Andrews - Television and British Cinema

Television and British Cinema
Television and British

Cinema
Convergence and Divergence Since 1990
Hannah Andrews
Department of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York, UK
© Hannah Andrews 2014
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations x
A Note on FilmFour xi
Introduction: The Contexts of Convergence 1

Unknown cinemas and lost continents: Locating
television in British cinema studies 7
Quality in broadcasting: Public service brands
and ‘Cinematic’ television 10
Convergence: A new media discourse? 18
Convergence and divergence in British cinema
and television 24
Part I Convergence/Divergence: The Relations

between Television and Film at the End of the
Analogue Era
1 Film and Television Drama: The Making of a

Relationship 33
Film and television production: From telecine
to television films 35
David Rose, English Regions Drama and Channel 4’s
department of fiction 46
Conclusion 56
2 Television as Film, Film as Television: Broadcasting

Cinema in the 1990s 58
Film 4 Today: Re-broadcasting, re-branding 60
Broadcasting art cinema: Channel 4 and
Derek Jarman 67
Four Weddings and a Funeral as a television event 75
Conclusion 81
v
vi Contents
3 Commercialism and Quality: Television Institutions and

the British Film Industry, 1998–2002 83
‘More than a Television Channel’: Institutional
restructuring and commercialism 85
Bigger than what? Television and the British film industry 90
Hollywood and Europuddings: International co-production 92
A ‘Cultural Burden’? Evaluating publicly subsidized film 96
Two FilmFour failures 100
Conclusion 106
Part II Convergence and Divergence

in the Digital Age
4 Digital Departures: Television Institutions
and Low-Budget Production 111
The FilmFour Lab: Digital experiments 112
Film4 and Warp X: Outsourcing experimentation 120
BBC Films and micro-budget film schemes 126
Conclusion 133
5 ‘Great Films You Know, Great Films You Don’t’: The

Birth and Life of the FilmFour Digital Channel 135
‘A Different Sort of Film Channel’: The opening night
simulcast of FilmFour on Channel 4 137
‘Classic films, cult films, foreign films’? FilmFour
channel survey 144
Conclusion 159
6 New Logics of Convergence: Film through

Online Television 161
Databasing and interfacing: Film on iPlayer 162
Showcasing new British filmmaking on the
BBC Film Network 170
Conclusion 178
7 Conclusion: Convergence and Divergence Now 180

Convergence and divergence now 183
Notes 194
Bibliography 208
Index 224
Figures and Tables
Figures
0.1 Film4 season promotional advertisement 2

1.1 Cinema admissions and television ownership, 1946–1990 40
2.1 Interstitial broadcast before Nuts in May 63
2.2 Interstitial advertisement for Four Weddings,
broadcast before part four of Jake’s Progress (Channel 4,
2 November 1995) 79
4.1 Jessica witnesses Tom’s father abusing him, My
Brother Tom 119
4.2 Leaving the city behind at the end of Kicks 131
5.1 Age of films shown on FilmFour during sample weeks 147
5.2 Danny Boyle discusses collaboration for a Film4
‘Self Portrait’ 153
5.3 Area of origin for films shown in sample weeks 155
6.1 Film Network homepage on 17 July 2006 (l) and 27 May
2010 (r) 176
Tables
1.1 Film and television drama: Key moments 34

2.1 The Films 4 Today season 61
5.1 Sample of FilmFour channel survey database 145
5.2 Quantities (era, country, genre) in June 2001 sample week 146
5.3 Complementary scheduling on Channel 4 and Film4,
February 2007 149
vii
Acknowledgements
This book has evolved over an extended period of time and along the
way the list of those to whom thanks are owed has grown. Since it would
be foolish to attempt to name every individual who has inspired, influ-
enced and shaped the ideas behind it, I hope that they will know who
they are, and that I have appreciated their help.
The bulk of the research for the book was conducted while I was study-
ing for a PhD at the University of Warwick. This was made possible
by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for which
I am thankful, particularly in the light of the growing threat to funding
for the humanities and social sciences. Charlotte Brunsdon super-
vised this PhD, and her advice, guidance and insight were absolutely
indispensable. I am hugely grateful to her.
Thanks must be offered to colleagues and peers from the Depart-
ment of Film and Television Studies, especially to my friends Hayley
Merchant, Lauren Jade Thompson, Richard Wallace, Owen Weetch,
Nicolas Pillai, Roisin Muldoon, Anna Reynolds Cooper, Celia Nicholls
and Derilene Marco. You all stopped me from taking myself too seri-
ously, and provided numerous welcome distractions – much appreci-
ated. I also want to offer thanks to Helen Wheatley, Rachel Moseley
and José Arroyo for their reassurance and friendship, and to Richard
Perkins, Tracey McVey and Anne Birchall for their invaluable support
and kindness.
Thanks to Robin Gutch and James Rocarols, who gave their time to
speak to me about their work, and to Steve Bryant of the BFI, whose
archiving expertise enabled me to analyse in detail seemingly ephemeral
material which might otherwise have been lost to me.
The book has been completed during my first year at the University
of York, where colleagues have provided the encouragement needed to
reach the finish line. My heartfelt thanks to them, especially Duncan
Petrie who has been a generous listener and given greatly appreciated
advice.
Thanks to Felicity Plester and Chris Penfold at Palgrave, who have
made the journey from proposal to publishing much smoother than I
anticipated.
viii
Acknowledgements ix
Finally, for their support, patience and love, to my family and friends
I am so thankful: to Gabrielle and Lizzie for silliness and fun, to my dear
sisters Kath and Faith, whose film and TV obsessions I never quite seem
to share, and to my wonderful Greg, without whom I would never have
made it this far.
Abbreviations
ASL average shot length

BFI British Film Institute
DCMS Department of Culture, Media and Sport
DQF ‘Delivering Quality First’
DV digital video
ERD English Regions Drama
FIDO Film Industry Defence Organisation
HD high definition
IFVD Independent Film and Video Department
PSB public service broadcaster
UGC user generated content
UKFC UK Film Council
VOD video on demand
x
A Note on FilmFour
Channel 4’s filmmaking arm, as this book explores, has gone through a
number of changes during its lifetime, and has also undergone a series
of re-brandings, often changing its name in the process. A further com-
plication arises in that the titles for both the film-funding organization
and the broadcast slots/channels operated by Channel 4 have tradition-
ally been the same. In this book, I have referred to the organization by
the title that was in use in the period under discussion. Below is a list of
the titles in operation and the relevant time periods.
Title Used for In use
Film on Four Broadcast slot 1982–1998

Channel Four Films Production/distribution 1982–1998
FilmFour Ltd Production/sales/distribution 1998–2006
FilmFour Lab Experimental film production 1998–2006
FilmFour Pay-TV channel (satellite, cable, digital) 1998–2006
Film4 Development/production 2006–present
Film4 Free-to-air digital channel 2006–present
Film4OD VOD service provided by Film4 2010–present
Film4.0 Digital and interactive film production 2012–present
xi
Introduction: The Contexts
of Convergence
Over a five-day period in November 2008, a short ‘season’ of five films

made by Film4 was shown by their parent broadcaster, Channel 4.
A promotional advertisement for this season was programmed at various
intervals for about a fortnight prior to the first broadcast. The promo is
structured in such a way as not only to advertise the season, but tac-
itly to celebrate Film4. The advertisement is a compilation of extremely
short clips taken from various Film4 productions edited together as a
montage, with a linking motif of certain parts of the photographic image
being pencilled over in black and white using a rotoscoping technique,
as though part of a moving storyboard. (See Figure 0.1.)
Completing the hand-drawn motif is a series of white arrows super-
imposed over the image and pointing in the same direction as the
characters. These arrows apparently lead rather than follow the actions
of characters or objects on screen. For example, a clip showing two men
pushing a car across the screen left to right (from The Motorcycle Diaries
[Walter Salles, 2004]) is followed by a clip of a group of youths walking
across screen left to right (from This Is England [Shane Meadows, 2007]).
The edit is highlighted by the use of the white arrow, pointing both
groups of characters, though from different films, in the same direc-
tion. The arrow represents the producer, guiding the film images into
being. The implication is that the involvement of Film4 as a producer
is formative, giving the films their ‘direction’. The connecting theme of
the advertisement is the creative and financial input of Channel 4 in
these films, in development, production, distribution and exhibition.
This is explained in a voiceover in which a male voice states: ‘From
the drawing board to the big screen to your living room, FilmFour has
been making films, developing talent and drawing on years of experi-
ence to bring you the complete picture.’ In the space of 30 seconds, the
1
2 Television and British Cinema
Figure 0.1 Film4 season promotional advertisement
advertisement relays a narrative of a film’s progress from pre-production

to post-exhibition. Crucially, it tells us that the final destination of
these films is not a cinema screen, but the television screen. According
to this advert, this is ‘the complete picture’. Film4 is worthy of cele-
bration, because it is involved not only in bringing these film images
into being, but also in giving audiences multiple opportunities to see
them. This book explores this ‘complete picture’ of the relationship
between television institutions and cinema in Britain between 1990
and 2010.
The involvement of broadcasting institutions in film culture at the
level of financing and production, and, to some extent, distribution and
exhibition, has been a major feature of the British film industry since
Channel 4’s inception in 1982. This book examines the development
of this relationship, and the effect of the involvement of public service
broadcasters (PSBs) in a cultural industry separate from, though parallel
to, their own. Further, though, it explores some of the ways in which
the primary medium of these institutions – television – has been used to
distribute and exhibit cinema. It explores the meanings that derive from
bringing together these parallel media, and the effect on their discursive
and material specificity.
In the disciplines of both British cinema studies and television stud-
ies, there is surprisingly little sustained work on the relations between
(British) broadcasters and cinema. I perceive two main reasons for the
unwillingness of scholars to discuss the relationship between television
and cinema in depth. The first is the multiple points of entry and intel-
lectual approaches one might take in relation to the topic. It can be
studied as a matter of materiality, medium specificity and technical con-
vergence. Equally, the intervention of PSBs in the film industry might be
viewed as a negotiated form of public subsidy and patronage, and thus
approached at a cultural policy level. From an economic perspective, the
relative weakness of the British film industry and scarcity of successful
British productions might be viewed as a cultural ‘market failure’ of the
kind that is ameliorated by the interventions of public institutions like
Channel 4 and the BBC. The relations between television and film have
institutional, industrial, aesthetic, historic, political and philosophical
dimensions. The sheer number of intellectual choices involved makes
this a daunting prospect for research and analysis.
Related to this is the vexed question of disciplinary rivalry. Though
there are significant overlaps in theoretical models, methodological
tools and institutional space between film studies and television stud-
ies, the requirement for each discipline to argue the case for its medium
has sometimes led to rather strained relations with its rivals. Televi-
sion studies’ quest for institutional legitimacy has meant defending the
medium against others that are somewhat (though not much) more
established in the academy. Employing discourses of medium specificity,
as Noel Carroll notes, has been an important means of establishing and
defending academic disciplines:
The notion of medium specificity was a powerful rhetorical lever

for lifting film departments into existence. For if film was a unique
medium with a unique practice – one different from literature, the-
ater and fine art – then surely it required its own experts, housed in
their own department.1
To engage with questions of convergence, such as those explored in this

book, appears seriously to undermine these claims to specificity, and
to move rather uncomfortably between disciplines. This book intends
to initiate a new, interdisciplinary dialogue on the relations between
television and film in Britain. This is likely to have ongoing resonance
as technical, industrial and aesthetic convergence between different
audiovisual media develops.
Because this book explores the relationship between PSBs and the
films they produce, one of its central questions is how to bring the
institutional into discussion of the textual (or vice versa). The extent
to which involvement of broadcasters can be considered a determining
feature in the textuality, ontology or aesthetics of any given film is an

ambivalent issue, as Amanda D. Lotz argues: ‘The institutional certainly
does not resolutely determine the textual, but it provides a significant
factor that evaluations too often under-emphasize.’2 Though it can be
argued that PSBs are inclined towards producing films of a particular
kind, films that focus on particular themes or have particular cultural
intertexts, it is nevertheless difficult to establish the specific ways in
which the producing institution affects the resultant text. Even if we are
to suppose that the PSB exercises some kind of institutional ‘authorship’,
then, because most PSB films are co-productions, we must also accept
the other parties as ‘authors’, diluting the institution’s authorial claim
and rendering the position untenable. How can we conceive of the role
of the institution here? Vincent Porter has suggested that ‘the guiding
hand of the producer may be difficult to perceive in an individual film’
and therefore ‘it is precisely in the longer term that the key role played
by the producer becomes clear’.3 In order to examine the relationship
between the institutions and film culture, then, this book attends to a
wide range of texts during the course of its 1990–2010 primary research
period.
The argument that I wish to follow, and the history I want to trace,
requires me to take a long view of the relationship between film and
television broadcasters. I begin in 1990, a symptomatic moment in the
history of Channel 4 film production, as it both marked the retirement
of the first Commissioning Editor for Fiction, David Rose, and was the
year in which legislation was passed inducing the Channel to sell its
own advertising air time (from 1993). Beginning the principal research
here allowed me to avoid focusing upon the early years of Channel
4’s relations with film (which have been well documented elsewhere)
without ignoring them completely. The main period of research ends in
2010, not merely for the sake of numerical symmetry, but also because
the change in British government that year signalled a new approach
to public culture, exemplified in the closure of the UK Film Council.
So although my analysis focuses on the last decade of the 20th century
and the first decade of the 21st, it does so with the recognition of the
longer history of convergence in British film and television. What I hope
to uncover in this book is a relationship with a long history and one that
is ongoing.
The book combines two sets of methodologies which I view as com-
plementary, and which offer both a macro- and a micro-analysis of the
history I tell. In terms of the latter, to register some of the subtleties and
complexities of the ways in which the relationship between film culture
and PSBs might work, I employ detailed textual analysis of certain clus-
ters of texts and paratexts. The analysis that began this introduction
thus introduced not only the topic and themes of this book, but also
one of its central methodological processes. The application of textual
analytical techniques to paratextual material allows this book to discuss
the nuances of the relationships between PSBs and cinema. This is nec-
essary because, as the book will argue, the character of the relationship
between the institution and film does not reside in texts alone, but in
the discursive framing, presentation and mediation of those texts. This
is enhanced by contextual research, in terms of the political, social and
cultural context from which the texts are made. At certain points, the
history I explore is best told by looking at a large number of texts at
once. In order to do this, I have at points employed quantitative research
methods. Quantitative analysis has been performed on databases specif-
ically created for the purpose of amalgamating large amounts of data.
These have allowed me to create a picture of the relationship between
PSBs and film culture over extended moments in this history. If the
‘guiding hand’ of the producing institution might be seen over the long
term, then this kind of quantitative inquiry offers a means of analysing
its effects. Combining the detail of textual analysis and the breadth of
quantitative data analysis allows me to create a fuller picture of the way
in which the relationship between PSBs and film culture works.
This book implicitly asks the complex and historically contingent
question ‘What is a (British) film?’ and explores the role of the PSBs
in producing answers to this question. It analyses the effect of context –
particularly institutional context – on a medium’s ontological status.
The ontologies of media are most readily conceived of as a function
of their materiality, of the combined power of specific properties and
their application. I break with this tradition, in that I consider extra-
and paratextual features of media as equally crucial to textual status.
Specifically, the book examines the construction of distinctions between
television and film, in terms of both the discourses applied to texts and
the ways in which texts are presented through various platforms. This
is particularly significant given the effects of (digital) convergence, in
which material distinctions between different media are eroded. The
book works with the premise, then, that media ontologies are contex-
tually contingent; in other words, they are discursive, as much as they
are material or phenomenological. ‘Convergence’ and ‘remediation’ are
thus central intellectual paradigms for this book.
Finally, the book is interested in the issue of textual evaluation, and
the hierarchy of media forms. The book explores the prestige associated
with cinema as a factor in the intervention of the PSB in film culture.

Engaging in film production, exhibition and distribution, and investing
considerable energy in the distinction of film from television, PSBs play
a role in reproducing a kind of hierarchy in which television is culturally
and aesthetically inferior to film. I examine how institutions of broad-
casting have contributed to the discursive ontology of British film, and
how it has been separated and distinguished from television despite the
growing material and aesthetic convergence of the two forms. In other
words, I consider the production of rhetorics of divergence that have met
and continue to meet media convergence in Britain.
As outlined above, I hesitate at the point of defining texts even as
uncomplicatedly ‘authored’ by particular institutions. Instead, I con-
ceive of the presence of the institution in the discursive life of the
text as part of an exercise parallel to, but not coterminous with,
‘branding’. In this book, the institution is examined in terms of how
its reputation, status and cultural position affect the way in which it
presents its cinematic texts to the audience through various media.
The manner in which texts are presented by the institution is key,
and, in a circular motion, the institutional reputation (or ‘brand’) of
the PSB is also invoked in the critical and discursive uptake of the
texts. The book argues that an institution’s projected reputation (‘brand
image’) is a central part of the discursive formulation of these PSB film
texts.
Ultimately, this invocation of the institutional reputation of the PSBs
in the understanding of film texts matters because it affects the way in
which they are evaluated aesthetically. Texts are conceived of as aes-
thetic objects of a particular kind because of the way in which they
are presented: they are understood as cinematic (or otherwise) because
of this presentation. This evaluation feeds back into the institutional
reputation – Channel 4, for example, has gained considerable industrial
prestige for its ongoing support for British film culture. However, insti-
tutional reputation also feeds into the critical evaluation of the text. In
other words, texts are discussed in different modes if they are conceived
of as a television drama/play or a film. What is at stake, then, is not
only the particular textuality of the PSB films, but also the modalities
of discourse which surround them. The book thus attempts to unpick
the complex interweaving of these features with one another, and to
show how they work upon the text and its inter- and paratexts. Before
I begin, though, I will set out in more detail the key ideas that under-
pin this exploration of television institutions’ role in British cinema
since 1990.
Unknown cinemas and lost continents: Locating

television in British cinema studies
Britain offers itself as a strong case study in the relationship between

television and cinema, since the cultural forms have been so intimately
intertwined for much of their histories. As John Caughie has argued,
the histories of broadcasting and of cinema in Britain have clear paral-
lels: each beginning in earnest in the 1920s, each dominated by one
overawing presence in the shapes of Johns Grierson and Reith, each
taking significant influence from pre-existing democratic and aesthetic
cultures.4 In Chapter 1, I explore in more detail the historical entwine-
ment of the two forms and their institutions. Given the depth of the
historical connection between television and cinema in Britain, it would
be reasonable to expect a surfeit of scholarly work on this topic. This
is, however, not the case: television’s place in British cinema history is
not, I contend, sufficiently acknowledged in scholarly histories of British
cinema. Why is this?
Describing how the ‘legitimization of film as a valued form of cultural
expression’ involved a series of ‘classification struggles’, John Hill notes
that the history of film studies in Britain began with an effort to exclude
or suppress British cinema.5 Hill argues that the initial impetus for the
championing of American popular cinema, particularly in the Cahiers
du cinema-inspired Movie journal, was political; a matter of ‘destabilising
the taken-for-granted assumptions and cultural hierarchies characteris-
tic of contemporary British culture’.6 British cinema was too bound up
in the ‘atrophied, class-bound character of English culture’ for the tastes
of early film studies scholars.7 The emergence of British cinema studies
was predicated on the need to define and legitimize the study of what
was initially deemed an inferior cultural form. British cinema studies is
thus peppered with references to its own non-existence, or the insuffi-
ciency of the field. Hill also points out, however, a strong tendency to
‘discover’ new areas for investigation in British cinema – exemplified
by Alan Lovell’s 1972 essay ‘The Unknown Cinema of Britain’ and
Julian Petley’s ‘The Lost Continent’.8 This has resulted in one of the
most significant ‘classification struggles’ in British cinema studies, the
legitimization of certain kinds of British films as worthy of attention:
Although the cultural discourses surrounding British cinema have

