This research project, funded by Bristol + Bath Creative R+D, investigates the effect of Channel 4’s move to Bristol in 2018-19 as it transformed from a London-based to a regionally based public service broadcaster, with its new headquarters in Leeds and two ‘creative hubs’ in Bristol and Glasgow. My research will examine how this relocation has changed the ways in which Channel 4 operates and the impact it has had on Bristol’s screen ecology.

This first blog is quite lengthy because it sets out the aims and objectives of the research and the context of this relocation in a longer history of the relationship between broadcasting and the UK’s nations and regions. As the project progresses, I will post additional blogs that discuss developments in the research and any interesting issues that have arisen. They will be much shorter!

Andrew Spicer, Bristol, January 2022.

The UK’s Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) and Regional Diversity

Established in 1982, Channel 4 is one of the UK’s four public service broadcasters (PSBs). The others are the BBC (established in 1922); Independent Television (ITV) (established 1955) and Channel 5 (established 1997). The BBC and Channel 4 are both not-for-profit organisations but funded differently. The BBC is funded by a mandated licence fee; Channel 4 largely through advertising revenue. ITV and Channel 5 operate as commercial entities. One of the principal obligations of the PSBs is to reflect and serve the cultural diversity of the UK as a whole rather than a particular section. For instance, the BBC’s charter contains the corporation’s commitment ‘to reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all the United Kingdom’s nations and regions, and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom’ (Public Purpose 4). All the PSBs are regulated by the communications regular, Ofcom, which tries to ensure that they fulfil this commitment by setting quotas for the percentage of primary production expenditure in the nations and regions. Ofcom understands its quotas as a mechanism to encourage the PSBs to produce ‘regional stories, characters, places and issues’, and thereby ensure that television ‘reflects and responds to all the identities and communities of the UK’s increasingly diverse society, and … helps to maintain viable communities in the nations and regions’ (Ofcom 2005: 56). According to Ofcom, the PSBs should help ‘to disperse and stimulate investment and job opportunities in the [broadcast] sector throughout the UK … [which] benefits the viewer by ensuring a diverse range of programming and editorial perspectives’; they also help ‘to address geographical imbalances within the national television production industry’ (June 2019, pp. 1, 4). This commitment to nation and region diversity is particularly important because historically the UK’s broadcasting industry has been overwhelmingly London-centric. This economic and cultural dominance has meant that the small nations (Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and the English regions (the North-East, North-West and South-West) have been starved of resources and decision-making powers. (The South-East is usually bracketed in with London).

Channel 4 and the Regions and Nations

Channel 4, which began broadcasting in November 1982, was set up in order to be something new and distinctively different in British television, then dominated by the ‘cosy duopoly’ of the BBC and ITV. Its founding remit was to experiment and innovate in the form and content of its programming, to offer a space for minority voices and cater for diverse audiences. Equally critical was Channel 4’s status as a publisher-broadcaster that commissioned programmes from independent companies rather than, as with the BBC or ITV, to use in-house staff. However, according to Maggie Brown in her recently extended history of Channel 4 (2021), Channel 4’s central London location meant that the majority of its early programmes were made by London-based indies, thereby reinforcing broadcasting’s metropolitan bias and limiting its regional reach. Channel 4 did have an office in Glasgow and created a new senior post, Director of Nations and Regions, based there, who had overall responsibility for Channel 4’s strategy and corporate development outside London. The first post-holder, Stuart Cosgrove emphasised that the broadcaster’s regional strategy was rooted in its mode of operation as a publisher-broadcaster: ‘My work for Channel 4 is driven not by a dull plea for regional television, but for the more exhilarating thought that some of Britain’s best companies work from a regional base in creative cities far from London. We work in an industry that seems myopically obsessed with one creative city – London. It would be a great step forward if regulators and broadcasters could escape from this deeply parochial mindset.’ (quoted in Kidd and Taylor 2002: 27). Cosgrove argued that these small, dynamic companies ‘by their nature, are closer to ideas, popular influences and cultural change’ and therefore represented a new force that could embody a diverse and sustainable spectrum of regional production.

Channel 4’s Move Out of London – 2017/18

The major change occurred when, under government pressure, Channel 4 decided to move out of London. In 2017 the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) published a regional cost/benefit analysis modelled on a range of different relocation set-ups. The following year, Channel 4 launched its ‘4 All the UK’ strategy, whose mission statement proclaimed: ‘Our goal is to reflect the full diversity of contemporary Britain on and off-screen … we want our production partners to produce challenging and creative content that tells the stories of an inclusive Britain.’ Channel 4 invited ‘pitches’ from regional cities and from more than thirty city bids, drew up a shortlist of seven: Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and the West Midlands (Birmingham and Coventry). After site visits and interviews, Leeds was chosen as Channel 4’s new headquarters, Bristol and Glasgow as two additional ‘Creative Hubs’ (Lee, Champion and Kelly 2021). My contention is that Channel 4’s coming to Bristol – delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the doors of its new offices in Finzels Reach opened on 1 January 2020 – is the most significant event in the City’s screen history since the establishment of the BBC’s Natural History Unit in 1957. It is therefore worthy of close scrutiny and analysis within the context of the changing history of Bristol’s screen industries (Spicer and Presence 2022).

