Pilots, Pilots Everywhere

It’s the start of the Edinburgh International Television Festival today, and most of the channels are cancelling vast swaths of their existing shows (goodbye Celebrity Big Brother, we’ll not miss you!) to make way for a range of exciting and innovative home grown programming. In other words, the old popular shows are costing us too much so lets ditch them for something cheaper. Now in general I approve, but it really depends on what they replace the timeslots with. Channel 4 is going to spend more with small indies (ones with less than 2 million turn over) to help support growth in the sector, or do they want companies that are a little more… eager for work and willing to get paid a little less? I’m sure it’s not that. Then there’s the big furore about trust in broadcasters (cue Paxman, exit pursued by an angry controller). That’s going to eat up the training budget and cause the less-then-body-builder-physiqued producers the more than occasional hernia when they try to carry the new editorial standards guidelines into meetings.

There’s also been a few interesting general trends in commissioning lately. Both BBC3 and Channel 4 have upcoming series of one off pilots. BBC3 has 6 dramas coming later this year:
Six For Three
and Channel 4 has ‘Coming Up’, a series of 8 original half hour dramas:
Coming Up

It’s nothing new, and has worked very well in the past (Seven of One led to Porridge, Open All Hours and the less successful The Magnificent Evans) but this feels like a way to test the waters before commissioning a full series, rather than intentionally constructing a series of short dramas. Why does that make a difference? Well, for one thing I’d be interested to know what budgets these got, and for writers, creating a one off drama so that it can also be turned into a series can lead to a confused mess of open ended plot points and sudden resolutions. Hopefully these won’t fall victim to these problems, but the fact that most of the BBC3 shows feature “a group of teenagers in [insert location/situation here]” isn’t a good sign. On the other hand, one of them features a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf flat sharing, so it’s not all predictable.