changed dramatically, the rhetoric of the ‘unknown cinema’ or ‘lost
continent’ continues to be invoked as popular genre cinema remains
marginalized in critical writing.9
The idea of uncovering or discovering ‘unknown’ cinemas, ‘lost con-

tinents’ and the ‘classification’ of British film has been a foundational
habit among British film scholars. When the primary rhetoric of a schol-
arly field has been to point to its own non-existence, it is understandable
that the field has little room to discuss an interloper, let alone a cul-
tural rival. Television’s absence from British cinema studies might be
considered another of its ‘lost continents’.
There is almost a sense of repression within the discipline on this
subject: the relationship between film and television seems to be part of
the intellectual unconscious of much recent writing on British cinema.
For example, Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson’s introduction to their
edited collection British Cinema Past and Present contains no reference
to television’s involvement in the British film industry at all, despite
citing several films with which television institutions were involved.10
Similarly, in the three editions of The British Cinema Book there is no
single article dedicated to the relationship, even in the section titled
‘contemporary British cinema’.11 Studies of British cinema appear not to
want to talk much about television.
Having said this, in a number of works of British cinema scholarship,
television is acknowledged as a factor, even sometimes an important
one, in the history of British cinema. Instead of a thorough inves-
tigation, though, there tends to be a terse acknowledgement of the
relationship, often posed as an irresolvable problem. James Leggott’s
statement that ‘substantial work remains to be done on the symbioses
between British cinema and other forms of media’ is typical, as is
Robert Murphy’s introduction to British Cinema of the 90s, which curtly
announces that ‘the relationship of television to the film industry is too
big a topic to deal with here’.12 Similarly, institutions of television are reg-
ularly alluded to, mostly as financers of British films. For example, Sarah
Street’s excellent overview, British National Cinema, contains a paragraph
on television institutions, in her chapter ‘The Fiscal Politics of Film’.13
The title of this chapter summarizes a general trend in writing about tele-
vision’s contribution to film culture: that it is an economic and political
matter rather than a relationship with serious aesthetic, ontological or
cultural consequences.
Of course, as with every trend, there are notable exceptions. John Hill
and Martin McCloone’s 1996 collection, Big Picture, Small Screen, is the
most thorough book-length investigation, containing essays from estab-
lished media scholars and, importantly, industry players such as Michael
Grade and Mark Shivas. However, the book’s age now renders most of
the important insights contained therein historical rather than current.
The most persistent commentary on the historical convergence between
British television and film has been made by John Caughie. His descrip-
tion of British film and TV’s interrelationship as conforming to certain
‘logics of convergence’ are the most useful summaries of the contours
of that relationship. Another important exception is John Hill, whose
work on the relationship between texts and context has included con-
sideration of the role of television in the British film industry, in film
aesthetics, and in the social and cultural impact of television broadcast-
ers on British cinema, particularly in the 1980s after the intervention
of Channel 4. While the formal industrial convergence between film
and television in Britain may indeed have been an innovative feature of
Channel 4’s drama policy, the relationship between television and film
aesthetics and cultures stretches much further back. One collection that
acknowledges the embedment of television in film culture of the 1970s
is Paul Newland’s edited collection Don’t Look Now, which includes a
section devoted to television.
The exclusion of television from British cinema history might be
explained by the history of the field itself. If British cinema (especially
genre-cinema) has formed a ‘lost continent’, and if, as John Hill has
argued, there has been a historical resistance in Britain to taking British
cinema seriously, then it is a sensible means of disciplinary defence
not to share analytical energy between two media, even where they
are closely related. British cinema scholars have to be especially wary
about television as an interloper in their discipline, because arguments
about the ‘uncinematicness’ of British cinema are so well rehearsed –
note the often-cited opinions of Satyajit Ray and Francois Truffaut about
the incompatibility of the British temperament with cinema. In relation
to television-funded cinema, John Hill has argued:
What is often noticeable about the conventional criticisms of British

‘television films’ (literariness and lack of visual intelligence, on the
one hand, or subordination to a realist aesthetic, on the other) is that
these are simply the same criticisms which have always been directed
at a certain type of British filmmaking.14
If British cinema has had a reputation for being ‘uncinematic’, then it

is logical to attempt to disavow the position of a parallel cultural form
widely believed to be aesthetically inferior. The best explanation I can
make for the cordoning off of television from British cinema history is
that of the hierarchy, and the sense of comfort it can offer.
Though, clearly, there remain extant hierarchies within cinema cul-
ture, the reputation of the medium as a whole has been enhanced to
such a degree that its status as art object has been more or less confirmed.
There has by no means been a complete acceptance of film studies as

a discipline – one is still subject to quizzical looks when announcing
one’s field to those outside (and sometimes, more troublingly, within)
academia. Nevertheless, film and the study of film have acquired a
respectability that I do not think is yet equalled in attitudes to televi-
sion. The suppression of television in the field of British cinema studies
in fact mirrors a wider attitude to television in culture at large. Cinema
and the cinematic are now acceptable, respectable and even valuable
aesthetic categories (see below); the same cannot be said for television
and the ‘televisual’. This is evidenced in the frequent use of televi-
sion/televisual as a simile for films with domestic setting, or rather
drab, cheap-looking aesthetics. That a film ‘looks like television’ is often
the ultimate insult in the arsenal of the high-brow film critic: note
some of the scathing reviews of high frame-rate films like The Hobbit:
An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson, 2012), predicated in part on the
complaint that the high density and definition of the image makes it
appear more like video/television than ‘film’. Assumptions about televi-
sual aesthetics retain a powerful hold, even while television culture itself
has changed immeasurably over the last decade, particularly television
drama’s ‘quality’ turn.
Quality in broadcasting: Public service brands

and ‘Cinematic’ television
In the term ‘quality’, two key concerns of this book overlap: the first
is the demands placed on PSBs and the terms by which their pro-
grammes/content are judged; the second is a kind of television drama
that has been discussed in (and beyond) the academy as possessing
‘cinematic’ aesthetics, style and value(s). Before I discuss the uptake of
‘the cinematic’ as a discursive formula for evaluating television aesthet-
ics, I want briefly to consider some of the ways in which ‘quality’ has
informed the debates about public service broadcasting.
In Britain, there is an abiding sense and a longstanding tradition
of discourse that assumes that public service broadcasting is a crucial
means of ensuring ‘quality’ in television, a bastion against the propen-
sity of commercial broadcasters to under-invest in and underestimate
the tastes of their audiences. This definition of ‘quality’ refers not to
programme production standards, or to consumer appreciation, but
to a more nebulous set of assumptions about the value of television
programming based around the tastes and preferences of a powerful
elite. Discourses around public service broadcasting have tended to
assume that ‘good’ and ‘popular’ television are opposites, as in Christina

Murroni and Nick Irvine’s question of whether, under increasing finan-
cial pressure, ‘television channels [will] make good programmes or
popular programmes?’15 The idea that PSBs are the only guarantors of
quality has come under increasing scrutiny since the 1980s with the
arrival of expanded competition in the broadcasting market in the shape
of satellite and cable (later digital) broadcasting. The traditional con-
sensus around quality in television began to dissipate, as John Corner,
Sylvia Harvey and Karen Lury summarize:
Initially inflected in the direction of a defence of established pub-

lic and cultural values, [quality] was quickly serviceable as a term
to describe the improvement of a product which, it was argued,
would follow the introduction of a new, more competitive, television
system.16
Quality in television thus started to be treated by policy makers in rather

the same way as quality in other commodities and services – as a mat-
ter which is largely guaranteed by the choice offered by a competitive,
deregulated market. However pervasive the rhetoric of choice, there is
a significant difference between the broadcasting industry and other
manufacturers:
Quality indicators . . . may be relatively straightforward in manufac-

turing industries and even some services such as transport, but in
others such as education and broadcasting, designing a ‘strategy for
quality’ raises problematic and thorny public policy issues.17
Quality in television is a relative, subjective and flexible discourse, diffi-

cult to define, let alone to measure in ways that might apply to material
goods. As Corner, Lury and Harvey put it, ‘quality’ is a key term because
of its ‘accommodating ambiguities’.18 These ambiguities have seeped
into various governmental interventions in the television market since
the 1980s, which have had the primary aim of deregulation, but have
always accepted the necessity of maintaining some public funding in
the ecology to drive standards and ‘quality’ upwards.
What do legislators mean by ‘quality’? Corner, Harvey and Lury
outline four broad definitions that can be traced in the re-regulation
debates of 1989–1990. These are quality framed in ‘a literary aes-
thetic’; quality related to television’s informational role and associated
independent, significant news provision; a ‘craft’ definition emanating
from the producers and concerned with production values; and qual-
ity defined by audiences, by what was popular or watched by lucrative
demographics.19 Geoff Mulgan argues that the ‘crudest’ of the market
definitions of quality ‘is that which identifies it with the preferences
of the viewers’, an argument against the redefinition of the term
along lines of ‘consumer sovereignty’, a favoured expression of the
Peacock report, published in 1986.20 Peacock’s report suggests certain
specific types of programming that are ‘suitable for public patronage’,
which are summarized in the key words ‘knowledge, culture, criticism
and experiment’.21 After Peacock, the pursuit of ‘quality’ in television
defined by traditional categories of public service was subsumed by the
expansion of competition and commercial possibility. Rather than an
overall objective of broadcasting as a whole, ‘quality’ television seemed
to become a minority pursuit associated with PSBs.
Quality tends only to be defined in abstract in the Acts of Parliament
that underpin Broadcasting regulation. In the 1990 Broadcasting Act,
PSBs were required to produce programmes of specified types (news, cur-
rent affairs, regional programming) that were ‘of high quality’. Along
with ‘suitable’ and ‘sufficient’, which tend to be attached to scale or
proportion of programming, ‘quality’ acts as an ambiguous adjective
throughout the Act, a matter for interpretation rather than a prescrip-
tion. The ITV companies were required to pass a ‘quality threshold’ in
order for them to be awarded regional franchises, and there was provi-
sion in the Act for bids of ‘exceptionally high quality’ to be considered
where the highest cash bid was not deemed acceptable, or if two iden-
tical bids were made.22 Paul Kerr rightly notes, however, that the idea
of a quality threshold is a contradiction in terms, since a threshold
is a minimum, the lowest point at which something is possible, and
‘quality’ is about ‘maximums’ – the highest attainable level.23 The 2003
Communications Act, which created the new public communications
regulator Ofcom, used the term ‘quality’ much more sparingly than pre-
vious legislation; its definition of the public service remit for television
replaced the demand ‘of high quality’ with ‘high general standards’.24
Ofcom’s 2003–2004 investigation into public service broadcasting cul-
minated in three reports, the last of which was titled Competition for
Quality. For Sylvia Harvey, this was a clear indication that the idea
that public service broadcasting is the best means to guarantee qual-
ity in broadcasting had ceased to be a central assumption for policy
makers, because justifications for public intervention such as spectrum
scarcity and the ‘public good’ thesis of broadcasting do not readily apply
to digital broadcasting. Harvey argues that the multi-channel universe
makes it more, not less, difficult for broadcasters to produce high-quality

programming, as increased competition means fragmenting audiences
and rising costs.25 It is perhaps for this reason that Ofcom includes
in its reports specified characteristics for PSB programmes, the first of
which, rather predictably, is ‘high quality, being well-funded and well-
produced’.26 Whereas public service broadcasting is no longer expected
to guarantee quality, quality is still demanded as a core feature of PSB
programmes. The association of ‘quality’ with PSBs remains intact.
Another consequence of the period of de- and re-regulation in the
1980s was a shift in conception of the viewer of television in Britain,
from a ‘citizen’ to a ‘consumer’. PSBs, particularly those funded through
advertising, were obliged to take up commercialistic practices in order
to bolster threatened funds. During the early 1990s, Channel 4 began
to market itself more explicitly towards certain lucrative demograph-
ics such as the 16–34 year group, or the ABC1 group of consumers,
which were (as per their remit) light users of ITV, but were also con-
veniently, and not accidentally, sought after by advertisers. To target
these audiences, the channel publicized its ability to produce innova-
tive, high-quality niche programming. It also began to engage more
explicitly in marketing practices associated with profit-making enter-
prises. For Catherine Johnson, one of the key practices involved in
marketing was the consolidation of PSBs as brands. Of course, given
the immateriality and abstractness of broadcasting as a public ‘good’, as
we have seen above, it seems an unlikely candidate for branding. Nev-
ertheless, branding emerged both in the United States and in Britain as
an important means of organizing the expanding economy of broad-
casting, and for broadcasters to compete with one another. Georgina
Born, in her analysis of the corporate identity of Channel 4 in the late
1990s/early 2000s, noted that this was not only acknowledged within
the institution, but became an integral part of their corporate strategy:
In a multichannel universe, given the need to stand out from the

crowd and to negotiate carriage with powerful platform owners,
maintaining a strong and distinctive brand is considered vital.27
In a media situation in which broadcasters’ output is now ‘content’

rather than ‘programmes’, the identity of broadcasters qua broadcast-
ers is no longer as important as their identity as a specific and knowable
brand. This is not, however, to suggest that branding only emerges as a
‘response to the shift away from television as a public service towards
conceptualizing television as a consumer product in a commercial
marketplace’; indeed, Johnson argues that the practices associated with

branding can be compatible with public service itself.28 Johnson found
that as early as 1988 the BBC was positioning itself as a corporate brand,
though, importantly, one which carried brand values of ‘quality and
service to the public’ which were, of course, a core constituent of their
remit. As Johnson argues, ‘the value of its brand is asserted insofar as the
BBC is able to maintain its position as the leader in achieving and deter-
mining the criteria for both these values’.29 ‘Quality’, then, not only
becomes a legislated requirement for the PSB; it also becomes a tool by
which it may ‘sell’ itself to the public.
‘Branding’, as the dissemination and exploitation of the institutional
image, becomes shorthand for the values of programmes produced.
Of course, this is how brands operate, as objects of communica-
tive exchange or, as Celia Lury argues, using new media parlance, as
‘interfaces’:
As an interface, the brand is a frame that organises the two-way

exchange of information between the inner and outer environments
of the market in time, informing how consumers relate to producers
and how producers relate to consumers.30
Brands attempt to control the judgement of the consuming public on

two levels: they convey not only the value and quality of the product
being sold, but also, increasingly, of the producer/seller. The creation
of a PSB brand associated with ‘quality’ and ‘service to the public’ also
conveys these values upon the products produced, commissioned or
distributed by the PSB. For the purposes of this book, the processes of
‘branding’ (even where this term connotes a not always appropriate rela-
tionship to a commercial marketplace) are central to the ways in which
PSB filmmaking operations and/or film exhibitions confer value upon
their film products, and also use those film products as a means by which
to extend and bolster the ‘quality’ of their brand. The engagement of
PSBs in the film industry, in a medium of greater cultural repute and
prestige, is a means by which their brand extends ‘beyond’ television.
Creating a ‘quality’ television brand, particularly in recent years, has
hinged on the exploitation of certain kinds of highly stylized pro-
gramme output as much as it has on traditional markers of ‘quality’ in
Britain, like consistently high production standards, service to the pub-
lic or any of the thresholds imposed by government. There has been
a consequent surge in engagement with textual form and aesthetics
among television studies scholars, which, according to Jason Jacobs,
can be attributed to such changes in (particularly American drama)

programming:
The continued sense that the television text is mostly inferior to the
film text and cannot withstand concentrated critical pressure because
it lacks ‘symbolic density’, rich mise-en-scène, and the promotion of
identification as a means of securing audience proximity, has to be
revised in the light of contemporary television.31
Technological and economical innovations in television production

have allowed television drama producers to pay ever greater attention
to visual style. According to John Thornton Caldwell’s seminal explo-
ration of the American television industry, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and
Authority in American Television, industrial interest in distinctive televi-
sion style began in the 1990s, as competition for audiences made bold
aesthetics into commercial advantage, a practice he called ‘televisuality’.
Caldwell argues that ‘the cinematic’ (along with the ‘videographic’) is
one of the ‘stylistic worlds’ exploited by televisuality. ‘Cinematic values’,
he argues, ‘brought to television spectacle, high-production values and
feature style cinematography.’32 The production of such visually dense
programming coincided with the emergence in the late 1990s of narra-
tively rich ‘quality’ television (drama), particularly that associated with
the original programming of the Home Box Office cable network (itself
a premium brand). The combination of enriched style and complex nar-
rative led to a discursive tendency to describe such programming as
‘cinematic’.
In 2004, Robin Nelson noted that a general consensus in popular and
academic television criticism that ‘American “quality” television today
has different qualities which align it with cinema and differentiate its
products from the dominant conventions of the TV medium’.33 How
does this consensus manifest itself in critical writing? Put broadly, it is
a desire to compare (usually favourably) recent television drama aes-
thetics with those of film, at varying degrees of explicitness. Jane Feuer,
for example, describes Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–2005) as ‘reek[ing]
of a European art cinema heritage’.34 Janet McCabe and Kim Akass’s
introduction to their collection of essays on ‘Quality TV’ describes how
innovations in both production and reception technologies have ‘con-
tributed to television now becoming a medium that rivals film for
entertainment’.35 One does not have to look far in scholarly writing on
‘quality’ television drama to find the term ‘cinematic’ lurking among
other positive adjectives.
It seems to be taken for granted that there is such an adjective

as ‘cinematic’, and that this has an unequivocal meaning, which, as
Martin McLoone has noted, involves problematic essentialist assump-
tions about what cinema (and television) are and do. For McLoone,
the often-argued contrast between cinema and television is a false one,
‘since it opposes the extremes rather than the characteristics of the two
media – television at its least “adventurous” (aesthetically) and cin-
ema in its big picture “event” mode’.36 The term ‘cinematic’, when
applied to television, tends to refer to a particular range of stylis-
tic choices: ‘arty’ off-kilter framing, the use of wide-angle establishing
shots, glossy cinematography, the presence of high-profile stars. ‘Cine-
matic’ is a meaningless adjective, because in reality the stylistic choices
available to cinema and (particularly single-camera) television in fram-
ing, lighting, mise-en-scène and so on are more or less identical. The
more pertinent practical distinctions between the forms are in budget
and schedule, and these differences inhere within the industries as well
as across them. There is a huge difference in the range of options avail-
able to the producer of a high-budget prime-time drama series, and the
producer of a daytime children’s television programme, and those mak-
ing aesthetic judgements would do well to take these differences into
account. As Jason Jacobs has forcefully argued, ‘it is not appropriate to
apply criteria of authenticity, creativity and innovation in the same way
to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and ER’.37
In television scholarship, there is too often an uncomplicated accep-
tance that ‘cinematic’ and ‘quality’ are mutually affirming discourses.
Robin Nelson argues that ‘[e]ach medium has its own visual qualities
in consequence and, historically, film has been taken to be a superior
medium in terms of visual quality’.38 The combination of the terms ‘cin-
ematic’ and ‘quality television’ posits a hierarchy of value in audiovisual
artforms, with television able to co-opt some of cinema’s ‘natural’ qual-
ity through emulation. As Deborah L. Jaramillo argues, ‘ “Cinematic”
removes the television text and its style from the medium we are study-
ing and transplants it elsewhere.’39 This seems to confirm an idea which
reappears throughout the quality debate, that television on its own
and by its own terms cannot truly produce or maintain ‘quality’, and
that television programmes must affirm their quality by comparison
with an already established high-cultural product. Charlotte Brunsdon
argues that, in Britain, television traditionally drew its legitimation
from ‘already validated’ art forms: ‘Television (by implication, not itself
good) becomes worthy when it brings to a wider audience already legit-
imated high- and middle-brow culture.’40 Like Brunsdon, I would want
to question the implication that television is not itself ‘good’, and that
it requires legitimation through other cultural forms. Film is not one of
the ‘already validated’ forms that Brunsdon specifies, though the align-
ment of television with cinema carries parallel cultural connotations:
television is, apparently, better quality the more it looks and feels like
film. This is, as Brunsdon notes elsewhere, due to a series of cultural
connotations that have historically ‘typed’ television and film:
the dominant characterisation of television in both everyday and

scholarly literature is as a medium of distraction while cinema is one
of concentration. To cinema is granted the possibility of aesthetic
seriousness, while television – in blatant disregard of the history of
much British television (and film) – is thought of as trivial.41
When one medium is allowed to be ‘serious’ and the other trivialized

