When Andrew Sheldon first started travelling from Leeds to London to pitch ideas for new television shows, even getting in the door was a challenge for his Leeds-based television production company.
“You’d get to London and get to the front desk and be told: ‘Sorry can you come back next week,’” recalled the founder of True North productions. Even when he did get inside, one senior television executive was notorious for welcoming the visitors from Yorkshire as exotic creatures: “You’d go and see them and they’d say: ‘How are things in the north’ and wave their arm across the sky. It was a bit like being in Game of Thrones.”
In theory Channel 4’s recent arrival in Leeds should change that. Rather than having to head to the capital to win television commissions, Yorkshire companies such as True North – and smaller start-ups – should be able to build up relationships with commissioners in the same way that their London rivals have long enjoyed.
Which is why Yorkshire’s television production companies are baffled the government is risking its own rare levelling up success by privatising the channel, just as the regional work starts to take off. They fear that any private-sector owner of Channel 4 is unlikely to want to keep an expensive office in Leeds or take risks on small start-up companies.
“TV in Yorkshire has become a thing again – it’s that hard-to-quantify confidence,” said Pete Brandon. He returned home from London three years ago to co-found Button Down productions. The company, based in a wooden medieval building overlooking York Minster, has benefited from Channel 4’s regional commissions schemes and is hoping to win commissions from the broadcaster. It currently employs five full-time staff and has been considering expansion but the uncertainty caused by Channel 4’s potential privatisation is causing them to think twice.
“Would there still be an appetite from whoever owns Channel 4 to commission small regional indies like ourselves, or would all the commissions just go to [global television production giant] Endemol?” asks Brandon. He fears a lengthy parliamentary debate over privatising Channel 4 will leave his business in limbo: “Is it going to turn into TV’s version of Brexit and waste so much time and nothing actually happens?”
Veterans of Yorkshire’s television production scene talk about two lost decades of television production in the county, after ITV’s retreat from regional programming in the early 2000s destroyed the career pathways that used to exist and left little more than Emmerdale behind.
And while they don’t doubt Channel 4’s current commitment to the region is sincere, many point out that this is a recent development. Channel 4 fought hard against government plans in 2015 to relocate the entire business to Birmingham, and even with the opening of the Leeds office the majority of staff and key decision makers, including the entire top executive team, are remaining in London.
There’s praise for the government’s pressure on Channel 4 to boost its regional presence – and bafflement at why ministers want to risk that. Caroline Cooper Charles, the boss of regional group Screen Yorkshire, says the media industry in the region wants the business in public hands: “If a commercial owner was to decide to withdraw that regional presence, that would be very significant for the indie community – many of whom are only just starting to reap the benefits.”
Ministers have suggested that some of the £1bn it hopes to raise by selling Channel 4 will be put into regional training programmes for the television industry – but Sheldon says he just wants Channel 4 to spend more on regional programming.
“What [the government] is saying is we’ll sell Channel 4 to raise some money to let you do the things you’re already doing. There’s no logic. It’s telly eating itself,” he said.
In February Channel 4 put forward its own counter-proposals to government, which would see it seeking private investment while remaining in public ownership. A leaked copy of the document shows the broadcaster’s bosses want to have a commitment to regional output built into its legal mandate, with a pledge to move 300 more jobs out of the capital, rapidly expand the Leeds office, and reduce office space in London.
Instead Sheldon has one more proposal that the government should take advantage of its ownership of the channel to push it to be more radical: “One of the things I’ve tried to advocate is that it would have been a brilliant thing to move Channel 4 out of London altogether and put it in Leeds – that would be entirely possible.”