The Project’s Aims and Objectives

The overarching aim is to explore the impact of Channel 4’s move to the Bristol region and its context within national debates about the significance of creative industries to regional economies and cultures.

The project has four specific objectives:

1. A detailed scrutiny of why Channel 4 chose to locate one of its two regional ‘creative hubs’ in Bristol, examining the application process, ‘4 All the UK’ and conducting interviews with Channel 4 executives.
2. A forensic analysis – using unpublished documents and interviews – of the reasons why Bristol’s bid was successful, by scrutinising how its application, ‘Invent the Future of Channel 4 with Bristol’ represented Bristol as a ‘creative city’.
   
3. Examining, through interviews and a scrutiny of commissioned programmes, how Channel 4’s commissioning practices in its reconfigured role as a regionally based publisher-broadcaster have been reshaped? How has Channel 4 been able to work with regional organisations and local institutions? Has it become more ‘embedded’ in particular communities; if so, in what ways?
   
4. Understanding, through interviews and a wide-ranging analysis of academic studies and grey literature, the broader significance of Channel 4’s relocation regionally and nationally within the context of the increasing internationalisation of the television industries.

The Context of the Project

The project’s focus on Channel 4 will be framed within the following four contexts:

The History of Regions and Nations Broadcasting

Channel 4’s move out of London was the latest episode in the long struggle between the ‘centre’ (London) and the ‘peripheries’ (the nations and regions) in UK broadcasting history. ITV was set up in the 1950s as an interlocking set of strong, autonomous and distinctive regional broadcasters, a conception specifically designed to counteract the BBC’s London bias, which had been criticised in the 1951 Beveridge Report (Briggs 1995). By 2000, this ‘experiment’ was over as the separate companies had coalesced into one corporate entity, based in London with only vestigial regional ties (Fitzwalter 2008). The inauguration of Channel 5 in 1997 was subject to a prolonged, though unsuccessful, lobby that it should be regionally located to address broadcasting’s ‘deep historical imbalances’. The BBC’s London-centricity was broken in 2011 when the corporation moved five departments and around 3,000 staff to Salford Quays in Greater Manchester (Spicer 2019). In March 2021, The BBC announced its ‘Across the UK’ policy that committed it to a substantial increase in regional expenditure; a rise in network commissions from the nations and regions to ‘at least’ 60 per cent. These commissions included 200 ‘new and returning’ drama and comedy series that would ‘reflect the lives and communities of audiences outside London’. 400 jobs are to be relocated outside London (BBC March 2021). Rhodri Talfon Davies, the BBC’s Director of Nations and Regions, argued that the policy will enable the BBC To get ‘much closer to communities across all four nations, really embedding ourselves in those places and getting regional centres to tell the stories of their localities and feel rooted in those communities’ (‘In Conversation’, 2021).

Changes in the Television Industry

UK television is no longer determined nationally, but forms part of the increasing internationalisation of television and the radical transformation of audio-visual production and distribution markets arising from the proliferation of satellite channels and the massive growth in Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) providers – increasing 86 per cent in the last five years – which have very different priorities. Although they invest significantly in UK production, satellite channels such as Sky, or SVODs such as Netflix or Disney+, do not have national or regional responsibilities nor are they regulated by Ofcom. As Ramon Lobato argues in Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution (2019), internet-distributed television ‘changes the fundamental logics’ of broadcasting, accelerating and intensifying the dynamics of satellite broadcasting. Whereas the PSBs’ historical role was to define the audience politically, as citizens of ‘the nation’, satellite broadcasters and SVODs operate to a global commercial logic in which ‘territories’ are not defined by national boundaries because they are conceived as markets not cultures. As Lobato argues, this new logic does not entirely displace or supersede the older linear logics of analogue broadcasting but introduces new layers of spatial complexity.

Understanding Creative Clusters

Many economists have argued that the creative industries (and industries in general) benefit from co-location. The Harvard economist Michael Porter argued that ‘clusters’ – which he defined as ‘geographical agglomerations of firms that collaborate and compete with each other’ – provide ‘enduring competitive advantages in a global economy’ though local knowledges and relationships ‘that distant rivals cannot match’ (1998: 78). Porter’s work has been the subject of significant critique for underestimating the importance of long-term cultural traditions, and failing to engage with the interactive and iterative relationship between cultural production and place. In his seminal The Cultural Economy of Cities, Allen J. Scott argues that place has a particular significance for creative production because of the ways in which locality and culture are intertwined (2000: 3). Scott contends that, as social as well as economic entities, places ‘leave deep traces on the form and cognitive meanings of products (and above all cultural products) as they emerge from localized systems of industrial activity’. He argues further that creative producers, ‘tend to accumulate place-specific cultural associations’ and these ‘symbolic and sentimental assets’ derive from the ‘distinctive historical associations and landmarks’ that make each particular place unique. Places are always both actual locations and what Benedict Anderson terms ‘imagined communities’ (1983: 15), which, as cultural constructions, generate ‘place-images’ that, over time, accrete to form a ‘place-myth’, which defines a locality as much as its geographical features and built environments (Shields 1991: 61). This project scrutinises how Bristol operates as a ‘cluster’ or ‘hub’ and how Channel 4 has affected its dynamics.