(and as Brunsdon and others have noted, ‘feminized’), it is understand-
able (though less forgivable) that scholars and critics would seek the
cultural validation that comparison with the older medium can grant
television.
There has been a shift in thinking about television aesthetics: away
from previous phenomenological or medium-specific considerations of
television form and its ‘messy textuality’42 and towards an engagement
which, I argue, is akin to and, crucially, influenced by scholarly film
criticism. Lurking beneath this shift is a tacit acceptance of a hierarchy
of media that values the ‘cinematic’ over the ‘televisual’. As Brett Mills
has argued,
that the ‘cinematic’ might be seen as a positive term when applied

to (some) television can only be seen as a reassertion of a hierarchy
that sees television as film’s poor relation. This means that television
style only seems to become of interest when it is seen to draw on the
conventions of another medium which, in broad terms, has far more
cultural legitimacy.43
Mills refers here to a range of recent television scholarship that works

to elevate certain kinds of television and defend them as art. Michael
Z. Newman and Elana Levine describe this as ‘legitimating television’,
and set about denaturalizing this process, noting, like Mills, its depen-
dence upon the very cultural hierarchies which were previously used
to denigrate television. They focus particularly on the post-digital iden-
tity of television, where the medium has become almost unrecognizable
in terms of its traditional technological and cultural form, in that

fragmentation, viewer autonomy and individual pleasure have replaced
flow, collective viewing and communities of audiences as the contem-
porary television paradigms. Newman and Levine argue that the process
of cordoning off sections of television for the special attention (such as
American ‘quality’ or ‘cinematic’ television) that I have described above
reinforces extant hierarchies:
If television scholars contribute to the legitimation of the medium in

the convergence era, and if these processes of legitimation perpetu-
ate hierarchies of taste, value and cultural and social worth, then we
are – wittingly or not – complicit in the very discursive formation we
intend to critique.44
Bringing some of the methodological and aesthetic tensions to the

surface of the disciplines may prompt us to think afresh about the
specificities of our mediums of study. This is particularly important in a
period in which these very specificities are under rhetorical threat from
powerful discourses of media sublimation and convergence in the digital
age. While it is true that the technological capabilities of digital media
render film and television as constitutionally closer together, the ongo-
ing rhetoric of ‘cinematic’ and ‘televisual’ creates distinctions (in the
Bourdieuian sense) between the media and places them in a hierarchical
relationship with each other which is eminently traditional. Against the
transformative effect of digital convergence on television as a medium,
there has been an equal and opposite reaction, one which is discursive,
and seeks to retain extant media hierarchies. I call this reaction ‘rhetor-
ical divergence’, and, in this book, I explore some of the ways in which
PSBs have been involved in producing and maintaining these medial
distinctions and the discursive ontologies of cinema and television.
Convergence: A new media discourse?
The ongoing issue of definition, redefinition and discursive construction

of media forms, through terms like ‘televisual’ and ‘cinematic’, has had
much influence on film and television studies as disciplines. However,
the introduction and dissemination of digital technologies has unseated
old assumptions about the ways in which media work, as Anna Everett
notes:
We have only recently reached an attenuated consensus on the dif-

fering natures of cinematic and televisual texts as unique objects of
study. With this battle barely in a state of field-expanding detente, the

digital revolution has introduced new visual and aural media codes
that draw extensively from the medium specificities of film, video
and radio while introducing new characteristics and imperatives that
are properties of digital technologies alone.45
Convergence as a concept and a phenomenon gained much intellec-

tual currency as the 20th century drew to a close, as digital technologies
threatened to change the way in which media worked in relation to
users and to other media. However, both as a feature of the relation-
ships between media and as a way of conceptualizing and discussing
them, convergence pre-dates digital technologies and can, in fact, apply
to analogue ones. Peter Kramer, for example, has explored in detail
the domestic use of cinema (and, to a certain extent, the public use
of television) and provides a historical narrative of the convergence
between television and film.46 He describes the development of vari-
ous film exhibition technologies designed for domestic consumption;
for example, the Edison kinetoscope is discussed as an early proto-
type for home cinema.47 His (rather provocative) contention, therefore,
is that convergence between film and television is an ‘intensification
of past structures of the film industry and film culture rather than
a radical break with them’.48 Crucial here is the suggestion that it is
industrial structure and strategic choices by commercial enterprises that
has shaped the history of the relations between film and television,
rather than any fundamental ontological difference between the two
media. This kind of argument reveals what is truly at stake in the debate
around convergence: the specificity of the two media as techno-cultural
forms. Martin McLoone, too, has suggested that a kind of symbiosis
between the two industries occurred in America not only via the con-
glomeration of media companies, but also via the studios’ selling of
catalogues of films to television, and in producing made-for-TV movies.
Like Kramer, he concludes that the relationships between television and
cinema as institutions and as media, though often confused, are sepa-
rate: ‘the crucial point is that the economic and strategic imperatives
of the institutions will dictate how the respective media will be used and
developed’.49 Both McLoone’s and Kramer’s interventions seem to lend
weight to the thesis that, historically, distinctions between television
and film have been discursively and industrially constructed, with con-
siderable input from institutions, as well as a product of technological
differences.
In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins offers a way of discussing
convergence which is inclusive, taking into account the multifarious
manifestations of the discourse. He is thus careful to present his

definition of convergence in the opening pages of the book:
By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media

platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and
the migratory behaviour of media audiences . . .50
These three aspects of media, the latter in particular, are recurrent con-
cerns in Jenkins’s work. As a self-confessed ‘Aca-Fan’ (academic and
fan), he is particularly interested in the uses media users make of the
participatory experiences afforded them by new media technologies.
The user-based approach to new media, while not my primary focus in
this book, has important consequences for the way in which media oper-
ate. Analysing the ways in which users relate to new media technologies
shifts attention from the technology itself to its cultural and social
meaning. As Jenkins argues, ‘[m]edia convergence is more than sim-
ply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between
existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences. Con-
vergence refers to a process, but not an endpoint.’51 For this book, the
idea of convergence as altering the relationship between technologies,
industries (and institutions) and audiences is crucial. Conceiving of con-
vergence as a process rather than a theory or a particular moment in
media history allows me to make certain arguments about the national,
historical and institutional specificity of convergence in Britain. The
strength of Jenkins’s approach to new media convergence is that it
occupies a position pragmatically between two key paradigms of digi-
tal media, which Jenkins calls the ‘digital revolution paradigm’ and the
‘convergence paradigm’. The following statement summarizes how this
works:
If the digital revolution paradigm assumes that old and new media
would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm
assumes that old and new media will interact in ever more com-
plex ways. The digital revolution paradigm claimed that new media
was going to change everything. After the dot-com crash, the ten-
dency was to imagine that new media had changed nothing. As with
so many things about the current media environment, the truth lay
somewhere in between.52
Like Jenkins, my own approach is to be open to both paradigms, and

to recognize both continuity and change in media after the spread
of digital technology. I will, however, apply these ideas to a different

cultural and political environment to that which is discussed by Jenkins,
and many texts that discuss new media, which have tended to be based
around the media ecology of the United States. With a different regula-
tory regime, and a different attitude towards institutions of media, the
history and culture of convergence has not played out in the same way
in the United Kingdom.
The ‘digital revolution’ paradigm has been enormously influential
both in new media studies and in the uptake of discourses of the digital
in film and television studies. A seminal text in discussions of digital
media, Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital is also perhaps the epitome
of the ‘digital revolution’ paradigm. Negroponte is responsible for pop-
ularizing one of the most widespread (and, for scholars of ‘traditional’
media, most alarming) ideas of new media: ‘bits are bits’. Negroponte
is keen to emphasize the enormous change in constitution of media,
from having a physical presence, whether on paper, on celluloid or
through electromagnetic waves, to having only an abstract existence as
a series of zeros and ones. This means that individual media necessar-
ily lose aspects of their ontological specificity. Film, television, literature
and radio are no longer separate entities, but merely different arrange-
ments of ‘bits’ which have the same constitution. Channelling Marshall
McLuhan’s famous assertion about the meaning of media in the 20th
century, Negroponte provocatively suggests that ‘the medium is not
the message in a digital world. It is an embodiment of it. A message
might have several embodiments automatically derivable from the same
data.’53 This is, essentially, a description of digital convergence. David
Bell summarizes this point thus: ‘convergence refers to bits of media
becoming indistinguishable – whether those bits are bits of content, bits
of the industry or whatever’.54 The result of this constitutional change
in media, according to Negroponte, is that the identities of individual
media are subordinate to their digital make-up. In relation to traditional
media forms, he advocates a complete change in attitude to the issue of
medium specificity:
The key to the future of television is to stop thinking about television

as television. TV benefits from thinking of it in terms of bits. Motion
pictures, too, are just a special case of data broadcast. Bits are bits.55
Stripped of their traditional distinctions, in a digital era, according to

this view, there is no such thing as the ontological specificity of indi-
vidual media. Film ‘content’ and television ‘content’ are exactly the
same thing. Traditional technological distinctions between them break

down. Stephen Keane argues that ‘this is very much the business of
convergence, to make such formal distinctions unnecessary’.56 One of
the key aims of this book is to analyse how traditional media institu-
tions in Britain have gone about the apparently ‘unnecessary’ task of
making evident such distinctions. In other words, while convergence
technologies may negate the specificities of individual media, much is
still invested in media separation. Digital (and analogue) convergence
is, I will argue throughout this book, often met with powerful discursive
and presentational acts of divergence.
The loss of distinction, the ‘bits are bits’ thesis, has led to consider-
able anxiety about the future of individual media, with a number of
film and television scholars decrying the ‘death’ or end of their subject-
medium.57 Henry Jenkins, however, offers us some counsel here, by
separately conceptualizing ‘media’ and ‘delivery technologies’:
History teaches us that old media never die – and they don’t even
necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access
media content – the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media
scholars call delivery technologies . . . Delivery technologies become
obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve.58
It is therefore possible to still conceive of a text mediated through a

computer as a ‘film’ or as ‘television’: the ‘content’ retains some ele-
ment of its original medium’s status, though the platform or ‘delivery
technology’ has changed. Jenkins describes historian Lisa Gietelman’s
two-tier approach to media, in which a medium is both a ‘technology
that enables communication’ and a ‘set of associated “protocols” . . . that
have grown up around that technology’.59 For traditional media schol-
ars, this might provide some protection against the ‘death’ of their
subject. An example of how the idea of media as a set of discourses
(‘protocols’) has been used in theorizing changes to media in the wake
of digital technology is D.N. Rodowick’s thoughts on cinema:
Cinema presents an important lesson in philosophy to modern aes-

thetics, for it is useless to want to define the specificity of any medium
according to criteria of ontological self-identification or substantial
self-similarity. Heterogeneous and variable both in its matters of
expression and in the plurality of codes that organize them, the set
of all films is itself an uncertain territory that is in a state of continual
change.60
Conceiving of a medium as discursively produced, as the aggregate of a

series of heterogeneous codes which are contingent upon various factors
(era, culture, technology, for example), gives individual media identities
more flexibility, and a better chance of survival in a digital world. Fur-
thermore, and crucially for this book, it prompts questions about how
media relate to one another: as systems, as codes, as technologies and as
cultural forms.
Another important point about conceiving of media in terms of the
technologies and protocols is that this model allows for a fuller inves-
tigation of how remediation works. By ‘remediation’, I generally mean
the presentation of the content of one medium through the platform,
or ‘delivery technology’, of another. It is clearly a useful term for dis-
cussions of the presentation of film texts on television, or through the
online content players of television broadcasters. The term is, how-
ever, also widely used to mean the use of elements of one medium
within another, newer medium, as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s
seminal Remediation discusses:
We have adopted the word to express the way in which one medium
is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another.
This belief in reform is particularly strong for those who are today
repurposing earlier media into digital forms.61
Though Bolter and Grusin argue for the historical significance of

remediation as a cultural process prior to digital technologies, they
nevertheless recognize that digitalization has accelerated and widened
the process. For Bolter and Grusin, remediation is a combination of
processes of ‘immediacy’ – the disavowal or invisibility of the act of
representation – and ‘hypermediacy’, or the acknowledgement and,
indeed, exaggeration of the act of mediation. Digital remediation, there-
fore, works by rendering its own operations invisible, while at the same
time emphasizing the contours and content of the original medium.
In digital remediation, ‘the digital medium wants to erase itself, so that
the viewer stands in the same relationship to the content as she would
if she were confronting the original medium’.62 Remediation, then, is as
much a matter of the encounter between audience and text as it is the
ontology of media.
This in turn has important consequences for the social, cultural and
political role of media in a digital age. Digital convergence presents a
challenge to the status quo of the organization and institutionalization
of media, especially in nations like Britain in which broadcast media
have traditionally been organized along public service lines. Conver-

gence thus not only threatens the specificity of media, but also affects
their traditional social and cultural roles. Public service broadcasting has
tended to be defended on the grounds that, as Trine Syvertsen puts it,
‘broadcasting is special’, that it is a particular form of democratic pub-
lic good.63 Media convergence and the spread of digital technologies
make these kinds of defences harder to sustain. In this context, the pro-
cesses of divergence, of discursively separating media from each other,
make strategic sense: maintaining the cultural status and identity of ‘old
media’ helps broadcasting and filmmaking institutions retain a distinct
sense of purpose and continuity with traditional practice. In nations
like Britain, where the television ecology is built around notions of pub-
lic service that emerged in relation to the specialness of broadcasting as
a medium, such rhetorical divergence between media may, in the final
analysis, be linked to a survival strategy that is underpinned by argu-
ments about the inherent value of ‘old media’, arguments increasingly
threatened in a period of greater media convergence.
Convergence and divergence in British cinema

and television
This introduction has used writings from a variety of sources to discuss

three structuring ideas for the book: discourses of the specificity of film
and television as media; convergence and remediation; and ‘quality’ and
the hierarchy of film and television. The book is designed so that the
conceptual models which are set up in this introduction are explored
in detail in relation to the case studies discussed within the chapters
at varying levels of explicitness. A key aim of the book with regard to
ideas like convergence and remediation is to situate them in a historical,
national and institutional context. I am interested in ways in which
these terms might be applied to pre-digital media. Discourses of ‘quality’
and their meaning in relation to the hierarchy of film and television are
referred to throughout the book.
This book is structured in two parts. Part I explores the contexts in
which the relationship between film and television developed in Britain,
whether cultural, industrial or institutional, in the pre-digital period.
Part II uses this contextual background as a starting point for its investi-
gation into the changes wrought by the coming of digital technologies.
The book uses its concepts reflexively, which means that ideas which
have commonly been applied to digital media are used in the service
of discussions about analogue, or pre-digital, media. This means that,
although the book is organized to be more or less chronological, at no

time do I wish to imply that I view the history it tells as broadly teleo-
logical. Indeed, I emphasize consistently the continuities with traditional
practice among the various changes.
Since Channel 4 began its policy of supporting cinema in 1982, the
relationship between film and television has developed into a symbiosis,
with PSBs providing the only sustained support for the film industry.
The convergence between the two media, however, has been viewed
with suspicion by both sides. Nick James summarized the phenomenon
thus:
Time was when the UK film and television industries could afford
a mutual disdain: film people knew their enterprises had a prestige
and a shelf life denied to television works, and television people were
proud that they had an instant access to the heart of the nation
denied to film-makers . . . This see-saw snobbery between film and
television was, of course, built on the fulcrum of mutual depen-
dency: in the reliable old 20th century, the bulk of British filmmaking
was dependent on the television companies and they in turn were
equally keen on the ratings a good movie would guarantee before the
proliferation of movie platforms made them less special.64
The ‘see-saw snobbery’ kept the converging media at a distance from

each other, even if only at a rhetorical level. Convergence at indus-
trial, aesthetic or technological levels has been met with anxiety, which
in turn becomes resistance: convergence begets discourses of rhetorical
divergence. The first part of the book will explore various ways in which
the convergence/divergence dichotomy affected and was affected by the
film operations of the PSBs in the 1990s.
Chapter 1 explores the pre-history of the relationship between PSBs
and film, beginning with a summary of the complex history of this rela-
tionship, including both the use of film as material and medium for
making television drama, and a brief discussion of the film industry’s
response to television. This summary is intended to provide context
for the ongoing arguments of the book, not to be exhaustive; indeed,
much more historical work needs to be done to discover in more detail
the character of the relationship between film and television in Britain.
The chapter moves on to chart the career history of a key figure in the
relationship between cinema and television in the UK, Channel 4’s first
Commissioning Editor for Fiction, David Rose. Rose moved from work-
ing in theatre, to the BBC, becoming head of regional television drama,
to being a feature film producer with Channel 4 – a trajectory that sug-

gests a strong connection between these media pre-dating the period
conventionally understood as one of ‘convergence’ between film and
television in the UK. The chapter concludes with a detailed textual anal-
ysis of two television ‘plays’ Rose produced that were shot on film, and,
20 years later, would be re-broadcast by Channel 4 as ‘films’ during a
season called Films 4 Today (analysed in more detail in Chapter 2). The
chapter explores how this mutation occurred, and how the semantic
shift from ‘play’ to ‘film’ manifests cultural and institutional changes
in attitude to film on television. It also demonstrates the material and
discursive foundations on which the relationship between film culture
and television was built.
Continuing the examination of how the shift between play and film
occurred, Chapter 2 considers the role of television as an exhibition
platform for feature film in the early 1990s, with reference to three
very different case studies. The first explores the presentational devices
used by Channel 4 for the Films 4 Today season. It considers how tele-
vision’s presentational arsenal – including interstitials, advertisements
and listings magazines – was used in service of re-branding these texts.
The second case study looks at Derek Jarman’s Blue (UK, 1993), argu-
ing that television broadcast of art cinema compensated for the lack
of a theatrical distribution. Theatrical distribution alters the encounter
between public and film, and brings the film into new contexts of pro-
motion, circulation and evaluation. The enhanced public profile of a
film that can be achieved by distribution became useful to broadcast-
ers engaging in commercial strategies to sell audiences to advertisers, as
Channel 4 did in the 1990s. In the case of Four Weddings and a Funeral
(Mike Newell, UK, 1994), the film’s immense popularity and worldwide
success rendered its premiere on Channel 4 a television event, a phe-
nomenon explored in the third case study of this chapter. The chapter
considers the question of what ‘film’ is when remediated through televi-
sion broadcast, in a period when films on television reached their peak
popularity.
As the end of analogue broadcast television approached, Channel 4
deliberately moved from being a broadcaster to being a multi-media
company in a strategy of self-preservation designed to make the cor-
poration competitive in the digital broadcasting age. As part of this
expansion, the film operation separated from the main company in
1998, and was renamed FilmFour Ltd. This subsidiary operated as a
mini-studio, and had a production, sales and distribution unit. BBC
Films, similarly separated from its parent company, dedicated itself to a
programme of medium-budget American and European co-production.

