#worldscreen

Steven Moffat

PRAGUE: As an appetizer to tomorrow’s market opening, NATPE Europe dedicated two sessions this afternoon to examining formats, featuring insight from, among others, Pascal Dalton of Endemol Shine Group, Jennifer Ebell of ITV Studios Global Entertainment and Nathan Gibbs of Zodiak Media.

In the first session, Keri Lewis Brown, the managing director of British research house K7 Media, opened by asking “What’s Hot and What’s Not?”—to which, during a 45-minute presentation of ten clips, she gave the answer: nothing. Or, at least, nothing in the sense of the heat generated in the past by the likes of Big Brother, Millionaire and Idols. Lewis Brown’s contention is that there may never be another “next big thing”—the consequence, she suggested, of market fragmentation, viewers’ increasing ability to see past producers’ “tropes” and consequent desire to see more “real reactions.”

The second of this afternoon’s sessions, “Buying or Selling? Creating or Adapting?,” looked at the respective roles of the producer/distributor and broadcasters, with many contributions echoing points made by Lewis Brown (although there were also some notable differences of opinion).

Pascal Dalton, the sales director for TV formats and new media in CEE at Endemol Shine Group, reported renewed regional interest in Big Brother, with the series set to return to screens in Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro. Jennifer Ebell, the VP of sales for Southeast EMEA at ITV Studios Global Entertainment, noted that successful outings of Come Dine With Me in Poland and the Czech Republic have recently been joined by commissions of more than 100 episodes in both Serbia and Croatia, and that I’m a Celebrity... launched in March on Romania’s ProTV with a 30 percent audience share—none of these series being shy of the odd trope!

However, both Nathan Gibbs, the group head of format acquisition at Zodiak Media, and Small World’s senior VP of formats, Luci Burnley, agreed that audiences are becoming more demanding and less tolerant of the producer tropes Lewis Brown referred to—Burnley citing the recent success of The Redneck Auction in Finland over “big-budget talent shows” as an example of “viewers turning to more authentic reality,” and Gibbs highlighting “modern audiences’ demand for more from formats” as the reason he “constantly has to cast the net wider,” adding by way of illustration, “I am currently looking at formats from countries as diverse as Korea, New Zealand, China and Latin America.”

Gibbs and Burnley had markedly different views on the key area of development. Insisting, “I don’t think broadcasters should be spending the significant amounts required for them to develop their own formats, principally because there is such a great choice out there on which others have spent development money and which broadcasters can pick up for a fraction of the cost of developing their own,” Gibbs went on to lament, “We would, though, love it if broadcasters would share development costs with us, but most countries won’t do that.”

Burnley, by contrast, told the audience, “A lot of broadcasters are very happy to share development costs with producers/distributors, often regardless of ownership.”

PRAGUE: Adrian Hodges, whose credits include serving as co-creator and lead writer on Primeval and showrunner on The Musketeers and Survivors, kicked off the opening of NATPE Europe this morning with a breakfast keynote, in which he shared his experience and perspective of the global television landscape.

It is so often the case with big-name keynotes that the promise is much greater than the reality. So often the industry’s big-name successes turn out, understandably, to be reluctant to reveal the real secrets of their success—so often, but not always. The Adrian Hodges keynote was one, happy, exception.

Hodges is a genial, open and direct communicator unafraid of the dreaded ‘H’ word: honesty!

All of which can no doubt be explained by his origins in the business as a trade journalist. Realizing (with, it must be said, no obvious bitterness) that he wasn’t cut out for journalism, he became an acquisitions executive at the now defunct Thorn EMI, where he recalls, “I read thousands of scripts while still writing all the time—I was determined to become a writer.”

In the early ’90s that determination paid off when two of his scripts were commissioned and broadcast, Tell Me That You Love Me for the BBC and The Bridge for Channel 4.

He credits his time at Thorn EMI with giving him “an invaluable insight into the buying, selling and formatting of TV.” An insight that clearly wasn’t “in depth,” as it took him the experience of these two first productions to discover that “even though you know what you wrote, actors and directors can change everything significantly.” It was this epiphany that pushed him toward executive producing/showrunning; and, it would seem, formed much of the philosophy that has permeated his subsequent work.

That philosophy can be summed up in four words: “control, creative, freedom, communication.”

Much of Hodges’ work has been adaptations of previously existing oeuvres, something he explains thus, “they are much easier to sell because everyone knows there is an audience for them, and they are easier to do, compared with original ideas, which are really hard and take a lot longer to develop,” adding, “and it is a big help if the original writer or creator is dead!”

The audience laughed, but apparently not all living authors would share the joke. Referring to his 2012 adaptation of Kate Mosse’s bestseller Labyrinth, Hodges recalled taking the author to lunch, where he began describing his plans for her novel. Her reaction was such that Hodges abandoned this plan before the end of the hors d’oeuvres, telling Mosse, “I will do what I think is best”—although he does claim she liked the end result.

If this sounds egotistical, it isn’t. Describing the gestation of The Musketeers, which departed markedly from the Dumas original, Hodges said that he was happy with the request of BBC Worldwide to make the series episodic, as “everyone knows the story backwards, plus the original story has an end and, this being television, we want the series to run as long as possible.”

With  'WorldScreen' getting the Mighty Moff to talk Who the interview-frenzy continues and they are contributing some rather interesting reading material.  Here are some snippets. 

On Moffat’s first year as Who’s headwriter:

I remember thinking, if these two things screw up, I’m finished! […] This could be a really terrible year. I could crash Doctor Who and screw up Sherlock Holmes and if I’d just shot Daniel Craig in the face I’d have ended all of British culture. But it didn’t work out that way.

On what Mattt Smith has brought to the role:

The last thing anybody thought when we cast the 26-year-old was that what we’d get is a return to the eccentric old boffin that he is at heart, the hipster boffin.

 On casting the new Doctor:

At the end of the day the objective is to convince the nation that somehow, despite the apocalyptic change, it really is the same person.

There are also some Sherlock bits, like  how he and Mark Gatiss came up with the idea of the show and how updating it felt like a natural process. Then we get a comment on the changing nature of watching TV schedule-free:

Your bookcase doesn’t tell you when you can read. Why should your television tell you when you can watch? We’re heading towards the world of the download, and that’s a good thing. It will favour quality, I believe.

And, last but not least, why he thinks Who is the most perfect  TV show of all time:

It is the show you can’t kill. […] It is dependent on no individual. You give it your all for the years that you do it and when you leave it won’t even notice […] Not only can you recast the Doctor, you can create a Doctor who is appropriate for the times. He can always be modern. He can always be new. It’s an ancient tradition and yet it’s a brand-new iteration of that tradition. So it feels old and new at the same time.

But go on, and read the whole stuff, even though some of the statements may appear familiar to you, especially if you’ve been following Comic Con. However, some of the background-information has been utterly new to me, and there’s a chance it will be new to you too.