Mind the Gap: the corrosive impact of the ‘production’/’editorial’ divide in UK television.

Abstract

Production managers (PMs) play a vital role in television production. The ability of a company to bring in a project on-time and on-budget, while realising the vision of its producers, largely depends on production management. Yet PMs (together with the associated roles of heads of production, line producers and production coordinators) consistently head the lists of shortages reported by employers in the UK television industry (ScreenSkills Feb 2022; ScreenSkills Sept 2022; ScreenSkills 2023.) The industry struggles to recruit to the role: more significantly, it fails to retain the experienced PMs it has. In our recent British Academy funded project we surveyed and interviewed PMs (and former PMs) about their experiences of working in the UK television industry. We asked about what attracted them to the role, what kept them in the role and what, in a significant number of cases, made them leave. In our survey the three reasons most often cited for leaving, or for thinking about leaving production management were a sense of being undervalued and disrespected, an ‘always on’ work culture, and feeling over-loaded and under-resourced. In-depth interviews, moreover, revealed a key underlying issue in the growing divide between ‘production’ and ‘editorial’ staff working on television projects. This structural and cultural divide, though not universal, is common across the industry. Its origins can be traced to the bureaucratic divide that Tom Burns (1977) found to have emerged at the BBC from the 1960s, while John Birt’s Producer Choice programme in the 1990s introduced a cost-control strategy that framed the divide as economic necessity. Spreading across the independent production sector, the divide has, since then, become self-perpetuating, despite the opprobrium of editorial and production management professionals alike. Our participants’ experiences suggest that this divide is implicated not only in discontent and resulting retention issues in the production workforce, but also in compromised productivity, contributing to poor planning and resource management, poor communication, toxic work cultures and failures in the talent pipeline. We have examined their testimony, together with that of professionals engaged in editorial and managerial roles, to better understand the nature and function of this divide where it occurs. We have sought to identify and quantify the potential benefits of (and practical, economic or cultural obstacles to) alternative approaches to television production - approaches that in helping to close the gap, might improve both productivity and working conditions in the industry. (394/ 400 words) Sources: Bennett, J., 2014. From Independence to Independents, Public Service to Profit: British TV and the Impossibility of Independence 1. In Media Independence (pp. 71-93). Routledge. Burns, T., 1977. The BBC: Public institution and private world. London: Macmillan Harris, M. and Wegg-Prosser, V., 1998. The BBC and producer choice: A study of public service broadcasting and managerial change. Wide angle, 20(2), pp.150-163. Lee, D., 2018. Independent television production in the UK: From cottage industry to big business. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Morris, J., Farrell, C. and Reed, M., 2016. The indeterminacy of ‘temporariness’: Control and power in neo-bureaucratic organizations and work in UK television. Human Relations, 69(12), pp.2274-2297.