Chapter 3 explores this moment in history with reference to the rela-
tionship between the PSBs and the rest of the film industry at this time.
The chapter examines some of the public and industrial discourses of
the 1998–2002 mini-boom, looking particularly at FilmFour Ltd, which
was one of the UK’s pre-eminent independent film companies and a
victim of inflated expectations. Of particular interest in this chapter
are the various ways in which the British film industry, at this time,
employed a powerful anti-television rhetoric in order to distinguish
the two media. Although the economic and institutional convergence
between television and film was an accepted norm by the end of the
1990s, distinctions between ‘film’ and ‘television’ were made in order
to bolster the image of British film. Rather than the glorified televi-
sion drama put through cinematic distribution of the 1980s and 1990s,
British film, it was argued, must become bigger and better. Distinguish-
ing television from film was part of a wider strategy, fuelled by public
funding from the UK Film Council and other agencies, to grow cinema
as one of the UK’s pre-eminent ‘creative industries’.
Part II continues the investigation of the growing conver-
gence/divergence dichotomy in British cinema and television, but with
reference to the changes wrought by the coming of digital technologies
of production, distribution and exhibition. Reflecting on the state of
cinema at the turn of the 21st century, Anne Friedberg wrote:
One thing is clear: we can note it in the symptomatic discourse,

inflected with the atomic terms of ‘media fusion’ or ‘convergence’
or the pluralist inclusiveness of ‘multimedia’ – the differences
between the media of movies, television and computers are rapidly
diminishing.65
This statement speaks to an orthodoxy around digital media that was,

at the turn of the 21st century, becoming pervasive and widespread.
A key rhetoric of new media is that the specificities of individual media
dissolve in the face of digital convergence. The second part of the book
challenges and complicates this orthodoxy, considering how elements
which have so far been underexplored, such as institutional identity,
presentation and branding, may be crucial in maintaining some degree
of media separation between film and other new media content. Just as
analogue film and television retained, to some extent, their individual
identities and ontologies in Britain in an era in which their industrial,
personnel and aesthetic contexts were profoundly blurred, so too is it
possible still to distinguish between film, television and other media

remediated digitally. This part of the book explores some of the ways in
which PSBs are involved in both the convergence and the distinction of
media forms.
Chapter 4 looks at the use of digital technology in film production
supported by the filmmaking departments of the PSBs. Digital tech-
nology seemed to herald new possibilities for filmmaking and, from
the perspective of the PSBs, new avenues of subsidy and patronage.
When FilmFour separated from Channel 4 to become an autonomous
‘studio’, a specific department – the FilmFour Lab – was set up to pro-
duce low-budget experimental films. Fitting in with Channel 4’s cultural
remit and institutional reputation for innovation and risk, this depart-
ment was a natural place for digital cinema to be supported. Early
digital cinema made for this department evidences the difficulty with
experimenting in the context of public subsidy, particularly where the
medium itself is not yet established aesthetically or culturally. As digital
tools for filmmaking gathered both technical capability and greater cul-
tural repute, all-digital filmmaking schemes grew in prominence. The
remainder of the chapter looks at such schemes supported by Film4
(Warp X), and the BBC (Digital Departures, iFeatures and Microwave).
The chapter examines how digital technology has been used to reduce
risk on projects involving untested talent, and considers the ambivalent
use of the institutional images (brands) in promoting these films, and,
conversely, the use of these films within the brand consolidation of BBC
Films and Film4.
The maintenance of institutional identity is crucial for any media
company in the era of digital convergence. This is particularly true of
traditional (public service) broadcasters working within digital satellite
and cable broadcasting.
The FilmFour channel is an example of this: as a television broadcaster
in which television-as-text is absent, its identity is created by a com-
bination of promotion and presentation and by the kind of content it
contains – the films its shows. Chapter 5 explores both of these elements
through a thorough exploration of the establishment and maintenance
of the ‘brand’ values of the FilmFour Channel. First, the opening-night
programming of FilmFour, simulcast on Channel 4 and essentially an
elaborate marketing exercise, is analysed; second, I use quantitative data
about the first ten years of the FilmFour channel to discuss changes in
content, carriage and character.
Digital cable and satellite television was the first historical step in the
change of television from analogue to digital, but, arguably, retained
integral elements of television’s traditional textuality and cultural form.

A more profound integration of television with digital media is the
appearance towards the end of the 2000s of television online. James
Bennett argues that when television programmes appear on digital
media players, like the BBC iPlayer,
removed from the structure of television’s scheduled flow, the pro-

gram as content on these services calls our attention to its embedding
in a new, digital media context: instead of flow, here we have an inter-
face, hyperlinks, and a database structure experienced via broadband
rather than broadcasting.66
If television’s remediation of film, as explored in the first part of the

book, creates an ontological uncertainty about the status of film texts,
then the reduction of all audiovisual texts to ‘content’ must multi-
ply this process. Chapter 6 explores the relationship between the BBC
and its online film content. It specifically looks at the positioning and
presentation of film texts as embedded in the iPlayer. The BBC dou-
bly remediates its film content – once on television, once through the
iPlayer. The chapter thus considers the ways in which the database
functions of the iPlayer might affect the receptive encounter between
user and text. This is crucial, because judgements about their content’s
textuality – and its quality – may be passed from PSB institution to user
through presentation and content labelling. It goes on to explore the
BBC Film Network, an online showcase for short films made by aspiring
filmmakers, and how it utilized the BBC ‘brand’ in order to legitimate
the films in its catalogue.
This book explores the various roles PSBs have played in British cin-
ema culture over the last two decades. Working with a long view of the
history of this relationship, I seek to complicate some of the assump-
tions about British cinema’s reliance upon and rivalry with television.
The key aims of this book, then, are to bring the scholarship that already
exists around British cinema’s relationship with television in general,
and PSBs in particular, up to date. This, clearly, requires the discus-
sion of the development of digital culture in Britain, which has had
a profound impact upon the ways in which television and film as cul-
tural forms work. The book thus seeks to synthesize two different (and
historically distinct) conceptions of ‘convergence’: one which describes
the coming together and mutual dependence of two cultural/creative
industries, and one which refers to the erosion of material distinc-
tions between previously distinct media. This synthesis has prompted
the central investigation of the book: to determine how and why PSBs
invest rhetorical energy (as well as financial contributions) into film as
a medium distinct from television.
I offer, then, a new perspective on the issue of convergence, empha-
sizing the institutional and discursive as means of understanding
changes that are conventionally thought of as material and ontological.
By examining the work of (British) PSBs in particular, I offer a model of
‘convergence’ in which questions of medium specificity are grounded
within a nationally and culturally specific context. This is important,
because one of the central intellectual aims of the book is to propose
that there is an integral relationship between context and media ontol-
ogy. The book is simultaneously an update to a discussion that has
lain dormant for a number of years and a challenge to some dominant
conceptualizations of medium specificity and convergence, particularly
with regard to digitalization. Most importantly, though, it is intended
as the beginning of a discussion about the ways in which presentational
and discursive modes and the institutional contexts in which texts are
produced/received affect the understanding and evaluation of film texts.
Part I
Convergence/Divergence:
The Relations between Television
and Film at the End of the
Analogue Era
1
Film and Television Drama:
The Making of a Relationship
John Caughie offers this assessment of the historical coming together of

television drama and cinema:
Channel 4 completed the long march of technology from live tele-

vision to film – and to film not just as a technology (as it had been
used since the 1960s) but as an aesthetic and a culture. Aesthetically,
television drama increasingly aspired to look like cinematic film and,
culturally, Channel 4 began a new alignment between cinema and
television.1
This neat summary encapsulates a broad shift in the relations between

PSBs and film culture and the convergence between television drama
and cinema. It was characterized by the movement of personnel
between PSBs, changing institutional attitudes to film and subtle alter-
ations in the discourses around single television drama. This chapter
will unpick some of these intertwined strands, setting out the pre-
history which shaped discourses around cinema and television prior
to the 1990–2010 period in which this book is principally interested.
First, I summarize the major developments in the use of film for televi-
sion drama until the 1980s, fleshing out some of the detail contained
within the timeline in Table 1.1. I then explore in more detail the
career of a central figure in the change from television play to televi-
sion film, Channel 4’s first Head of Fiction, David Rose. I outline his
career and reputation as a producer, with particular reference to his
management of the English Regions Drama (ERD) department at Pebble
Mill, Birmingham, throughout the 1970s. Rose worked in interesting
ways within the general remit of ERD, which was given the task of
representing the various areas of England outside of London that had
tended to be overlooked in the past because of BBC bureaucracy and
33
34 Convergence/Divergence
metropolitan bias. I conclude the chapter by examining in detail two

television films produced by Rose during his tenure at ERD, David Hare’s
Licking Hitler and Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May, films with contradictory use
of spaces and locations, considering how the use of film’s materiality
produces a particular kind of aesthetic. These textual analyses display in
microcosm many of the themes and issues that this book will go on to
explore: material specificity, the discursive aspect of film’s ontology and
its connection with the institutional.
Table 1.1 Film and television drama: Key moments
February 1937 BBC rejects mechanical film/television hybrid Baird

broadcasting system in favour of more flexible
electronic EMI/Marconi device.
14 August 1938 BBC broadcasts first-ever feature film: The Student of
Prague (Germany, 1926).
1947 Telerecording emerges, a process of recording a
live broadcast programme on film, allowing for
programmes to be repeated (and also exported)
without producing a second live performance. The
expense of the process, as well as disagreements with
acting and technicians’ unions, prevents it from
becoming common practice for drama production.
1948 BBC Film Unit established, to organize filming on
35mm and 16mm film cameras. Though usually used
for documentary programming, film was also used as
‘inserts’ in dramas, for scene-changes and to show
exterior locations. Film was converted for broadcast
through a technique called ‘telecine’.
December 1952 BBC establishes Television Transcription Unit, which
telerecords programmes (including television drama)
in order to sell to English-speaking foreign territories.
The use of the technique is not widespread until the
late 1950s.
July 1954 First filmed serial, US import I Am the Law, broadcast.
November 1954 First UK filmed serial, Fabian of Scotland Yard,
broadcast.
22 September 1955 ITV launched, bringing competition to UK television
for the first time.
April 1958 Sydney Newman becomes Head of Drama at ABC.
1958 BBC begins using videotape to pre-record studio-shot
material. In the 1970s, the innovation of adding
timecode to video material allows for more fluid
editing.
Film and Television Drama 35
January 1963 Sydney Newman takes up the post of Head of Drama

at the BBC.
March 1964 Troy Kennedy Martin’s polemic ‘Nats Go Home’
published in theatre journal Encore.
August–September 1964 Diary of A Young Man broadcast, a six-part television
series written by Troy Kennedy Martin and John
McGrath, a manifestation of the ‘New Drama’ called
for in ‘Nats go Home’.
October 1964 The Wednesday Play begins broadcasting.
12 December 1964 Diary of a Nobody (wr. George & Weedon Grossmith,
dir. Ken Russell) is the first filmed single play shown
on British television.
3 November 1965 The Wednesday Play: Up the Junction (wr. Nell Dunn,
dir. Ken Loach) is the first feature-length filmed single
play on British television.
October 1970 Play for Today, the new, dedicated single drama slot,
begins broadcasting. It represents a more sustained
commitment to the use of film for television drama,
with 101 filmed plays as compared with 202
studio-shot plays.
November 1971 David Rose is recruited as Head of English Regions
Drama, where produced a number of dramas shot on
film.
May 1974 Armchair Cinema, the short-lived film drama
replacement for Armchair Theatre, begins broadcasting
on ITV.
10 January 1978 The Play for Today: Licking Hitler (wr. & dir. David
Hare) is the first British television drama broadcast
with the authorial credit ‘A Film By . . . ’.
November 1980 Broadcasting Act passed, establishing Channel 4 as a
publisher-broadcaster, which will commission all
its programming from independent television
companies.
1981 David Rose recruited as Commissioning Editor for
Fiction at Channel 4.
2 November 1982 Channel 4 begins broadcasting. At 9pm, the first-ever
Film on Four, Walter, is transmitted.
Film and television production: From telecine

to television films
‘They Think It’s All Over’, Charles Barr’s essay on liveness and early
television drama, cites several technological changes in television
drama which ‘progressively reduce[d] the technological and aesthetic

difference between television and film’.2 These include cutting between
cameras, with the result of shortening takes, recording on film (as in
recording live performances for repeated transmission), shooting on film
(with the resultant capacity for editing), and finally recording and edit-
ing on videotape. Barr’s is one of a number of histories that, as Jason
Jacobs argues, positions the history of early television drama as ‘a devel-
opment from a static, theatrical visual style to a mobile, cinematic one’.3
I do not wish to suggest a teleological progression from the naivety of
broadcast ‘theatre’ to the sophistication of television films. Nevertheless,
for various institutional, technological and economic reasons, there was
a development in the history of television drama that led to the rela-
tionship between television and film in which this book is interested.
In what follows, I examine in more detail these various shifts, setting
out a historical context that underpins the arguments of the book. I will
unpick some of the strands of this convergence, and discuss how the
institutional desire to construct a rhetorical divergence, to keep film
and television drama separate, in fact, has just as long a history as the
material and aesthetic coming together of the two forms.
Early television drama: Technologies and aesthetics

In The Intimate Screen, his study of television drama’s early style and aes-
thetics, Jacobs seeks to move beyond reductive ideas that drama was,
until the 1950s, merely photographed theatre. He argued, however, that
this reputation might have been deserved had the important decision
not been made in February 1937 to discontinue the use of the Baird
‘Intermediate Film’ broadcasting system in favour of the more flexible
electromagnetic EMI-Marconi one. Baird’s system involved recording to
17.5mm film, which was rapidly processed then converted into a sig-
nal to be transmitted, and was thus a hybrid film–television technology.
The decision to use the EMI system created a technological necessity
for liveness, which, as Barr noted, created the aesthetic conditions that
dominated television in its early period and beyond. Jacobs summa-
rized the aesthetic effects of liveness in early television as ‘intimacy’
and ‘immediacy’. Most television drama production in these early years
would derive from popular West End plays, which were either broad-
cast directly from the theatre as outside broadcasts – giving them the
status of special ‘events’ – or arranged in BBC television studios for live
broadcast. As with radio broadcasting before it, televised theatre was
designed to add prestige and respectability to the schedules of the new
service. Jacobs argues that the liveness of studio drama, the ‘continuous,
live nature of the segmentation of space and time’, required production

methods fundamentally different from those of film:
Usually the period of principle photography in making a film

involves a short period of shooting a set-up, lit and miked for that
particular shot before the camera is stopped, the actors, lights and
mikes repositioned, and the process continued. Live television pro-
duction is a continuous process of selection, choosing the appropriate
shots from a planned performance in the studio: cameras, lighting,
and sound have to be coordinated for the entire performance, in
planned order, rather than for each particular shot.4
The techniques associated with television drama, because they were con-
tinuous and contingent, meant that production had more in common
with theatre than with film. Theatre was not only the basis for the grow-
ing cultural legitimacy of television; it was also a practical touchstone for
production.
Broadcasts were not kept for posterity, even though a process called
‘telerecording’, available from 1947, allowed broadcast television to
be recorded on film. Film ‘inserts’, produced separately and cued into
the live recording of the drama, were used with increasing regular-
ity throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, converted to television
signal through a process called ‘telecine’. Between ‘telerecording’ and
‘telecine’, the technical possibilities for television drama to be ‘filmic’
were already in place by the early 1950s. As John Caughie noted, the
invention of recording techniques (added to greatly by the development
of videotape in the late 1950s) fundamentally changed the nature of
the television drama: ‘they brought an end to its essential ephemerality,
and transformed immediacy and liveness from technological necessi-
ties into residual aesthetic aims’.5 This change also allowed television to
gain a ‘commodity form’, to be repurposed, kept, and, most importantly,
exported. In 1953, the BBC set up a ‘Television Transcription Unit’ with
the express purpose of exploring options for export. The commercial
possibilities associated with export became a key factor in the recording
of television on film. This had not gone unnoticed by some of the ITV
companies, who produced a number of drama series on film (some in
co-production with US partners) for export, such as The Adventures of
Robin Hood (ATV, 1955–1959).
Although the technological capability to produce television drama
in a more ‘cinematic’ fashion was in place, there were a number of
obstacles. Prime among these was cost: the use of film remained a
last option, as studio recording was more economical. There were also
legal wrangles in the recording and subsequent dissemination of filmed
television, both in terms of the copyright for dramas based on pre-
sold properties like plays or novels, and from acting and technicians’
unions, which looked unfavourably on the work of their members
being reproduced electronically without sufficient compensation for
their original work. The former problem was resolved by commissioning
writing specifically for television. As early as 1950, the BBC commis-
sioned new plays from a ‘Script Unit’, which sowed the seeds that would
later flower into the ‘Golden Age’ of original television drama from new
writers. The most important impediment to the uptake of cinema as
a model for television drama was the attitude of television producers.
As Jacobs and Caughie have noted, many BBC personnel the 1940s and
early 1950s, including Head of Drama Val Gielgud and technicians like
George More O’Ferrall, were passionately committed to finding a unique
aesthetic for television. O’Ferrall wrote, in 1950, that: ‘having to use
film at all is a confession of failure . . . Television with its small screen
and intimate presentation does not lend itself . . . to the same vastness of
approach that the film can achieve.’6 Cinema-style presentation was by
no means a preferred aesthetic option. Jacobs’s work shows that early
television pioneers were much more interested in endowing drama with
‘televisual’ aesthetics than they have previously been given credit for.
On closer inspection, he found there was a range of options available
for expressive presentation of drama on television:
. . . producers were able to choose from a range of stylistic features,

some of them associated with theatre, some with film styles, and
some with the narrative forms of literature, such as the serial or
novelistic.7
The rejection of film style and techniques, then, was a choice, born of
a combination of institutional expediency, legal impediments against
recording performances and copyrighted material, and, most impor-
tantly, the desire to innovate and create a style appropriate and specific
to television.
FIDO: The film industry’s response

