Time To Get Animated: Why Kids TV In The UK Needs More Than Just A Tax Break

 


By Will Strauss

When the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne promised tax breaks for the animation industry earlier this year there was much rejoicing throughout the UK, not least in England’s North West.

With a great heritage in animated children’s programming (both stop-frame and cartoon), Greater Manchester and its surrounding area is one of the parts of the country that will benefit most if/when the proposed financial incentives are put in place.

Having lost Danger Mouse producer Cosgrove Hall in 2010, and seen some animation outsourced to countries that can boast either cheaper labour or tax breaks (or indeed both), being able to claim a decent percentage of a production budget back against tax is quite rightly viewed as potentially great news for the North West which is, of course, the new home of BBC Childrens and the “birthplace” of Bob The Builder, Roary The Racing Car et al.

Depending on how the tax break is issued, it promises to: allow certain animated productions to stay in this country that would have otherwise gone abroad: provide training and job opportunities for the next generation: prompt the production of more series and a wider variety of types of programming; and strengthen the UK’s position as the world’s leading exporter of pre-school programming.

Perhaps most important of all in a genre like Children’s TV where rights exploitation is key, it should also allow all intellectual property to remain on these shores.

However, with full details yet to be confirmed, the launch still a year away and some skepticism surrounding the government’s motives for such a plan, there are nagging concerns.

Evidence of this was made clear during a recent Westminster Media Forum called ‘Financing children's media - IP, co-pros and public policy support ‘ when a range of contributors welcomed the proposed tax break but warned that it alone will not solve all of Childrens TV’s problems.

FremantleMedia Enterprises’ president of Kids & Family Entertainment Sander Schwartz for one suggested that the UK needs to look beyond its pre-school expertise and embark on the production of what he described as “animated comedies with international appeal” or boys’ “action adventure series.”

These types of programme, he said, are in demand around the world and should be a target for the UK.

Zodiak Media chief executive of kids’ and family Nigel Pickard Pickard, a former director of programmes at ITV, added to that call for a greater range of content and also claimed that some producers were concerned that drama and factual programmes might suffer as a result of more animation commissioning. He cited France as an example of a country where this had already happened.

Pickard also bemoaned the percentage of homegrown television shown to children in the UK. Statistics suggest that he is right to do so. “Five years ago Ofcom research revealed that of the 113 thousand hours of TV broadcast to kids in this country,” he said. “Only 1% of that content is newly made here in the UK per annum.”

With that in mind, plus the deterioration in the number of commissioning broadcasters for children’s shows, the introduction of the HFSS regulations regarding junk food advertising plus an emphasis by US broadcasters to keep their production close to home, it may come as no surprise to learn that tax breaks for animation are not the only initiative being sought by UK producers with an interest in kids TV.

Newly formed campaigning body the Children's Media Foundation has launched an initiative to attract £30m worth of funding that can be used to commission children's TV and film.

Pickard said: [Our] proposal is that, post Olympics, and as part of the Growth Agenda, Lottery funding should be diverted to create an alternative commissioner for kids content. We should re-examine what the lottery is for. If it’s to support culture, then in a kids’ world it is very much screen based. For many kids TV and digital content is their culture.”

The pot of money would be used to produce cross-platform content across a number of genres, not just animation, with delivery made via a video-on-demand kids network online and through “TV window deals with the commercial broadcasters on a series by series basis,” allowing them to co-invest in TV and digital content. A 5-year cost plan for such a proposition has been put together.

Although somewhat audacious, its motives should be applauded, especially in the North West.

While some children’s TV and animation companies around Manchester have continued to do well through recent lean times, including one, McKinnon and Saunders, that I myself visited recently, there are still those living on the bread line.

With a combination of correctly administered tax breaks and a new, government funded, commissioning and distribution network, we could see kids TV in this part of the country return to the heights it achieved before the demise of Cosgrove Hall.

Without them we may as well all pack up our plasticine, our foam latex, our silicone and our copies of 3ds Max and go home.

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Will Strauss [www.willstrauss.co.uk] is a Leeds-based freelance journalist and regular contributor to various TV industry publications including Broadcast.

Local TV: Time For a Re-Think?

Following the demise of Manchester’s Channel M should the government re-think its plans for local TV? 



By Will Strauss

It’s not been the best couple of weeks for the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP.

Not only has the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport been forced to deny involvement in News Corp receiving ‘inside track’ during its negotiations to buy BSkyB but he’s also been asked further questions about his plans for local television provision in the UK following the closure of Channel M in Manchester.

