Lisa Nandy’s baffling theory for TV success is all stick, no substance

Good morning. Pat McFadden delivered a good, thoughtful speech on the “how” of public sector reform, citing recent examples of best practice that he thought the government could learn from. Equally importantly, he recognised that for governments to innovate they had to be prepared to fail.

If Labour can deliver on this, it will be exciting stuff that benefits all governments, but I don’t have much to say about it other than “I think it is good”.

Fortunately for the purposes of making today’s newsletter run to length another cabinet minister (the culture secretary Lisa Nandy) has given an interview with the Guardian’s Aletha Adu. Some more thoughts on why I disagree with it below.

The box stops here

Lisa Nandy has a striking theory about why people are switching from watching linear television to streaming services and other online media.

If the shows that [UK broadcasters] make don’t look like and feel like the country, if they’re not relevant to people, if they don’t directly connect with people, then they’ll switch off. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing people leaving TV to go to either streaming [services] or online and that in itself is really dangerous, not just for the TV industry but for the country, because it’s atomising. I really think that TV won’t survive unless it addresses this question.”

There are many words that I could reach for to describe this theory, however, profanity tends to trigger people’s spam filters. So in the interests of maintaining this newsletter’s open rate I will confine myself to just one word: crackers. This theory is crackers.

I mean, come on! The reason why today’s teenagers are watching Friends on streaming is not because Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is not sufficiently diverse! Nor is the reason why today’s thirtysomethings are streaming the show The Americans, or indeed the BBC’s excellent series Ludwig, is that they see something of themselves in either of them.

It is fair to say that the UK’s creative industries perform worse than many other industries. When I had lunch with historian David Olusoga, one of the things I had to cut from the piece was his thoughts on why this was:

It’s a series of codes, a series of behaviours, a language which you don’t know if you don’t know it: it’s designed to be imperceptible if you’re not from that background. There’s those language codes, there’s dress codes, they operate the same way as kind of cutlery operated in the Edwardian era: you’re supposed to be intimidated by this kind of dinner set serving, if you’re from the wrong social background. And TV, like all the creative arts, does it really badly.

If you were going to deliberately say: “How do we stop working-class kids getting into TV?” you would design something pretty close to the internship system. That would be a pretty good way of creating a hurdle other people couldn’t get over. If you were determined to make sure people from council estates couldn’t progress in television, you would casualise the industry and remove staff positions, as has happened over the last 10 years. So I’m not saying that those things were done to create barriers, but they were done by people for whom those things wouldn’t have been there, because they came from certain socio-economic backgrounds.

But it’s not true that a) streaming services are any better than linear television when it comes to diversity or that b) this is why British audiences are making the switch. (Again: is Friends a programme that “looks and feels” like the UK? Is Suits? Because people are actually watching these shows on Netflix and other platforms.)

Nandy proposes two things to improve the class, regional and racial diversity of UK broadcasting: to continue the last government’s “creative careers programme”, and promote a new talking shop about the “national story”. The state-funded programme aims to raise awareness among young people about different creative careers and explain what skills and qualifications are required.

It is far from clear that the main barrier to people getting a career in broadcasting or the arts more broadly is a deficit of advice. Usually the problem is money. The government proposes to spend less on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport budget over the course of this parliament and has, thus far, refrained from the simplest lever it could pull, which would be to allow the licence fee to begin to rise with inflation again after what has been a prolonged period of real terms cuts.

What’s missing from either of Nandy’s two interventions on this subject — in just five months she has found time to attack the TV sector twice, which seems a tad excessive frankly — is anything resembling serious engagement with what levers the government might pull to strengthen and broaden the talent pipeline into the broadcasters. It has been all stick, all chastisement, and little in the way of serious engagement with the routes into these industries and how that might change.

My concern here is that this isn’t just a one-off problem in one department, but it speaks to a broader misconception that Labour has about the economy, that success is a byproduct of “doing the right thing”, as if economic growth were a happy ending at the end of a children’s story. That if you improve diversity in broadcasting and TV, invest in the green transition, make our labour market more secure, then you get growth.

But it may be that the reason why people are watching Emily in Paris is not because it says something meaningful about what it means to be British today. Rather it’s because they find it enjoyable and it is very hard for national broadcasters to compete with streamers on costs. It may be that China is always the world leader in solar panels. And it may be that Labour’s reforms to our labour market slow rather than enhance growth. “Just be nice” is not a growth strategy for the UK’s creative industries or indeed any other part of the British economy.

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Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Duke Ellington’s rearrangement of the Nutcracker while writing my column. (It is nearly Christmas after all.)

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