Television drama was establishing its aesthetic parameters, drawing on
works of theatre and literature for material. Another possibility for
dramatic entertainment on television could have been feature films.
However, the BBC was prevented from transmitting theatrically released
films by a film industry that, understandably, had a mistrustful attitude

to its new rival. Film distributors initially withheld the rights to show
their films on television, which meant that, as Edward Buscombe notes,
‘virtually the only films the BBC could get in the pre-war and immediate
post-war period were foreign; that is, non-English speaking’.8 There was
also little enthusiasm among BBC employees for film broadcasts, since
there were ‘aesthetic reservations about . . . the appropriateness of film
to the conditions of reception and the forms of attention particular to
television’.9 An internal memo sent to the BBC Board of Governors in
July 1948 stated explicitly that ‘it is no part of the Corporation’s inten-
tion to convert the BBC Television Service into a home cinema, showing
mainly commercial films. It has a far more serious responsibility.’10 This
sniffy response to cinema was as much about the BBC’s Reithian sus-
picion of entertainment broadcasting as it was about the misaligned
aesthetics of television and film. Moreover, with only between £400
and £500 per film available in the budget, the corporation was usually
priced out of the market for anything but older, foreign-language films.
There was, then, an ambivalent relationship between film industry and
broadcasters from the very beginning.
It was undeniable that the growing popularity of television as a
medium, and the rising number of private homes with their own
set, corresponded with dwindling returns at cinema box offices (see
Figure 1.1). From a peak of 1.6 billion admissions to British cinemas
in 1946, by the time the ITV network was established throughout the
UK in 1959, attendances had dropped by 65 per cent. There were early
attempts to hold back competition through collaboration: J. Arthur
Rank held a number of meetings with BBC staff to discuss the possi-
bility of showing television material in his cinemas, but was met with
unease from the BBC, and no cooperation was agreed. Rank presum-
ably felt that BBC television was not too serious a competitor, as he
had remarked that the corporation ‘drives more young people into my
cinemas than anything else in the country’.11 The arrival of commer-
cial television in 1955 brought a second wave of attempts from the film
industry to have a stake in broadcasting, as major British film produc-
tion and distribution companies, and owners of cinema chains, bought
into the network franchises. The Associated British Picture Corporation
(ABPC) created a subsidiary, the Associated British Corporation (ABC),
which was the original ITV licence holder for the Midlands weekday
and North weekend franchises; Granada Ltd, owner of a large cinema
chain in the south of England, successfully bid for the North weekday
franchise and became the most successful of all ITV licensees; Southern
1,800.0 25
1,600.0
20
1,400.0
1,200.0
15
Millions
Millions
1,000.0
800.0
10
600.0
400.0 5
200.0
0.0 0
19 6
48
19 0
52
19 4
56
19 8
60
19 2
19 4
19 6
19 8
19 0
72
19 4
76
19 8
80
19 2
84
19 6
19 8
90
4
6
6
6
6
7
8
8
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
Cinema admissions
Television ownership (number of households)
Figure 1.1 Cinema admissions and television ownership, 1946–199012
Television, operating in the south of England, was part-owned by the

Rank Organisation, the largest and most influential of the British film
producer-distributor-exhibitors.
The arrival of commercial television, with its new emphasis on pop-
ular entertainment, was to prove a huge problem for the ailing cinema
industry. British producers were struggling, in an already highly com-
petitive film market, to get their films in cinemas, and the fear from the
industry was that they would be tempted by even the meagre funds that
television could offer. In response, the Film Industry Defence Organi-
sation (FIDO) was formed with members from four film associations:
the Cinema Exhibitors’ Association, the British Film Producers Asso-
ciation, the Federation of British Film-makers and the Association of
Specialised Film Producers. FIDO organized a levy of a farthing per seat
on cinema admissions, which would be placed into a special fund used
to pay producers the proceeds they might have expected from televi-
sion sales of their films in exchange for an agreement not to sell to
broadcasters. Because both BBC and ITV had statutory limits on the
numbers of foreign imports they could broadcast, British films were
valuable to them, and FIDO’s levy inadvertently and artificially raised
the prices that producers could charge for their films. By the mid-1960s,
television was easily purchasing the rights to popular films, and the asso-
ciations were forced to retreat from their former trenchant position of
opposing the sale of any film to television. In September 1964, the Cin-
ema Exhibitors’ Association announced that they would not protest the
sale of films more than five years old to television, paving the way for
the distribution ‘window’ system still in operation today. The FIDO levy
scheme ended in January 1965, after having paid nearly £2 million for
the removal of 925 films from television broadcast. As Michael Jackson
noted, ‘FIDO died because it had outlived its usefulness. Even without
large numbers of films, television still eroded the cinemas’ audiences,
and cinemas still closed.’13 The film industry had little control over the
growing popularity of its competitor, or over the other way in which
filmed drama was slowly establishing itself in television broadcasting:
through the single television play.
Nats go home: Film in television drama’s golden age

Most television historians acknowledge the arrival of Canadian tele-
vision producer Sydney Newman as Head of Drama at ABC, the ITV
network for the Midlands, as a landmark moment in British televi-
sion drama. Newman imported a successful model of production from
the United States: original plays for television by socially conscious
young writers. Most significant was Newman’s work on Armchair Theatre
(ABC/Thames Television/ITV, 1954–1978), a Sunday night drama slot
which specialized in not only broadcasting new television plays, but
also imbuing studio drama with a much more fluid visual style than it
had previously had.14 As John Caughie argues:
Formally Armchair Theatre expanded the space of live studio drama by

shooting in depth with a moving camera . . . The objective was quite
explicit: to use the camera as a way of breaking free from the stasis of
the theatrical space to the mobility of cinematic space.15
Though Caughie goes on to qualify this by exploring the idea of the stu-
dio as an expanded ‘performative’ space, it is clear to see that Armchair
Theatre’s contribution to television drama history was stylistic as well as
socially expansive.
Hugh Carlton Greene became the BBC Director General in 1960,
determined to modernize the corporation. His desire for BBC person-
nel to have editorial independence and creative freedom made room
for challenging voices and new ideas. He poached Newman from ITV
to become head of BBC Drama in January 1963, a move that proved

to be pivotal in the story of film and television drama. Newman cre-
ated the ‘Drama Group’, with separate heads of series, serials and plays,
and adopted a delegatory style of management that meant that pro-
ducers had relative freedom. He also encouraged the development of
The Wednesday Play (1964–1970), which is widely seen as inaugurating
a ‘Golden Age’ of British television drama. Wednesday Plays are often
praised for their visual distinction as well as their socially conscious
themes and content, developing and expanding the free moving camera
and expressive editing that had begun with Armchair Theatre.
The Wednesday Play emerged during a period when television drama-
tists were increasingly interested in exploring the stylistic possibilities of
the visual medium as well as using it as a means of verbal communica-
tion for their ideas.16 Troy Kennedy Martin’s influential 1964 polemic
‘Nats Go Home’ was written with this experimentation in television
form in mind. He rails against the contemporary preponderance in
British television drama towards a theatrical style and form, drawn from
naturalist plays, arguing for aesthetic values to be applied to television
drama that were neither strictly ‘theatrical’ nor strictly ‘cinematic’.17 He
outlined four key issues: first, that the basis in dialogue of (‘nat’) plays
is unsuitable for a visual medium like television; second, that the use
of ‘natural time’ limits the dramatic potential of the television play;
third, that editing in television drama is the key to creating a narra-
tive rather than plot-based fiction; and last, that the attempt to provoke
a ‘subjective’ response in the viewer misuses the television medium’s
propensity for objectivity. He argued that the centrality of dialogue led
to the tedious visual style of contemporary television drama. By placing
the words as the focal point, the director’s repertoire of shot choices
becomes limited to the classic two- and three-shot, or the close-up,
a use of the camera that derives from classic Hollywood cinema. For
Kennedy Martin, this combination of the narrative style of (naturalist)
theatre and the old-fashioned visual style of cinema produces unsatisfy-
ing drama. He suggested that the use of such ‘Hollywood’ techniques
creates expectations of audience identification, which are incompati-
ble with the television medium. To attempt cinema-style stimulation of
the emotion (in Kennedy Martin’s words, ‘subjectivity’) is undesirable
through the television medium.
With his six-part series Diary of a Young Man, Kennedy Martin was able
to put into action some of the ideas propounded in ‘Nats’. In the open-
ing episode, ‘Survival, or They Came to a City’ (tx BBC, 18 August 1964),
the fluid ‘filmic’ style of the series is easily identifiable. It is constructed
as a montage that combines still photographs and location filming with

the voiceover of protagonist Joe (Victor Henry) labouriously reading
from his diary about the arrival of himself and friend Ginger (Richard
Moore) in London. There is a minimal use of studio shots, which are
intertwined with the montage, freeing the narrative to take place over
an expanded time period, as ‘Nats’ had proposed. Montage, fast-paced
editing and moving camera were used by director Ken Loach in subse-
quent work for the BBC, notably his Wednesday Plays produced by Tony
Garnett, Up The Junction (tx 3 November 1965), Cathy Come Home (tx
16 November 1966) and In Two Minds (tx 1 March 1967). Loach was
unequivocal about the stylistic and medial framework for these dramas:
‘our whole intention, at that stage, was to make films – not studio-based
theatre’.18 This determination to use film saw Loach and Garnett butt
against corporate policy at the BBC. For Up the Junction, they were ini-
tially denied permission to use 16mm cameras to film on location, partly
because of a concern that the lightweight cameras would produce infe-
rior quality material, partly because funds had been invested in new
studios at Television Centre, and partly because agreements with Equity
stated that at least 10 per cent of shooting on television dramas had to
be done in a studio. Garnett deftly negotiated these various institutional
impediments to using film, though these dramas were exceptions rather
than the rule.
By the time ‘Nats’ was written, Kennedy Martin was accustomed to
using film as part of television drama production, as one of the origi-
nal writers for Z-Cars (BBC, 1962–1978). This police drama series used
an unusual number of filmed ‘inserts’, which were principally aimed at
giving the series a heightened sense of realism or, as Lez Cooke puts
it, ‘documentary veracity’.19 The association of film camera with real-
ism was not merely an aesthetic one, but had institutional origins. The
BBC’s Film Unit, established in 1948, was originally intended only for
necessary on-location shooting. This comprised primarily documentary
features, and the occasional short film insert for drama that would be
included between scenes to accommodate changes of scenery, costume
and props. The association of the film camera with the ‘real’ may also
explain why Kennedy Martin and some of his contemporaries preferred
the medium to studio shooting; as John Hill has recorded, Tony Garnett
wanted ‘to go out into the world where we could capture the conditions
of people’s lives, how people actually lived’.20 Deliberately employ-
ing the material and stylistic associations with realism, authenticity
and veracity of the documentary camera formed a major component
in the controversy these television plays caused: the use of film and
its attendant techniques apparently blurred too far the lines between
fiction and fact. Film, then, opened up new aesthetic and political possi-
bilities to television writers, within institutional circumstances that were
sympathetic to challenging voices and new forms of expression, even
where the use of film as a medium and material was not encouraged.
The 1970s and the arrival of Channel 4

The 1970s is usually considered to be a period of major distress for the
British film industry. Hollywood studios, which had buoyed film pro-
duction in the 1960s, withdrew from the UK early in the decade, and
with no significant state support for cinema along the lines of pub-
lic service broadcasting in television, the industry shrunk. As a result,
the historical image of 1970s British cinema, as Paul Newland notes,
is of ‘cheap, poor quality horror films, ludicrously unsexy sex come-
dies, shoddy farces or tedious television spin offs’, though there has
recently been some important work to reappraise the period in British
film history.21 Cinemagoing had also declined significantly as a leisure
activity, as Figure 1.1 shows; between 1970 and 1980, average yearly
admissions had decreased by almost 48 per cent. With cinema in the
doldrums, television drama has subsequently been seen as ‘an alterna-
tive national cinema’.22 Drawing on a comparison between BBC drama
departments and classical-era Hollywood studios made by television
director Alan Clarke, Dave Rolinson has described this period as one of
the ‘last studio system’. The adage ‘British cinema was alive and well
and living on television’ has been attributed to Kenith Trodd, Tony
Garnett and Mike Leigh, but this was a sentiment shared by a num-
ber of staff at the BBC and elsewhere.23 The gradual change in attitude
towards television film can perhaps be seen in the 1974 rebranding
of ITV’s single drama anthology to Armchair Cinema. The dramas for
this season were produced by Euston Films, which pioneered location
filming (as opposed to videotaped, in-studio) production methods for
drama series such as The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–1978) and Minder (ITV,
1979–1994).
The use of film in drama production increased dramatically during the
1970s, with a third of the output of Play for Today (the successor to The
Wednesday Play from 1970) produced on celluloid. Towards the end of
the 1970s, there were increasing calls from certain television writers,
directors and other personnel that the work produced for television
‘deserved’ a cinema outing; that their ‘plays’ should become theatrically
released films. As with the earlier debate about telerecording, union dis-
sent was a stumbling block here, alongside the continued caginess about
television from the film industry. The calls for greater flexibility in televi-
sion film distribution coincided with a debate on the future of the fourth
channel on British television. In February 1977, the report of the Annan
committee recommended that, rather than becoming a second ITV sta-
tion in direct competition with the BBC, the fourth channel should
be run by an independent (or, in Annan’s terms, ‘Open’) broadcasting
authority, and operate not as a broadcaster in the BBC/ITV tradition,
but as a ‘publisher’ of television programmes produced by independent
companies. Annan did not recommend any formal financial or insti-
tutional relationship between broadcasting and the film industry, as
there had been for many years in neighbouring countries like France
and Germany.
The origin story of Channel 4 is now rather well known, but the
importance of the channel’s original remit – to experiment in the
content and form of programming, to cater to tastes not supplied
by the other broadcasters and to embrace minorities – can never be
overestimated.24 For our purposes, it was the experimental remit of
Channel 4, the legislated right of the Channel to take risks with its bud-
get and with its programming choices, that allowed it to play such a key
role in the relationship between television and film culture in Britain.
In his letter of application for the post of Chief Executive of Channel 4,
Jeremy Isaacs, an old television hand who had worked for a number
of years as a commissioner for Thames Television, made a number of
suggestions about the content and character of a fourth channel were it
helmed by him. One of these was that the channel would ‘if funds allow,
make or help make films, of feature length, for television here, for cine-
mas abroad’.25 In this proposal, Isaacs was suggesting a radical overhaul
of the system, stating explicitly something that drama commissioners
working in television had believed in private for years: that British tele-
vision drama was as good as, if not superior to, much British film, and
that, given a chance at distribution, it might withstand the rigours of a
cinema exhibition. As he later wrote in his memoir, Storm over 4:
The best of television drama was made on film, and at virtual feature
length. But – sometimes to its makers’ chagrin – the work always
went straight on to the domestic screen. The agreements under which
it was made did not allow the film to be put first into the cinema.
If it was, this ensured a delay of years before it could be screened
on television. No TV drama department had sufficient spare funds to
wait that long. So the two industries, instead of co-operating, pulled
against each other.26
Isaacs’s experiences as both a television producer and a member of the

BFI Production Board (between 1972 and 1979, and its chair in 1979)
doubtless influenced his opinions on this dysfunctional relationship.
The Channel 4 strategy would fundamentally reshape the way in
which single television fictions were conceived. When broadcast on
BBC and ITV television until the mid-1970s, filmed one-off television
dramas were usually described and conceptualized as television ‘plays
on film’. The traditional broadcasters, especially the BBC, had devel-
oped a relationship with theatre which provided cultural validation
for their drama output. Many television dramatists worked simultane-
ously as theatre writers, and the movement of personnel between the
two fields was common. However, as we will see, a number of writers
openly favoured the production techniques associated with film over
those associated with studio drama, which were felt to confine artis-
tic imagination and produce inferior work. The main reasons, though,
that television dramas could not be conceived of as ‘films’ were polit-
ical: complex arrangements had to be made for the release of films to
accommodate the various technical, creative and acting unions that
represented personnel involved in the film and television industries.
Negotiations about, for example, the window between film release and
television broadcast for cinema films had been protracted and bitter, and
the suggestion that films made for television might be released at cine-
mas was a controversial one. It was navigating this tricky territory that
was one of Film on Four’s crowning achievements, allowing the recon-
ceptualization from play to film to move from theory to reality. The
most important change that Channel 4 made, however, was not the dis-
tribution of its dramas, which was patchy at best and largely confined
to London, nor the decision to commission only feature dramas shot
on film. It was the rhetorical move that registered feature dramas not as
television plays (-on-film), but as television films, as Films on Four. The
discourse surrounding feature television drama changed rapidly, with
the BBC renaming its single drama slot Screen One (and Screen Two) in
1985. The groundwork was laid for television and cinema to begin the
partnership that would develop into a symbiosis in the 1990s.
David Rose, English Regions Drama and Channel 4’s

department of fiction
A striking feature of the story of film and television drama is the insti-
tutional mistrust of the film medium, and the consequent need for
a minority of individuals to either strike out against their employers’
policies, or work covertly within them in order to produce work on

film. One such individual, David Rose, would become a key figure in
the story in the 1970s and 1980s: in the first decade working cleverly
within a system that was gradually growing to allow the production of
drama on film, but that was still constitutionally opposed to it; and in
the 1980s forging, alongside sympathetic senior management, a path
that would fundamentally change attitudes to television’s relationship
with film. Rose started work at the BBC in 1954 as an Assistant Floor
Manager, having previously worked in theatre. His first significant role
was in the Drama Documentary Unit, which produced fact-based drama
programmes based on topics such as a particular workplace, social prob-
lem or group. Rose directed and produced a number of these, including
‘Medico’ (tx BBC, 7 January 1959) and ‘Who Pays the Piper?’ (tx BBC,
13 October 1960). He then produced Z-Cars between 1962 and 1965.
As we have seen, the programme was significant for its greater-than-
usual use of filmed inserts. According to Peter Ansorge, the use of film
for the series was more than technological posturing; it was a manifesta-
tion of a wider ‘fluid filmic style’.27 Rose left Z-Cars in 1965 to produce
its spin-off series, Softly Softly (BBC, 1965–1969), until 1967. He was
Head of Television Training until 1971, when he became the Head of a
new department, English Regions Drama (ERD), based at Pebble Mill in
Birmingham. ERD was created in response to the requirement for region-
ally produced work stipulated in a 1969 internal BBC policy document,
Broadcasting in the Seventies. The emphasis on regionality was an attempt
to militate against the corporation’s metrocentrism, and resulted in the
construction of new outposts in the provinces. Rose was given relative
autonomy from Broadcasting House. This independence was to be one
of the distinguishing assets of the Pebble Mill unit, not least because
of Rose’s skill in negotiating budget allocations, known as ‘offers’.28 He
was able to annexe enough funds for shooting TV drama on film, not
common practice at the time. ERD, under Rose’s supervision, expanded
its output from one or two Plays for Today and a handful of short dra-
mas per year in 1972–1974, to three or four single plays, a season of the
anthology drama Second City Firsts (BBC2, 1972–1978) and film drama
for BBC 2 from 1974 onwards.
Though Rose’s ‘belief in the writer as the most important person
in the creation of original drama’ has been considered his strongest
attribute, he also encouraged the development of distinctive visual styles
for his ERD dramas, supporting directors and producers.29 The stan-
dard medium for recording drama (and most other forms of television
programme) at the BBC in the 1970s was videotape. The BBC invested in
large studios for this: an unpopular move with some drama writers and
producers. Unlike some in the managerial sector of the BBC, David Rose
understood the limitations of the videotaped drama well. A particular
problem for a unit that was meant to represent, reflect and capture the
essence of regional England was the fact that studio production tended
to limit much of the action to interior settings. Rose facilitated loca-
tion shooting, which was more expensive and required film technology.
Locations would vary from the Malvern countryside of Penda’s Fen (tx
BBC1, 24 March 1974) to the Birmingham skyline used to envision a
quasi-Chicago in Gangsters (BBC1, 1976–1978).
Alan Plater described the support writers received at Pebble Mill as
‘benevolent patronage’.30 For Plater, the ability of Rose to produce
innovative work through the nurturing of new talent was uniquely con-
tingent upon the existence of the independent institutional space in
which to do so, as well as the trust placed in such individuals as Rose to
deliver quality drama on small budgets. Crucial here was independence
from the centre. There is certainly evidence that Rose worked hard to
maintain ERD’s separation from central BBC management. For exam-
ple, in 1973, an agent from the publisher of the Penda’s Fen screenplay
asked Rose what credit he would prefer for the book’s cover. Rather than
simply crediting the work as a ‘BBC Production’, Rose answered: ‘I would
prefer “Davis-Poynter TV Script of a BBC Pebble Mill Production”.’31 The
autonomy of the department, its insistence upon regionally based tal-
ent and recruiting people new to television, may lead to the reading
of ERD as something between repertory theatre and film studio. Rose
would take this management style with him to his next role, as Senior
Commissioning Editor for Fiction at Channel 4.
Rose has stated that he was partly attracted to this position because
of its title – rather than Head of Drama, he would be Commissioning
Editor for Fiction, a job description that did not, in Rose’s words, ‘carry
the baggage of theatre’.32 Rose’s experience at the BBC, however, had
led him to believe that some of the drama he had produced ‘could
have stood up very well in the cinema’.33 The proposal that Channel
4 would finance films to be given limited theatrical releases was attrac-
tive, as it would enable him to offer his writers the ‘wider and longer
life’ for their work that many of them craved.34 A number of writers and
directors migrated from the BBC in the 1980s to work under Rose’s new
institutional context of patronage – a ‘brain drain’ in Peter Ansorge’s
terms.35 These included Stephen Frears, David Hare, Alan Clarke and
Willy Russell. There is a strong critical temptation to erode distinctions
between Rose’s role at the BBC and at Channel 4, not least because, in
his words, he ‘transferred the BBC in Birmingham to Channel 4 but gave
it better production values’.36 Many have argued that there was signifi-
cant continuity between Rose’s work at the BBC and at Channel 4. Sean
Day-Lewis suggests:
When [Rose] joined Channel 4 he probably saw Film on Four as the