The latter story may have received less publicity than the News Corp saga but, in the long term, it may be of greater significance.

Channel M began life as Manchester Student Television in 2000 and for 12 years broadcast to the Greater Manchester area on Freeview.

In April 2012 the station closed with owners GMG Radio declaring that: “it was unable to offer a commercially viable quality service within the Government's strategy to provide local television.”

The local TV strategy that GMG is referring to has been vigorously probed but, with Channel M’s closure, is once again being questioned.

As it currently stands, the government plans to award licenses that will allow broadcasters, media owners, independent producers and anyone with the right credentials to provide local television services (via an independent multiplex operator) to the cities of the UK via a dedicated channel on Freeview.

Finance for this new vision of local TV will come from both advertisers and the BBC which is being forced to provide up to £25m for the local TV services plus £15m over three years for content as part of the license fee settlement of October 2010.

Industry regulator Ofcom is currently consulting on the first 20 local stations with 2014/15 the likely starting point for any such services.

The over arching plan is to offer “a new voice for local communities, with local perspectives that are directly relevant to them.”

Designed to sit alongside rather than replace current regional television services, the ambition is honorable and has great merit.

With the media still very London-centric, it sounds (from a North of England based television viewer’s perspective at least) like a blessing, especially if you live in, visit, work in or associate yourself with a city that gets a licence.

In industry terms it’s a potential boon too as, now that multiple media ownership is possible, it could allow more local newspaper publishers, commercial radio firms and the like to get into TV or, perhaps most interestingly, give independent producers the chance to become broadcasters.

Phil Redmond, the founder of Mersey Television and creator of Brookside, said recently that he would apply for a license to broadcast in his hometown of Liverpool. "[The proposal] will be to create a platform and exhibition space for voices and social issues that do not get properly exposed or debated’” he said. “It will be commercially driven but with a strong public service purpose."

Now, although the idea of Redmond (and/or his peers) dictating the content agenda for a local TV service is manna from broadcasting heaven, there are still big hurdles and questions to answer.

Once awarded, the license will only require the licensee to broadcast a minimum of one hour of programming a day. This hardly feels like the revolution it could be.

Also, it really possible to, as Redmond suggests, make the service ‘commercially driven’?

Stuart Taylor, the chief executive of GMG didn’t think so. “Sadly, we don't feel they provide us with the framework needed to grow Channel M into a profitable business that delivers the quality service viewers and advertisers expect from GMG,” he said.

Part of this difficult commercial context is down to a lack of an appropriate way of measuring what will be very small audience viewing figures. The current BARB service that is used by the TV industry has, as BARB itself admits, ‘not been designed to represent viewing at individual small local levels.”

To get those stats requires significant investment but without them it is difficult to see how an advertiser will be able to justify any spend on commercials.

The good news is that in recent days further cash has been added to the potential Local TV pot thanks to the BBC returning £300m it didn’t spend on the digital switchover.

The bad news is that although city-focused TV stations could provide advertisers with highly targeted audiences and access to entire communities, local TV is expensive and time consuming to make (in comparison with other types of media) and is unlikely to provide the audience scale necessary to satisfy major brands and, in turn, the revenues required to sustain local TV services.

As interested parties from around the UK gather at Liverpool John Moore’s University today to discuss how it could work  I have my own thoughts.

Surely, a wider choice of platforms would provide the scale required? Why not embrace this new thing called the ‘internet’ (you have may have heard of it) where the start-up and transmission costs for video are also significantly lower?

Failing that, if this new vision for local TV must be available on broadcast television and we’re only talking about one-hour a day, would it not have been better to allow a public service broadcaster such as Channel 4 to launch a dedicated channel with lots of regional opt-outs featuring indie-produced investigative, social and historical documentaries on a micro, rather than macro, scale.

Think of it as ‘The One Show’ meets ‘Dispatches’ via ‘Countryfile’ but with regular stories from (and for) each of the nations and regions not just their cities.

Importantly it would be a further boost to a wider tranche of the UK’s regional Indies and it could potentially provide the size of audiences that advertisers would be happy with.

The broadcaster would run it, the quality of the content would be high, the viewing figures would be handled in the industry-accepted way and only one start-up would need to flourish rather than 20-odd. 

It’s probably too late now but - if nothing else - in his annus horribilis it would have given Jeremy Hunt one less problem to deal with.

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Will Strauss [www.willstrauss.co.uk] is a Leeds-based freelance journalist and regular contributor to various TV industry publications including Broadcast.