Regional Economies

In his magisterial The UK Regional-National Economic Problem: Geography, Globalisation & Governance (2016), Philip McCann delineates the profound structural imbalance of the UK’s economy. He demonstrates that the UK is ‘one of the most interregionally unequal large high-income country’ globally, its sub-national government funding & capital expenditure among lowest of any large OECD economy (p. 409). Thus although some regions, notably London and South-East England, have high productivity, other regions are among the lowest in Europe. As McCann points out, these inequalities are experienced ‘almost entirely by lower 40% of the income spectrum’, and that the government, business elites and the media collude in making sure this issue is not prominent in public consciousness and thus well down the list of voter priorities. McCann argues that these destructive interregional inequalities are compounded by the UK’s ‘highly centralised, top-down, largely spaceblind and sectorally-dominated governance system’. The present Conservative administration has declared its commitment to ‘levelling up’, and therefore has a direct interest in urging the PSBs to address ‘geographical imbalances within the national television production industry’ as part of this process. What has been the role of Channel 4 in these wider processes? Did ‘4 All the UK’ and its choice of regional centres address or exacerbate these imbalances? Has the choice of Bristol rather than Cardiff increased these cities historic rivalries or will it contribute to the development of the Western Gateway super-region? These concerns show that the role of television, unlike film, has always been a profoundly political concern in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe. At the time of writing (January 2022), Channel 4 is embroiled in a government initiated move to privatise the company, which Channel 4 itself and most commentators are resisting strenuously. Privatisation would almost certainly have a deleterious effect on the relocation strategy and, even if it does not go ahead, is an unwarranted and unwelcome distraction.

About Andrew Spicer:

Andrew Spicer is Professor of Cultural Production at the University of the West of England Bristol. He is supervising several doctoral students and teaches across the under- and postgraduate programmes in the School of Cultural and Creative Industries, including MA Screen Business. He has published extensively about media production including Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies (2014). He was a member of a European project, ‘Success in the Film and Television Industries’ (SiFTI, 2013-16) and co-editor and contributor of its summative volume Building Successful and Sustainable Film and Television Businesses: A Cross-National Perspective (2017). He led an investigation into the ecology of the film and television industries in Bristol (2017, revised 2022), is currently developing a broader project exploring the politics of regional production and is engaged on research on Channel 4, and Bristol as the global centre for Natural History film-making.

Image Credit: Steve Presence

References

Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.

BBC, Across the Nations and Regions (March 2021), http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/reports/the-bbc-across-the-uk.pdf

Briggs, A. (1995), The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume 5: Competition 1955-1974 Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Maggie (2021), Channel 4: A History from Big Brother to the Great British Bake Off, London: BFI Publishing.

Davies, Rhodri Talfon (June 2021), ‘In Conversation’, Royal Television Society, https://rts.org.uk/video/conversation-rhodri-talfan-davies

Fitzwalter, Raymond (2008), The Dream that Died: The Rise and Fall of ITV, Leicester: Troubadour.

Kidd, Michael and Brian Taylor (2002), Television in the Nations and Regions: Television Broadcasting Outside London, London: Independent Television Commission.

Lee, David, Katherine Champion and Lisa Kelly, ‘Relocation, relocation, relocation: examining the narratives surrounding the Channel 4 move to regional production hubs’, Cultural Trends, 2021; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/09548963.2021.1966296?needAccess=true

Lobato, Ramon (2019), Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution, New York: New York University Press.

McCann, Philip (2016), The UK Regional-National Economic Problem: Geography, Globalisation and Governance, London: Routledge.

Ofcom (2005), Reshaping Television for the UK’s Nations, Regions and Localities: Ofcom Review of Public Service Broadcasting – Phase 2, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/34015/nations.pdf.

Ofcom (2019), Annual Report, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/annual-reports-and-plans/2019-20-annual-report

Porter, Michael (1998), ‘Clusters and the New Economics of Competition’, Harvard Business Review, 76: 6, pp. 77-90.

Scott, Allen J. (2000), The Cultural Economy of Cities: Essays on the Geography of Image-Producing Industries, London: Sage.

Shields, Rob (1991), Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, London: Routledge.

Spicer, Andrew (2019), ‘A Regional Company? RED Production and the Cultural Politics of Place’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 273-304.

Spicer Andrew and Steve Presence (2017, rev. 2022), Go West: Bristol’s Film and Television Industries, UWE Bristol.