best possible way of prolonging the life of the television single drama
but with the theatrical success of some of his movies, at home and
abroad, he became caught up in the aesthetics, the risks and rewards,
and the high profile of cinema features.37
It is certainly true that the single drama was under threat by the
mid-1980s, and Rose’s work at Channel 4 did offer support to one-off
fiction.38 However, it seems unlikely that the ‘high profile’ of feature
film attracted Rose, since both his own and Channel 4’s name were usu-
ally omitted from any publicity for the films’ theatrical releases, to ease
distributors’ concerns that people would not pay to see a film made
with television money. Furthermore, as Ansorge and others have noted,
‘Rose did not accept a fundamental distinction between the best of film
and television.’39 Rose’s work on Film on Four, though, was recognized
by .both the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 1986 and
the Cannes Film Festival in 1987. He retired from Channel 4 in 1990
and was replaced by David Aukin, Executive Director of the National
Theatre since 1986.
Rose’s career was characterized by an approach that was part patron,
part impresario, part producer-author, part editor. Only in institutional
contexts which allowed certain individuals privileged and relatively
unhindered access to sections of the budget could this unique approach
be taken. Rose’s career could also be seen to reflect not a movement
away from theatre towards cinema, but a complicated parallel relation-
ship between theatre, television and film. Rose may have considered
the writer to be of utmost importance in the creative process, but in
his positions at the BBC and Channel 4 he enabled other members of
the team to endow this writing with a visual language which was cen-
tral to the ongoing development of television film aesthetics and form.
In the remainder of this chapter, I analyse two television single dramas
produced by Rose at ERD, teasing out some of these developments,
and looking particularly at the aesthetic and discursive dimensions that
distinguish these dramas as films, not plays.
Licking Hitler and Nuts in May: Film as material and medium

Nuts in May was originally broadcast in January 1974, and was Mike
Leigh’s second Play for Today, after Hard Labour (tx 12 March 1973). Its
story concerns the holiday in Dorset of Keith and Candice-Marie Pratt
(Roger Sloman and Alison Steadman), a sensitive middle-class couple
who are displaced from their usual suburbia, and attempt to recreate
it in their campsite, causing friction with other campers. As is usual
in Leigh’s work, the characters and story were developed in collabora-
tion between actors and director, hence Leigh’s credit being ‘devised
and directed’, rather than ‘written by’. The Pratts had, in fact, originally
appeared in the stage play Wholesome Glory, performed at the Royal
Court in 1973, and their trip to Dorset was inspired by David Rose’s
suggestion that Leigh should make ‘something’ about this region (Rose
was born in Swanage, on the Dorset coast).40 In contrast to the outdoor
locations of Nuts in May, David Hare’s Licking Hitler is set entirely in
a country house, which has been converted for the purposes of creat-
ing propaganda during World War II. The film tells the story of Anna
(Kate Nelligan), a shy aristocrat who is drafted into the propaganda
unit as a translator, and her tumultuous relationship with Archie (Bill
Paterson), a dyspeptic Scot whose class consciousness and disdain for
the way the war has been conducted leads to bitter unhappiness, alco-
holism and domestic abuse. Feeling strongly that the play should be
produced on film, and that he should direct it, Hare waited a year for
a film slot to become available at ERD. When the play was broadcast,
its opening credits described it as ‘A Film By David Hare’. According to
Peter Ansorge, ‘[t]his apparently minor alteration in a credit sequence
was to have a huge impact over the following years: directors of televi-
sion drama could now also become auteurs’.41 What was so desirable
to the author, so alarming to the institution, about the shooting of
feature-length drama on film?
BBC policy at the time dictated that film be reserved for exterior loca-
tion (mostly establishing) shots. It was expected that interior scenes of
dramas should be shot in videotape studios. The comparative difference
not only in cost but also in time and labour made studio shooting a
more practical and economical option; whereas a day’s shooting on film
would deliver only around four minutes of material for the final broad-
cast, studio-shot plays could deliver 30 minutes or more. According
to Mike Leigh, the technical limitations of studio shooting techniques
made it an unsatisfying medium to work with, ‘because it had a def-
inite studio feel – that static, airless, literal quality’.42 For this reason,
studio plays worked best when they captured single, domestic locations.
The claustrophobic feel of the studio was used effectively in Leigh’s two
videotaped dramas, The Permissive Society (tx BBC2, 10 April 1975) and
Abigail’s Party (tx BBC1, 1 November 1977). Both portray the events
of an awkward evening in a domestic setting, the former being a date
between recently attached lovers, and the latter a disastrous cocktail
party thrown by an unhappily married couple. For Leigh, the parallel
for studio drama is theatre rather than film:
What is important about the studio aspect of The Permissive Society is

this: because it was a studio play as opposed to a film, it had to be
constructed properly as a play. You couldn’t do it in a filmic way.43
According to this analysis, the material conditions under which a text is

produced mean that one cultural referent must be favoured over and
above another. Studio production seemingly necessitates a theatrical
mode of working and film production strongly suggests a cinematic
mode. David Hare’s preference for film in television drama originated
from dissatisfaction with video as a material, which he argued lacked a
unique aesthetic:
Videotape lies in between theatre and film, the hopeless

hybrid . . . which, up till now, has lacked visual finesse, against sets
which have no stylistic density or texture and lit from a grid which is
too high and too crude.44
Each of these complaints pits the apparent shortcomings of video/studio

production against film’s superior aesthetic: in terms of mise-en-scène,
lighting and the more general sense of ‘texture’.
Hare took great care that the mise-en-scène of Licking Hitler had a
specific visual referent – British cinema of the 1940s – in keeping with
its World War II period setting. He deliberately restricted the camera
movements to those which were possible in the 1940s, which affected
the design and structure of scenes.45 Rather than using elaborate zoom-
ing, tracking, panning or tilting shots, most of the sequences in Licking
Hitler are shot with a single, static camera in medium shot, or close-up.
Scenes with a number of characters conversing thus tend to be shot
using several planes of action, with actors occupying foreground and
midground. Ironically, this is the kind of ‘naturalistic’ shooting style
that Troy Kennedy Martin had identified as inimical to truly creative
television drama, and should be avoided. Lighting is also significant in
creating the 1940s visual style. Hare frequently presents his characters
shrouded in darkness, with a single beam of light illuminating their face.

Such lighting patterns are a frequent occurrence in one- or two-shots
in 1940s British cinema. The use of mise-en-scène and lighting design
in Licking Hitler deliberately complemented its setting. The film’s sense
of authenticity was produced, to a certain extent, through intertextual
referencing and stylistic imitation.
Lighting and mise-en-scène in Nuts in May are influenced largely by
the film’s outdoor setting. Most scenes use natural light, reflecting the
environment in which they are shot. This allows the performers to
respond to their environment, which suits Leigh’s improvisatory work-
ing style. Similarly, the framing, angle and position of the camera are
frequently designed to allow the audience to take in Dorset as protago-
nists Keith and Candice-Marie find it. For example, in a scene in which
the couple visit a cove called ‘Stair Hole’, Keith delivers a geology les-
son from the top of a cliff, shouting: ‘You’re standing on sedimentary
limestone. It’s been folded in the shape of a stair. That’s why it’s called
stair hole. There’s stairs there . . . and a hole there!’ Leigh describes Keith
here as ‘sort of living in this graphic picture of the place. The way we’ve
filmed it . . . and the way he’s seeing it, the way he describes it are all
completely to do with the graphics of the environment.’46 The sequence
begins with a medium long shot, cutting to a low angle shot with Keith
in the right foreground. In both cases, the shots have been arranged so
that the character is visible but the landscape dominates; the ‘hole’ and
the ‘stair’ both occupy the centre of screen. The camera captures the
landscape in the same ‘graphic’ way that Keith sees it. This arrangement
of mise-en-scène is used throughout the film, making the relationship
between the characters and the landscapes a stylistic trope as well as a
dramatic theme.
David Hare argues that the ability to edit images together is film’s
primary virtue:
Film is fast. It cuts well. You create your work like a mosaic out of
tiny pieces, each one minutely examined as it’s prepared, and then
slipped into the stream of images you are preparing in your head.47
This suggests that Hare would tend towards montages of short takes
edited seamlessly. However, a shot-by-shot analysis of Licking Hitler
actually reveals a rather long average shot length (ASL) of 11.1 sec-
onds, and a preponderance of takes of more than 15 seconds. Many
of these long takes occur when the camera focuses on a single charac-
ter performing a monologue. Most frequently this privilege is given to
the character Archie McLean. His first speech, on ‘the question of Hess’,
is given in voiceover, accompanying a long take (67 seconds) during
which the camera slowly tracks backwards. The screenplay makes very
explicit the authority over the camera that McLean’s voice holds: ‘All the
time the camera is tracking back, drawn by the voice of Archie McLean’
(my italics).48 The long take is also often combined with a close-up to
emphasize the actor’s vocal and facial performance. The emphasis on
performance, produced by the combination of long takes and close-
ups, and the consequent focus on the dialogue rather than the image
exposes Hare’s theatrical heritage. Though he claims a desire to make
an ‘intensely visual’ cinema, the editing style of Licking Hitler actually
reveals a use of cinematic methods to theatrical ends.
The editing style of Nuts in May is much faster and more fluid than
that of Licking Hitler, and its ASL is considerably shorter, at 8.4 seconds.
An example of the film’s overall style is one of its longest scenes, in
which Candice-Marie and Keith corner their campsite neighbour, Ray
(Anthony O’Donnell), lecture him about various lifestyle choices and
force him to sing along to a song they composed together. Because
the performances of the actors in this sequence are comically exagger-
ated, some critics described it as ‘theatrical’. Leigh takes issue with this
criticism:
I think what happens here is perfectly cinematic. The camera serves

what’s going on . . . The fact that there’s not a great deal of running
around and fast cutting doesn’t make it any less cinematic . . . I think
we use the camera in a very inventive way that in each moment
serves what’s going on.49
The ASL of this sequence is 7.1 seconds, shorter than the overall average
for the film. The camera quickly cuts between speaker and listener. The
sequence uses a combination of wide, medium three-shots, higher angle
medium shots of Ray, and close-ups, particularly of Keith and Candice-
Marie as they condescendingly explain the benefits of a vegetarian
diet to their guest. Using editing in this way breaks up the dialogue,
allowing for a flow of images to create the rhythm and tension of the
sequence. Framing Ray from a slightly higher angle, and Candice-Marie
and Keith from a lower angle, visualizes the power relations between
the overbearing couple and Ray. In these close-ups, it is the image that
communicates, not the dialogue. Sequences like this, rather than being
evidence of a theatrical mode of presentation, reveal the extent to which
Nuts in May is designed as a piece of cinema.
Both programmes contain significant use of montage, the mode

of presentation favoured by Kennedy Martin as providing a desirable
form of visual storytelling for television. Licking Hitler’s two montage
sequences are accompanied by a Chopin waltz, a mournful, slow piece
in a minor key, and are of equal length. This invites a reading of them
as a rhyming pair, in which the images in the second montage ‘answer’
some of the problems encountered in the first. In the first sequence,
for example, Anna (Kate Nelligan) is shown how to make a pot of tea.
An early scene in the film tells the viewer that Anna is incapable of doing
so because, being an aristocrat, she has never needed to learn. The brief
clip of Anna’s tea-making lesson shows the audience in the most eco-
nomical way that Anna has undertaken to learn practical skills while
she is a member of the propaganda unit. In a brief image in the second
montage, she proudly produces a soufflé for the Christmas table. By the
time of the second sequence, then, Anna has grown enough in confi-
dence to attempt difficult dishes. This rhyming pair thus indicates both
the passage of time and progress. In shorthand, the montage images
fill in narrative detail. This allows the film’s dialogue to focus on the
moral issues in which Hare is more interested, rather than broad expo-
sition. Using a montage sequence, a quick succession of images, to do
this is one of the unique features of moving image media, and of film in
particular.
Montages in Nuts in May, on the other hand, perform very little narra-
tive purpose. They mostly comprise shots of the Dorset landscape which
are not connected narratively or spatially, accompanied by voiceover
dialogue. Montages are primarily used to give a sense of the landscape
from which the story emanates. Part of David Rose’s motivation for com-
missioning Nuts in May was that most of his ERD commissions had been
set in northern, urban environments. To set a play in a rural environ-
ment would be a change of pace for the department, and would help
fulfil their remit to represent aspects of English regional life that were
underserved by metropolitan drama production. In Nuts in May, the
landscape is often filmed from the back of the Pratts’ car as though the
camera were a passenger. This allows the viewer to experience Dorset as
Keith and Candice-Marie do, giving a ‘tourist-eye’ view of the region.
According to BBC audience research, the presentation of Dorset’s land-
scape was highly appreciated by viewers of the programme. Even those
who rated the film poorly stated that the ‘lovely Dorsetshire scenery’
presented in the programme prevented it from being a ‘complete waste
of their time’.50
Nuts in May followed BBC protocol by using film to shoot entirely

in exterior locations. Licking Hitler, on the other hand, brought film
inside. Finlay Donesky suggests that shooting on video would diminish
the play’s impact, because ‘there has to be the sense that this propa-
ganda unit comes from a real country house set in the lush English
countryside’.51 Here, he follows the logic outlined by John Caughie
in which film on British television is associated with the ‘rush of the
real’, connoting authenticity in a way that video, a medium assumed
to have in its constitution a distancing effect, cannot.52 Licking Hitler
uses on-location filming to capture the complexity and detail of the
country house setting in a manner that would perhaps not be as effec-
tive using a studio set and props. Towards the end of the film, Archie’s
speech reveals the extent to which the country house setting is crucial
to the film’s meaning: ‘This house is the war. And I’d rather be any-
where . . . anywhere but here with you and your people in this bloody
awful English house.’ The combination of image and dialogue figure the
country house as the location of class conflict as well as propagandistic
warfare. The centrality of the country house setting to the moral and
political perspective of the play necessitated an authentic representa-
tion of that milieu. This could best be achieved by shooting on film, on
location.
Though Hare wanted to use film for its aesthetic superiority to video-
tape, his motivations were equally political. He viewed the opportunity
to use film as a means of warding off ‘censorship’ from the BBC man-
agement, by, as Carol Homden puts it, confronting them with a fait
accompli.53 Similarly, Trevor Griffiths argued:
what is strong about film, as opposed to work done on videotape

in the studio, is that you do it away from the institution. That
means you can keep other eyes away from it until the last possible
moment.54
The film medium was a site of conflict between artist and institution.
ERD worked both within and without a system which apparently tried to
frustrate artistic ambition by emphasizing pragmatic concerns. By allow-
ing even a limited amount of its drama resources to be spent on films like
Nuts in May and Licking Hitler, the BBC showed that it was, in fact, will-
ing to take certain risks. Produced in opposition to institutional policy
and, to some extent, managerial taste, Licking Hitler allowed for the
artistic rather than practical use of the film medium. This, to a certain
extent, paved the way for the acceptance of television films as films (or
with cinematic frames of reference) rather than as mediated theatre.
Conclusion
David Rose’s career indicates some of the ways in which the move-
ment between the two frames of reference was facilitated institutionally.
It also displays the divergences between the institutional attitudes of
the BBC and of Channel 4 to cinema and to the film medium; the
reservations of the former are notably distinct from the embrace of the
latter. Operating autonomously from central BBC, Rose’s ERD depart-
ment might be considered as a kind of independent studio, one which
utilized the institution’s resources as a source of artistic patronage for
writers and filmmakers. Its position simultaneously within and with-
out the BBC’s institutional framework appears to have rendered it a
unique space in which the convergence between film and television
could grow throughout the 1970s. Film was a rhetorical site of strug-
gle between bureaucracy and artists and Rose has emerged historically
with the image of a maverick producer, willing to take risks against a
philistine, technocratic regime.
Whatever the truth of these claims, it is clear that film was never
intended as the primary medium for BBC drama, and that drama policy
was not explicitly designed with cinematic frames of reference in mind.
The clearest expression of the theatrical frame of reference is in the title
of the single drama slots, The Wednesday Play and Play For Today. Martyn
Auty has argued that one of the crucial factors that hampered the devel-
opment of a healthy and mutually affirming relationship between film
and television in Britain was the ‘persistence of television executives and
publicists in using the word “play”’, which
[did] irreparable damage to the public’s perception of such works

and to the institutional politics of television companies where liter-
ary and theatrical traditions vie with graphic and cinematic thinking
under the broken umbrella of ‘drama’.55
This historical analysis lends weight to the rhetorical divergence thesis

at the heart of this book: if it is true that the nomination of British
single fictions as ‘plays’ resulted in the conception of the texts as literary
and theatrical rather than graphic and ‘cinematic’, this demonstrates the
power of the institution in setting the discourse by which ontological
judgements about media texts are made. The corollary here must be
that, as fictions on television begin to be called ‘films’, the terms of

discourse shift towards ‘cinematic’ frames of reference.
Channel 4 developed a culturally reinforcing relationship with art cin-
ema; its drama policy was predicated on the idea that its feature dramas
were films, not plays. Though thematically, materially and aesthetically
indistinct from some of the dramas produced by Rose at ERD, the seman-
tic change from play to film allows for a critical mode in which the
discourse of cinema is applied to those dramas. It was in the explicit
presentation of these discursive differences, and in making ‘film’ the
standard epithet for feature-length drama on television, that Chan-
nel 4’s real contribution stood. In the next chapter, I will explore some of
the specific ways in which televisual modes of presentation were used to
make the distinction between television ‘film’ and television drama, and
how this set the groundwork for the discursive and practical separation
between the two media, even where they were materially convergent.
2
Television as Film, Film as
Television: Broadcasting Cinema
in the 1990s
By the end of the 1980s, single fictions on television were generally

called ‘films’ rather than ‘plays’. Channel 4’s drama policy helped bring
about a discursive, conceptual and presentational shift in the way in
which single television dramas were conceived. In the 1990s, with a
change in Commissioning Editor and a change of job title to ‘Head of
Film’, came a change in direction for Channel 4. Whereas previously
Film(s) on Four were intended for cinema distribution internationally
(and, in some cases, a small-scale domestic distribution), after 1990
Channel 4 films were explicitly destined for theatrical distribution in
the UK as well. John Caughie has described the changes occurring in the
early 1990s as manifestations of various logics of convergence between
British television drama and film. He summarizes them thus:
The £6 million budget to produce twenty films a year becomes

