to shine. The comedy Rules of Engagement only had one season of 24 (Season 5) out of its seven seasons)..

Then there’s the ratings monitoring and what that involves. I know there’s sweeps week, never sure that that actually means, but I know it’s ratings. Awards seasons too. All in effect advertising the shows to attract more advertising.

The BBC does not advertise, so does not do this. It does sell to overseas, so ratings and quality are important, but not traditionally, it’s been recent decades for that. Part funded by US quality TV is there too (Rome for instance was co funded by HBO).

This is, of course, Network TV, streaming has produced a whole other thing, with a perchance of funding new shows (to attract subscribers) and dropping them unfinished a lot of times (no reason to keep them, no more subscribers).

There are shows which go on for a long time on British TV, soaps, for instance like Coronation Street (64 years) and Eastenders (40 years) multiple times a week with few interruptions. And the low quality comedy shows of the 80s did a lot, I suspect with the idea of selling them overseas too.

So it’s simple, when you think about it, but complicated in detail. Like anything in life.

51

Your general point is of course right - 90% of everything is rubbish, and there’s been a lot of terrible British TV. But Heil Honey I’m Home! isn’t really an example of this because it was barely on TV - it was broadcast on a little seen satellite channel in the days when noone had satellite, and was cancelled after 1 episode. Whereas Hole in the Wall and Crossroads had full seasons and an audience.

52

It is for the star of a hit show. A lot of stars get $1,000,000 per episode. That’s what the original leads of The Big Bang Theory were making, when, notoriously, the later-comers were not-- more like $300,000, including for Mayim Bialik, who not only came to the show as an established star with a following, but also with a PhB in neuroscience, and could be her own character’s technical advisor.

When the later actors were denied raises, the orignal ones historically offered to take cuts to free up money for the others.

IIRC, the actors on Friends were making that much per ep from about mid-run on, and Mariska Hargitay makes that per ep of L&O: SVU just for her acting; she also gets a salary for her producer’s credit.

Now, is $500,000 low pay for just about any other job? no, it’s would be extravagant for what I do. In fact, you could pay 8 people for a year to do what I do, for $500,000, and that is with a degree and the experience and time in that I have, and the place I work pays about 12% over market. You could probably pay 14 people concurrently going to college, with little to no experience, to do essentially what I do for $500,000, and it would be good for someone aged 18-22.

Now, there is union minimum, the lowest fair pay that actors’ unions let producers pay, and that, I understand, is somewhere close to the entry-level pay at my job.

53

And let’s not forget - no Crossroads = no Acorn Antiques. Macaroon, anyone?

54

Yes, that is a bit wild. When radio broadcasting started, it suited all the relevant interests to set up a stand-alone, independent public service to work out how best to use the medium to “inform, educate and entertain” (i e., not “decided by the government” - indeed an attempt by the government to take it over at the time of the General Strike of 1926 was firmly rebuffed). By the time TV came over the horizon, the BBC was the only show in town, technically. But TV receivers were so expensive and its range so limited that up until WW2, and for some years afterward, only the better off in and around London would be watching. It took until the Coronation in 1953 for TV to overtake radio as the predominant medium nationally, and only a couple more years before a commercial competing network was set up.

I don’t know where you get the idea of “Just Benny Hill” from. Some of the most radical programmes from the 1960s onwards came from the BBC taking a chance.

55

Pirate Radio was a thing in Europe and particularly Britain. Running a Pirate Radio station on the MV Olga Patricia for instance does not make sense if, “Some of the most radical programmes from the 1960s onwards came from the BBC taking a chance.”

Production was always Institutionally Approved and that is never radical.

56

I was thinking of TV dramas of the time, like The Wednesday Play and Play for Today, since you referred to TV and “dangerous ideas” for the working classes. Continuous pop music on radio was hardly radical in that sense, even if it took commercial competition to spur the BBC into following suit. And of course what was broadcast was “institutionally approved” - how else would any programme have been broadcast by any broadcaster?

57

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. It’s not true that all American television channels are only advertising funded. There’s PBS (Public Broadcast Service) that is partly funded by the federal government. 99% of Americans can receive a PBS station purely by broadcast television (i.e., by using an antenna rather than cable). I presume that all cable systems can show the main PBS channel (i.e., the one that’s broadcast). On my choice of my cable system (which the cable company calls “basic cable”), I get several additional PBS channels. One more channel that I get is funded entirely by the city I live in. It has no commercials. The shows that it runs are limited, but there are no commercials.

There’s no absolute difference between the amount of television with commercials in the U.S. and the U.K. The amount of television that has commercials is much more in the U.S. than in the U.K., but both have both commercial and publicly-funded television. Incidentally, on basic cable in the U.S., there’s a channel just for BBC news. There’s also a lot of British shows on PBS. There’s a streaming channel called BritBox which I think (because I’ve never watched it) shows a lot of new and old British shows.

58

So far as I know, there has never been a “pilots season” in the US. When I was growing up, unsold pilots were sometimes shown during the summer, when there were relatively few viewers and the established shows were on hiatus. Combined with reruns, it was just a way of filling time and possibly recouping an investment.

I remember a number of imported shows were given a summer run in the late '60s and early '70s, maybe to see if they’d catch on. These were variety shows with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck, Val Doonican, and Dean Martin’s Golddiggers (“from London”), along with dramatic series like Strange Report and The Prisoner.

British series on the regular network schedule included This Is Tom Jones, The Avengers, and Secret Agent (aka Danger Man), but others like The Saint and The Persuaders were (so far as I know) shown only in syndication.

59

Ok, so do any of these channels produce successful 24 episodes a season original dramas or comedies?

As far as I understand, the 24 episode a season, mass produced show, comes exclusively from the US advertising networks, but correct me if I’m wrong.

And the typical shows which people refer to as British TV here is usually from the BBC. Sure, there are exceptions, but the likes of Downton Abbey is not a typical ITV show, it’s an BBC type show produced by ITV, often successfully sold overseas. It isn’t producing most of its revenue from advertising sales.

Channel 4 pretty much doesn’t do dramas, or not many, and has succeeded in the past with comedies (Father Ted, IT Crowd, to name two), but that is a lesser channel which has only really had big successes with some things like Big Brother, and you’ve got your own of that, I assume.

I very much doubt Channel 5 original content has made it overseas. It’s a dumping ground for low-quality UK programming, and its glory days were when it showed the likes of CSI, which it has long since lost.

60

One television program I’d love to see all the shows of (but which do not seem to be available) is Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London. From 1965 to 1976, Dean Martin hosted a popular weekly variety show. The show took a hiatus each summer, and a replacement variety show filled in that time period each week. These summer replacement shows were thus called things like Dean Martin Presents . . . In 1968 and 1969, these summer replacement shows were called Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers . The Golddiggers were a singing and dancing group of twelve women put together for the show who filled in between the acts on the show. They were like such dancers as the June Taylor Dancers. In 1970, this summer replacement variety show was filmed in London just to be a little different and called Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London

I only remember a little of this show, but the little I remember had some hilarious sketches by Charles Nelson Reilly (who wasn’t very funny himself) and Marty Feldman (who wasn’t known in the U.S. at that time). Feldman had previously been part of At Last the 1948 Show . Some of the sketches of Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London were remakes of sketches from At Last the 1948 Show, including a version of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch (rewritten for two people). I hadn’t seen Monty Python’s Flying Circus yet at that point, so the humor in Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London was greatly different from anything else I’d ever seen.