£12 million to produce around fifteen. Costs go up and volume
comes down; the need to fill a programming strand is replaced by the
need to ensure that each product has the quality which will enable it
to find its place in the market.1
The consequence of engaging in international film distribution is a loss of

the centrality of this kind of television drama to a national culture. This,
Caughie argues, gradually changed the kinds of film being produced
by the PSBs – from explorations of social issues with recognizably local
features, to a generalized and universally resonant mode of address. The
growing interdependence between television and film cultures began to
denude television drama of its resources, cultural vitality and specificity.
Caughie’s analysis reveals that the business of ‘saving’ the British film
industry was ambivalent, coming at the expense of a well-established
tradition of single fiction on British television.
58
Broadcasting Cinema in the 1990s 59
Regardless of the fact that they were distributed at cinemas, these

films would be encountered by most of their viewers via television.
An important question, therefore, is how and why did these television
texts propose themselves as ‘films’? What is a ‘film’ when mediated
through television? How do television institutions propose their film
broadcasts to a television audience as film? This chapter will investigate
the ways in which content is understood as ‘film’ when it forms part
of television’s textual flow; it will attend to the messy textual position-
ing of film on television. It will look, in other words, at moments of
analogue convergence, of television’s remediation of film, and of the
discursive positioning of a particular programme to be read as ‘film’ not
television. Because this is largely a matter of presentation, I pay particu-
lar attention to processes of promotion, packaging and structuring that
are specifically televisual, related to television in its broadcast mode.
Modes of packaging and presentation for media forms have been the
subject of recent scholarly interest, with focus on ‘ephemeral’ media,
interstitial content, media branding and, following Gerard Genette’s
influential work on the literary industry, ‘paratextual’ materials.2 This
focus emerges in a context of intellectual uncertainty about medial
identity and medium specificity. Indeed, to rehearse one of my key
contentions – that the distinction between ‘film’ and ‘television
(drama)’ is primarily discursive and presentational – is to suggest that
the paratexts have a significant influence on the ways in which differ-
ent media are conceptualized. It is for this reason that, for example,
Jonathan Gray, calling for an ‘off-screen studies’, argues for ‘a focus[]
on paratexts’ constitutive role in creating textuality’.3 Gray argues that
paratexts have a crucial role to play in ‘acclimatizing’ the viewer to a
particular text, arguing that they function as an ‘airlock’ for texts and
suggest ‘certain reading strategies’.4 In this chapter, I explore some of
the specific ways in which television’s and film’s paratextual materi-
als are used in order not only to suggest ‘reading strategies’, but, at a
more fundamental level, to confirm the medial category of the text:
this text is ‘television’, this one ‘film’. Where the textual material in
question is television broadcasts of film, the televisual paratext, par-
ticularly interstitial material, has a constitutive role to play. John Ellis
argues that interstitials ‘are a series of distillations of television, and an
internal metacommentary on ordinary TV . . . ’.5 The remainder of this
chapter will dissect this metacommentary, the paratextual material and
its relation to television’s specific textuality.
By presenting particular television content as ‘film’, broadcasters are
able to separate and refine this material from the ‘rest’ of television.
Interstitial material is instrumental in this process, carving out a space

in the television ‘flow’ for this particular programming, alerting the
audience to its special features, even suggesting a different mode of
viewership. In this chapter, I pursue a modified ‘off-screen studies’ to
investigate how three separate film-based events on television were han-
dled by both broadcasters and extra-televisual agencies, and how this
paratextual material contributed to the sense that television was here
being used as a conduit for film materials, rather than for ‘ordinary’
television. The three analyses that follow concern three quite differ-
ent forms of film exhibition on television. The first section explores in
detail the presentation and structure of a series broadcast in 1990 on
Channel 4 of re-broadcast BBC Plays for Today, some of which were dis-
cussed in Chapter 2. The season was called Films 4 Today, and provides a
case study of television presentation and structuring being used specif-
ically for the purpose of rebranding television material from ‘television
play’ to ‘television film’. The second case takes the television premiere
of Derek Jarman’s Blue (UK, 1993) as an example of a film which largely
bypassed distribution, yet whose textual properties mark it out as an
interesting example of the intersection between television and (experi-
mental) film. The third case study will examine the media phenomenon
of Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, UK, 1994), examining the
promotion that went into ensuring as wide an audience for the tele-
vision premiere as possible, and how it was positioned as a significant
television event. Between them, these case studies explore how the lan-
guage of television broadcast is used to delineate and separate certain
texts as ‘film’, texts which may previously have been uncomplicatedly
understood as ‘television drama’.
Film 4 Today: Re-broadcasting, re-branding
To mark the retirement of outgoing commissioning editor David Rose

in September 1990, Channel 4 showed a six-week season of repeat
transmissions of television dramas Rose produced during his tenure
as Head of English Regions Drama at BBC Pebble Mill (see Table 2.1).
The films were originally broadcast during Play for Today, and were
the result of Rose’s pro-film policy at English Regions Drama.6 Films 4
Today contained work representative of the output of ERD. The films
shared a thematic and narrative connection, in that they all located
eccentric characters in definable English settings, but there is also a
more pertinent technical and structural connection: they were feature
length and shot on film. In this, they were similar to Channel 4’s
Table 2.1 The Films 4 Today season
Title Writer Director Channel 4 tx Original

BBC1 tx
Licking Hitler David Hare David Hare 8 July 1990 10 January

1978
Nuts in May Mike Leigh Mike Leigh 15 July 1990 13 January
1976
Penda’s Fen David Alan Clarke 22 July 1990 21 March
Rudkin 1974
Our Day Out Willy Pedr James 29 July 1990 28 December
Russell 1977
The Muscle Alan Alan Dosser 5 August 1990 13 January
Market Bleasdale 1981
The Fishing Peter Terson Michael 12 August 1990 9 July 1973
Party Simpson
feature-length dramas, broadcast in the Film on Four slot. Despite the

domestic and international distribution of some Channel 4 commis-
sioned films, Film on Four was always intended to bring cinema into
viewers’ homes. Film on Four’s slot title, packaging and presentation sug-
gested that, for the next two hours or so, your television would provide
access to non-mainstream film, access that cinemas themselves did not
offer.
Film 4 Today made a similar, if anachronistic, offer. It repackaged
television material that would have been understood and received as
television ‘plays’ when first broadcast in the 1970s as ‘television films’
in 1990. David Rose claimed of this work for ERD that some of it might
have stood up on the art film distribution circuit. Film 4 Today anthol-
ogized such programmes, re-positioning the original texts as pieces
to be read as films (for television) rather than television drama. This
was largely done, as with Film on Four, through careful packaging, by
exploiting television’s textual bag of tricks – scheduling, intra- and
extra-broadcast promotion, and interstitial material. All of these pre-
sentational tools suggest a particular viewing experience, and exemplify
the ways in which a broadcasting institution can address its television
material and attempt to skew viewer experience. They are, as Jonathan
Gray suggests, a paratextual ‘airlock’; a means of adjusting audience
expectations in order that they understand the text to be viewed not as
‘ordinary’ television but as ‘extra-ordinary’ film. If, as John Ellis suggests,
interstitials are ‘little instruction manuals on how to read TV’, then, in
the case of Films 4 Today, the instructions contained therein might be

considered to alert the viewer to read these programmes as films.7
The programmes were transmitted at 8.30pm on Sunday night, a stan-
dard slot for film broadcast on Channel 4. It was also common at the
time for Channel 4 to broadcast film ‘seasons’ over a number of weeks,
like the ‘Truffaut Season’ in October/November 1989 or ‘Hitchcock Sea-
son’ between September and November 1989, also broadcast in the
Sunday evening slot. Film 4 Today’s title amalgamates that of Channel
4’s own film slot, Film on Four, and the BBC slot title, Play for Today. The
replacement of the word ‘for’ with the numeral performs an appropria-
tion of the texts by Channel 4, reinforcing the sense that this material
‘belongs’ to the channel, that Channel 4 is its natural home, perhaps
even that, had Channel 4 existed in the 1970s, it is where these films
would have been found. The semantic turn from ‘play’ to ‘film’ and the
arrogation of the BBC texts seem to reflect the Channel 4’s confidence
in itself as an exhibitor of television films.
Like Films on Four, Films 4 Today were preceded by a title sequence.
This consists of a montage of still images from each of the dramas tinted
deep blue, framed slightly askew, and with particular detail (usually the
faces of the characters) picked out in close-up. Aside from the added
blue tone and the slanted camera angle, this is the same graphic design
employed for the title sequence for Play for Today. These images are
edited together to the beat of the series’ musical theme, which has a
melody close to that of Play for Today’s introductory music. The timbre
of the Film 4 Today music is quite different, replacing the simple piano
chords of the Play for Today theme with a saxophone playing a more
intricate melody. The use of smooth saxophone for interstitial music
was rather in vogue at the time, evidenced by the commercials shown
in the advertising breaks during the programmes. So, while the music
evokes the Play for Today theme, it also updates it for a contemporary
audience. This brief title sequence both conveys resonances of the past
life of the dramas and indicates that they are relevant to the viewer of
1990. Further, though, the title sequence ties the programmes broadcast
in the season together, connecting disparate texts through paratexts.
It is not only this series’ specific interstitial material that partici-
pates in rebranding its texts as television ‘films’. Continuity announce-
ments, both before the preceding commercial break and immediately
prior to the programmes’ start, prepared viewers for the text. These
announcements tended not to acknowledge that the programmes had
been BBC plays, describing the series as a ‘season of television films
from the 1970s’ prior to the broadcast of Penda’s Fen, for example.
Here, conventional television grammar (the pre- and post-commercial
Figure 2.1 Interstitial broadcast before Nuts in May
announcement) is utilized in the service of presenting the programmes

as ‘film’ texts.
In the pre-commercial break continuity announcement for Nuts in
May, the still image (Figure 2.1) is shown with a soundtrack voiceover of
a female continuity announcer. Rather than a still from the film itself,
the image is a production photograph of the director Mike Leigh work-
ing with his actors. This places the audience outside the fictive world of
the text, leading the imagination rather to the filmmaking process. The
continuity voiceover describes Nuts in May as ‘one of Mike Leigh’s best
comedy creations’, eschewing definition of the piece as either film or
play. However, in drawing attention to the text’s director, who by 1990
had made two theatrically released films for Channel 4, the interstitial
seems to prompt the viewer to judge the piece as a film rather than a
television drama or a play. Furthermore, the presence of the logo in the
image confirms the appropriation and re-brand of the text as a ‘Channel
4’ product. A similar function is performed by in-programme intertitles
before and after advertising breaks, which simply give the name of the
film being broadcast and the ‘Film 4 Today’ logo, which incorporates the
Lambie-Nairn ‘4’ icon. Paratextual material specific to Channel 4 is here
being used to re-contextualize the material, to rebrand it as ‘Channel 4’

text and also as ‘television film’.
In addition to the title sequence and other interstitial material, Films
4 Today were broadcast with brief to-camera introductions by the films’
writers and/or directors. Although this is not a particularly common pre-
sentational device on television generally, Channel 4 had a tradition of
short introductions for film seasons, by actors (such as, for example,
Kiefer Sutherland introducing ‘Canadian Cinema’ in 1989), critics (such
as David Robinson for ‘Robinson’s Choice’ in 1985) and even academics
(Colin MacCabe on Jean-Luc Godard, also in 1985). Channel 4’s use
of such presentational devices indicates that the film programmes were
taken seriously, handled with care and proposed to the audience as a
special part of the television schedule. Moreover, of course, the idea of
the introduced film selection has its origins in the world of art cinema,
where one may expect to find such an approach to film curation: a short
lecture by a knowledgeable person before film screenings is, after all, a
well-established feature of independent cinema presentation.
In such a context, these introductions to the Films 4 Today seem to
imply that the programmes shown should be viewed as films rather
than as television dramas. Films 4 Today introductions were short and
descriptive, endowing the speaker with authority to direct the viewer’s
attention to elements of the text that they considered particularly perti-
nent. Some of these introductions discuss the political or philosophical
content of the text, as in David Rudkin’s enigmatic introduction to
Penda’s Fen. Others discuss the origins or intentions behind the pro-
grammes, as in Mike Leigh’s introduction to Nuts in May, which centres
on the choice to make an ‘urban yarn’ in rural Dorset. Some intro-
ducers make some reference to the production context for the film,
highlighting the particular challenges or rewards of working with the
medium.
Willy Russell’s introduction to Our Day Out is perhaps the most
emphatic about the ‘filmic’ status of the piece. He describes various
serendipities of casting, crewing and weather which seem to him to be
unusual in filmmaking:
Some films can be agony. You’re stood there on location, the

weather’s all wrong, you’re behind schedule. The actors want to shoot
the director, the director wants to shoot the producer, the producer
wants to shoot himself and everyone wants to shoot the author.
Nobody wants to shoot the film. But this one really was the other
side of the coin.
Russell here employs the discourse of cinema, with the language of

location, schedule, shooting and, of course, repeatedly referring to
the text as a ‘film’. Russell may by 1990 have been readily associ-
ated with cinema as well as television and theatre, with film versions
of his plays Educating Rita (Lewis Gilbert, 1983) and Shirley Valentine
(Lewis Gilbert, 1989) becoming popular hits in the 1980s. He speaks
of the vicissitudes of filmmaking with authority and humour, describ-
ing, for example, a moment during the shooting of Our Day Out; the
director Pedr James was about to begin shooting when some of the
non-professional cast of schoolchildren cast a critical eye on his choice
of camera angle. By sharing such anecdotes, Russell’s introduction
presents the proceeding programme as uncomplicatedly and definitively
‘film’. This and other introductions to the series helped enact the dis-
cursive separation of the Films 4 Today from the rest of Channel 4
‘television’.
While the television presentation of these texts seems to imply
strongly that the viewer should read the programmes as ‘films’, the
message in extra-televisual forms of promotion was less clear. The
press previews for the season exemplify the complicated status of these
texts; that is, as television material previously presented as ‘television
drama’ and now being rebranded as ‘films’. In an article defending
the scheduling practice of television repeats, The Independent’s Sabine
Durrant described the season as ‘a fresh showcase for acclaimed David
Rose dramas (many of which were formerly shown in the BBC’s “Play
for Today” slot)’.8 The season did not appear in the ‘film on television’
section of The Observer or the Sunday Times, though the programmes
were often suggested viewing from the papers’ previewers. These news-
papers explicitly outline the origins of the season as Plays for Today made
in David Rose’s Pebble Mill unit, specifying Rose by name as well as the
motivation for the season in his departure from Channel 4. As with
other journalists including the series in their previews or reviews, the
ontology of the texts is not certain: they are films, they are film dramas,
they are former ‘Plays for Today’. They are, apparently, neither one thing
nor another. The ambivalent attitude of the press to the status of these
texts is revealed in the following, taken from the Sunday Times preview
of Licking Hitler:
Channel 4 begins a new season of films produced by David Rose, who

left the station as head of drama last March. First shown in the BBC’s
Play for Today slot, the dramas begin with David Hare’s brutally black
BAFTA-winner . . .9 [my italics]
Looking for accurate terminology, the journalist requires the use of

the entire semantic field around ‘television drama’, without mention-
ing ‘television drama’ itself. This blend of descriptors for the text
shows that there is no fixed definition. It illustrates the ongoing con-
fusion between ‘film’ and ‘television drama’. In a climate where a
Film on Four is accepted as a film, despite being seen by the major-
ity of its audience on television, texts with similar features – British,
low-budget, shot on film, featuring knowable regional landscapes and
focused on ‘socially displaced’ characters – are easily abstracted as film
texts as well.
This season, and the descriptive flexibility needed to describe the texts
shown in it, demonstrates the relationship between television drama
and film in different institutional contexts. In many ways, the Films 4
Today season points to the atavistic relationship between Channel 4’s
feature fictions and the previous television drama work of the BBC. This
is particularly evident in the visual shadow and musical echo of the Play
for Today theme tune during the title sequence for the season. However,
the re-branding of these texts as ‘films’ through paratextual presentation
specific to television generally and Channel 4 specifically aligns them to
the channel’s own slot for feature fiction, Film on Four. This rebrand-
ing is a product of an institutional re-contextualization. By repurposing
and remediating these BBC plays, subjecting them to Channel 4’s insti-
tutional modes of presentation and address, the Films 4 Today season
changes their locus of medial identity. This indicates the more general
shift of cultural referent and source of value for television fiction from
the theatre to the cinema. Film on Four was the intervention that allowed
this rhetorical shift to take place. As with Film on Four, Films 4 Today
utilized aspects of television’s paratextual form to make a discursive sep-
aration of the texts from the rest of ‘television’ – these are not Channel
4 television dramas, they are not BBC television plays. They are Films 4
Today.
Film on Four was not the limit of Channel 4’s contribution to film
culture or remediation of film materials. Channel 4 also widened access
to films – particularly ‘world’ cinema – that could not secure national
distribution. Television here provided access in two senses – access to
the airwaves for artist-filmmakers, or to minority film cultures, but also
access to that film material for viewers who found such moving-image
material lacking in their cinema diet. As Jeremy Isaacs put it:
Channel 4 put itself out to ensure that adult viewers who wanted
to see films of merit which they could previously only find in the
cinema, could now see them on television also. In the West End of
London, this was an advantage. In Inverness, where there was no
cinema showing such films at all, it was a lifeline. Viewers starved
of such work in the cinema wrote to say so. Theirs were among
the interests not catered for by ITV that Channel 4 was set up to
serve.10
The next section will look at one such film-artist, Derek Jarman, and
his relationship with television and Channel 4 in particular. For Jarman,
television exhibition of his films was a double-edged sword, providing
exposure about which he was ambivalent, and an altered presentational
framework for films that would seem to demand a particular context of
reception, that of the avant-garde cinema.
Broadcasting art cinema: Channel 4 and Derek Jarman
Derek Jarman has posthumously become one of Britain’s most cel-

ebrated artist-filmmakers, but during his lifetime his films were not
widely exhibited. This is partly a result of the chronically weak posi-
tion of British film productions in the business of theatrical distribution.
Experimental and ‘art’ film has tended to fare particularly badly under
a system dominated by American commercial distributors. As Jarman
himself noted: ‘It’s the great weak link. You make [films] and then there’s
no one there to pick them up, nowhere to put them on.’11 Though
television has always had the potential to offer an alternative site of
exhibition, there has been little sustained tradition of experimental
or alternative cinema finding its way onto British television screens.12
There was, however, a small window in British television history, in
the first decade of Channel 4’s life, where there was some commit-
ment to broadcasting such challenging cinema. Channel 4’s innovative
funding formula (whereby it was not responsible for selling its own
advertising airtime and had a fixed budget stipend) legislated impera-
tive to experiment with the form and content of television and to cater
for minority audiences, and supportive commissioning editors (partic-
ularly Alan Fountain and Rod Stoneman of the Independent Film and
Video department) meant that there was, for a brief period, a greater
opportunity for avant-garde cinema to find a wider national audience
through television. Slots like The Eleventh Hour (tx Channel 4, 1982–
1990) demonstrated the Channel’s commitment to alternative and
experimental film culture, albeit to a certain extent stymied by a ghetto
transmission slot and generous but limited budget.13 In this context of
institutional sympathy, Jarman’s work was broadcast on Channel 4 a

number of times during the 1980s and 1990s Jarman’s films fitted within
their rebellious image, and the channel took the artist and his works seri-
ously, despite his own reservations about how good Channel 4 had been
for his career.
Jarman’s films caused considerable trouble for Channel 4, often pro-
voking complaints from the tabloid press and media pressure groups,
like Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listener’s Association
(later, Mediawatch-UK). As early as December 1982, British tabloids
reported that Channel 4 had bought two ‘gay films’ for showing uncut,
Nighthawks (Ron Peck, UK, 1978) and Jarman’s Sebastiane (UK, 1976).14
Sebastiane’s sexual explicitness was a source of particular consternation.
Channel 4 attempted to appease the tabloids by claiming that the films
had been bought as part of a package, and were not intended for broad-
cast, failing to defend Jarman’s film on the basis of its artistic integrity.
This incident brought Jarman to a wide and mostly hostile public, a sit-
uation for which he was unprepared. Although the censure was aimed at
the broadcaster rather than the artist, Jarman’s confidence in Channel 4
was shaken, and he would view the channel with considerable suspicion
forthwith. Jeremy Isaacs later claimed that they had always intended
to show the films once the controversy had died down, and Sebastiane
was duly broadcast in November 1985. This screening did not go with-
out dispute, and Whitehouse wrote to the Independent Broadcasting
Authority to complain about the transmissions of Sebastiane and Jubilee,
which she claimed ‘grossly offended against good taste and decency and
could incite violence’.15
That Channel 4 screening Jarman’s films could provoke such dis-
pleasure reveals much about the uneasy transition underway in the
mid-1980s to a less constrictive interpretation of public service broad-
casting, one in which there is room for television to offend, to provoke,
or to stimulate debate. Jeremy Isaacs argues in his memoir that the
relative conservatism of British television had its roots in aconception
of television viewers as a ‘family audience’, under which view televi-
sion had a duty not to offend or, in typically British fashion, not to
embarrass. For Isaacs,
Channel 4’s very existence queried the prevalence of that unitary,

family audience. We served audiences of differing composition at dif-
ferent times. We catered for the interests of individuals who could
make viewing choices of their own, and for themselves. We would
show matter that pleased some, even if it risked offending others.16
Arguments for censorship hinge on the fact that the structure and
technologies of broadcasting mean that programmes have the potential
to reach their audiences indiscriminately. Broadcasting, in this view, is
not a benign democratic system under which every viewer is served
equally, but, because of its near-universal availability, a widespread
threat to the morals of vulnerable members of society. For pro-
censorship campaigners, this means that what appears on television
must be carefully monitored in case certain viewers came upon the work
by accident. In this view, PSBs have a duty of care to their audience, one
which prohibits them from showing taboo material, whether it is sexual,
violent or politically charged.
For Channel 4 to become an alternative exhibition site for non-
mainstream, experimental cinema, these issues needed to be negotiated.
Jeremy Isaacs tended to be robust in his defence of challenging mate-
rial of ‘merit’ and the right of the broadcaster to transmit them. This
makes the initial failure to defend Sebastiane and other challenging
films early in Channel 4’s life surprising, but is a testament to the dif-
ficulty of carving a place for the upstart channel in the contemporary
broadcasting environment. Isaacs’s most notorious (and often ridiculed)
innovation for the transmission of challenging material on British tele-
vision was the ‘red triangle’, a warning symbol displayed on screen for a
brief period in 1986 which told the viewer ‘Special Discretion Required’.
These were, significantly, broadcasts of international art cinema. The
intention was to warn viewers of the ‘adult’ content of the material
to be shown, in order that he or she could switch off if likely to be
offended. Inevitably the consequence was that undue attention was
drawn to these broadcasts for viewers who might not have encountered
them otherwise, particularly adolescents, who were the subject of much
anxiety for pro-censorship campaigners.
The vituperation around Channel 4’s challenging broadcasts created a
reputation for the channel that could, in fact, be useful to them. Chan-
nel 4 could use screenings such as Sebastiane and Jubilee to cultivate its
image as broadcasting’s voice of dissent. Channel 4, during the 1980s,
was developing its reputation as an iconoclastic, youthful broadcaster
which was able to provide multiple points of view, and challenge per-
ceptions. Jarman’s art films, then, provided Channel 4 with material
whose apparently extreme content and imagery could be defended with
arguments about freedom of expression and artistic value. What is most
interesting in the case of Sebastiane (and, indeed, many Channel 4 con-
troversies) was that it was a film rather than a television programme that
provoked outrage. John Ellis argues that
cinema is constituted as . . . more adventurous [than TV], a belief that

some TV channels have used in order to introduce more adventurous
material than would be possible if it were made directly for TV only,
and within the institutions of TV manufacture.17
In this case, Channel 4 could exploit its position as a remediator of a

film to create conditions where television could co-opt some of film’s
adventurousness. Here the distinction between television and (art) film
takes on moral, philosophical and political importance. Rhetorically
separating film from television, through extra-televisual and paratextual
modes of address, allows the channel to push boundaries on television
with content that is, somehow, not-television. Presenting this mate-
rial as ‘film’ locates its identity outside of the broadcaster, outside of
television’s regime of address to its national public. Channel 4 was
simultaneously able to exploit the publicity caused by such contro-
versy and detach itself as a television broadcaster from this pre-existing
material.
Channel 4 did not only remediate existing works of experimental
cinema, but also committed funds through its Fiction, Education and
Independent Film and Video departments (IFVD). In 1982, Jarman was
trying to make a sumptuous, medium-budget biopic of Michelangelo
Caravaggio. His producer, Nicholas Ward-Jackson, began negotiations
with the newly formed Channel 4 about committing some funds to the
project, and got so far that, as Jarman biographer Tony Peake puts it,
‘their commitment seemed as solid as was necessary’.18 In December,
Channel 4 pulled out, citing a conflict of interest with the National Film
Finance Council, which wanted a three-year holdover before television
transmission. Channel 4 had no legal obligation to Jarman, but he took
their withdrawal quite personally, as Peake describes: ‘[he] interpreted
Channel 4’s rejection of Caravaggio as a rejection of his entire modus
operandi. He even saw it as a rejection of a whole swathe of independent
film-makers – and by the very people who should have been supporting
such independence’.19 Despite Jarman’s spikiness, Channel 4 did eventu-
ally devote funds to Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, UK, 1985) through their
fiction department, and also to The Last of England (Derek Jarman, UK,
1987) and The Garden (Derek Jarman, UK, 1990) through the Indepen-
dent Film and Video department, as well as commissioning Wittgenstein
(Derek Jarman, UK, 1993) through Tariq Ali and the Education depart-
ment. When producer James Mackay sought funding for what was to be
Jarman’s final film, Blue, from the channel, he targeted the IFVD and the
Education Department, both of which committed small funds.20
Blue germinated over a number of years from an idea that Jarman

had sketched in a notebook from 1974 about creating a ‘blue film for
Yves Klein’, the French painter whose best-known contribution to the
art world was the invention of a new shade, ‘International Klein Blue’.21
In 1989, he was asked to appear as an interviewee for a documentary
about Klein – ‘a loathsome inept youth-oriented arts programme’ in
which he agreed only to co-operate if the producers ‘explained Yves
and didn’t turn him into a circus’. Jarman’s idea was an interview fol-
lowed by as many minutes of blank blue television.22 He called the
eventual programme a ‘travesty’, but it is clear that at this point he
was more seriously considering the idea of a text consisting solely of
a blank blue image. The next stage of development was a piece of per-
formance art called ‘Symphonie Monotone’ (also named after a Klein
piece) that Jarman created to accompany an AIDS benefit in January
1991. This consisted of Jarman and his friend and collaborator Tilda
Swinton reciting passages of prose and poetry on the theme of ‘blue’
while a screen behind them projected a film image of a detail from a
Klein ‘Blue’ at the Tate gallery. Simon Fisher-Turner, who had composed
scores for four of Jarman’s films, led a musical ensemble in accompa-
nying the piece. Michael O’Pray describes the evening as ‘mesmeric, a
reminder of the range of Jarman’s reference points’.23 Channel 4 funded
some script development in 1991, around the same time that Jarman
was writing Chroma. This book combined journal, autobiography and
musings, including quotations from philosophers, poets, artists and sci-
entists, on the subject of colour. It was written as Jarman was beginning
to feel the effects of HIV most fully (he had been diagnosed with the
condition in December 1986), including losing full sight. The script of
Blue largely derives from the chapter of Chroma entitled ‘Into the Blue’,
which is a moving combination of wordplay on the theme of blue,
poetry and journal entries from Jarman’s various hospitalizations. All
the parts of Blue were now in place, with inspiration from all the areas in
which Jarman had worked: film, fine art, poetry and even his anathema,
television.
Blue takes the form of a 75-minute film, during which the only image
is a blank blue screen. Jarman and colleagues Swinton, John Quentin
and Nigel Terry perform his script, with music by Fisher-Turner. Channel
4 provided development and production finance, in addition to funds
provided by the Arts Council and Japanese patron Takashi Akai. The film
was still £9000 short of its £90,000 budget, but because the audio track
was a central component, producer James Mackay was able to gather
additional funds from BBC Radio 3. Blue was produced during the spring
of 1993, ready for its premiere at the Venice Biennale Film Festival in
June. Its UK premiere took place on 22 August at the Edinburgh Inter-
national Film Festival, where it won the Michael Powell Prize for Best
British film. Despite these accolades, the film did not achieve a wide
theatrical distribution in the United Kingdom.
Blue’s television premiere was one month later, on Sunday 19
September at 10.45pm. It was broadcast on Channel 4, with its sound-
track on Radio 3 in a simulcast. This was the first time that this had
been attempted, and a rare collaboration between the BBC and Chan-
nel 4. The uninterrupted transmission of a blank blue screen is risky on
television, given that audiences are used to the ceaseless flow of chang-
ing images. This play with the expectations of the television medium,
and of television’s flow, creates a unique televisual experience, a tele-
vision ‘event’. Promotions in several outlets helped ready the public
for this unusual phenomenon: extracts from the text of the film were
published in The Guardian on the Wednesday prior to the transmis-
sion, and BBC Radio 3 invited its listeners who did not have television
sets to apply for a blue postcard to look at during the radio transmis-
sion. Television magazines and newspaper supplements were careful
to point out the unique qualities of the transmission, including the
lack of commercial breaks and the Radio 3 simulcast. The television
press focused on the piece as a personal act of expression from Jarman.
The Radio Times described it as a ‘startling, deeply personal work, fero-
ciously ambitious in its humane and intelligent response to the Aids
tragedy’.24 The TV Times similarly concentrated on the artist, describ-
ing Blue as ‘Jarman’s most accessible film in an eclectic career that has
never failed to challenge conventional filmmaking and ideas’.25 Call-
ing particular attention to the artist-filmmaker points to the cultural
baggage of controversy and censorship attached to his films on tele-
vision, perhaps artificially inflating expectations of a furore for this
transmission.
The unusual viewing experience led the television press to focus in
detail on the film as a work of art, and its screening as a cultural event.
The Radio Times, for example, describes the film thus: ‘as an experiment,
it is a bold, controversial statement’.26 Mentioning Blue’s awards suc-
cess, this review of the film underlines its status as art cinema. The
TV Times similarly emphasizes the strange phenomenon of Blue on
television. In its ‘On View’ section, there was a small segment dedicated
to Blue which light-heartedly explains the image of the film, and how
the audience may respond to it:
No, we haven’t forgotten the picture. This is all you’ll see if you tune
in to Blue tonight. This astonishing film lasts for 75 minutes and the
idea is that viewers will conjure up their own images while listening
to haunting music and a script about the reality of living with AIDS
by filmmaker Derek Jarman.27
The television reviews both presupposed what the attitude of the audi-
ence might be and structured their expectation. Such reviews acclima-
tize uninitiated audiences to this television event, and provide context
that can shape reading position. That the film and its mode of consump-
tion require explanation is particularly significant. The reviews relay the
idea that the film is an aesthetic experience; one that is outside televi-
sion’s usual communicative register. Extra- and paratextual materials
prepared the television audience for a unique cultural event.
There has been considerable discussion about whether the film quali-
fies as ‘cinema’, about how it may be categorized and about the pleasures
it can offer its audience. It is, as Paul Julian Smith argues, ‘a work at the
outer limits of cinematic expression’.28 This assessment points to the fact
that, in removing the basic visual language of cinema, Jarman asks the
viewer what is the experience of cinema if there is ‘nothing’ to look at?
For many critics, the answer is that it’s visceral. By removing the usual
primacy of sight, Blue heightens the other senses, particularly hearing,
while at the same time making one hyper-conscious of the act of seeing.
Brandon LaBelle argues that ‘this witnessing of one’s own optical sense
allows one to “see” seeing itself and in so doing releases the uncon-
scious and the body’s sensorial life, into our conscious experience of
the film’.29 Duncan Petrie describes in the film’s press book ‘the primal
experience of sitting in the darkened cinema’.30 Much of the pleasure of
Blue, then, is sensorial, and seems inescapably tied to the cinema itself
as the site of exhibition. The television broadcast provided, of course,
a qualitatively different experience of the film. Michael O’Pray writes
that ‘[t]he experience of Blue in the cinema with the scale of the screen
and the concentration cinema demands is much more intense and
evocative than its televisual rendering’.31 Similarly, George Perry, along
with other television critics, argued that ‘inevitably television blunts
the effect’.32 The television exhibition in this case seems, by nature, an
inferior version of the experience afforded by a cinema screening. The
assumed viewing mode of television – distracted, domestic, attention
divided – appears to be incompatible with the viewing mode required of
Blue. Here, theatrical distribution is replaced by an apparently inferior
means of exhibition, since television can never properly reproduce the

conditions of the cinema screening.
However, the broadcasters involved in the transmission did make
some effort to provide a surrogate cinematic experience of the film. In
the press book, Petrie notes that the simulcast with Radio 3 allowed ‘an
approximation of the high quality Dolby stereo soundtrack in a domes-
tic setting’.33 Broadcasting the film uninterrupted by commercials meant
that the attention of the viewer would not be altered; s/he was able to
experience it unspoilt. Although the domestic setting and smaller screen
might diminish some of the film’s affect, the television transmission had
certain special features, particularly the collaboration of two PSBs which
made this a one-off broadcasting event. The simulcast combination of
broadcast television and broadcast radio is usually reserved for culturally
or politically significant events, such as state funerals and weddings, or
the BBC Proms concerts. Sight and Sound reviewer Chris Darke saw this as
‘the old Brechtian idea of “separation of the elements” receiving here a
novel, multi-media twist’.34 An additional feature, and a significant part
of the pleasure of Blue as a piece of television, then, was the collective
shared experience, a result of the doubled liveness of a simultaneous
radio and television broadcast.
The broadcast of Blue created from a film a unique televisual event,
one which compensated somewhat for the lack of a cinema distribution.
The means of transmission allowed viewers a facsimile experience of the
film. An audience either unable to attend film festivals or living outside
urban areas was given the opportunity to experience Blue, in as near an
approximation as could be achieved without a theatrical distribution.
This kind of collaboration is only possible under a system where it is
practicable to broadcast an art film likely to achieve few viewers. In other
words, only under the interpretation and application of PSB that had
resulted in Channel 4 (which, in the wake of the 1990 Broadcasting Act,
was coming to an end in 1993) could a film like Blue, and an artist like
Jarman, have been treated with such respect and sensitivity.
Blue, with its viewing figures among the lowest ever recorded for
Channel 4, represents an extreme in the film provision for the chan-
nel; a rare commitment to experimental art cinema that was seldom
repeated, particularly after 1993. Film 4 Today demonstrates the use
of film discourse to re-brand and re-position more conventional tele-
vision drama. But, in the early 1990s, with the renewed commercial
pressures on British terrestrial broadcasters, both from the 1990 Broad-
casting Act and from a small but growing multi-channel market, the
context for films on television was changing. From 1993, Channel 4’s
funding formula ended; it no longer had a guaranteed income and

became reliant on advertising revenue in a way it had not previously
been. Channel 4 now needed to provide a programming schedule that
was competitive enough to achieve higher ratings, but that still fulfilled
its responsibilities to innovate, to experiment and to cater for minori-
ties. Thus, the channel needed certain programming that would secure
large audiences, or alternatively that would appeal to viewers from a
particularly lucrative demographic, such as the 16–35 age group, or the
ABC1 marketing group of consumers. Film on Four, the channel’s pres-
tigious but expensive banner slot, is an example of such an address.
Film on Four (and its competitor slots Screen One and Two on the BBC)
became marketing tools for the channels: loss-leader series, designed,
more than anything else, to garner prestige and raise the ‘brand value’
or institutional image of their broadcasters. Doing this still required sig-
nificant audience numbers for the slot to justify the expense, and the
chances of attracting wider audiences could be enhanced by showing
films that were already well known. Because some Films on Four were
known entities before their television debut, the channel was able to cul-
tivate its cultural image to create a television ‘event’ from their premiere
in a way unthinkable without a wide theatrical distribution. Nowhere
was this clearer than in the sustained public life of Channel 4’s most
commercially successful Film on Four, Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Four Weddings and a Funeral as a television event
In January 1995, media journalist Maggie Brown reported dwindling

audiences for both Film on Four and the BBC’s Screen One and Two
slots. ‘There is’, she wrote, ‘the occasional big hit (e.g. Four Weddings
and a Funeral). But most Screen One and Two films are seen once and
forgotten.’35 Average audiences for TV films had declined from around
5.6 million in 1986 to 2.8 million in 1994. Brown’s report concluded
with the speculation that BBC One controller Alan Yentob aimed to
end the Screen One slot, with films operating as ‘one-off’ events in the
schedule in future. The idea of single drama transmitting in a ‘one-
off’ space marks a change from the tradition in which they were tied
together in the specially preserved space of a schedule slot. John Caughie
argues that, in the 1990s, ‘there [was a] technological logic which dissi-
pates television drama’s capacity to function as a single national event,
shifting it in time through tape recording or regionalizing it in space and
time through cinema exhibition’.36 Caughie describes changes in tele-
vision form and structure that fundamentally alter the ways in which
broadcasts of television fiction might be considered national ‘events’ of

similar cultural importance to major television dramas of the 1960s and
1970s. Nevertheless, film transmissions in the 1990s were still able to
function as notable TV ‘events’ by virtue of the huge audiences they
sometimes gathered. In this section, I discuss the ways in which film
broadcasts could retain ‘event status’ in this television context, albeit
in modified form. In the case of Four Weddings, this was done through
a highly commercially successful, awareness-raising (inter-) national
cinema distribution.
Four Weddings’s extraordinary box-office success was achieved through
a comprehensive and exhaustive publicity campaign. One of the key
selling points for the film in the UK was its success abroad, particularly
in the United States. Having premiered at the 1993 Sundance Film Festi-
val in Utah, it was released overseas (in France and Australia as well as in
North America) before it reached British cinemas. The film’s promoter,
Matthew Freud, explicitly argued that the film’s best publicity ‘[was] the
fact that it’s done so well over there’.37 The hype attached to the film
elevated it to the status of blockbuster usually reserved for Hollywood
imports. The advertising posters for the film somewhat ironically pro-
claimed that it was ‘America’s No 1 Smash Hit Comedy’. Referring to
this poster, Richard Combs asked: ‘[c]ould this not be a film worth con-
sidering until a real movie nation had flocked to see it first?’38 The
question attests to the sense that British moviegoers could not be inter-
ested in a film, even one that is made by and, supposedly, for British
people, until American audiences had endorsed it. This led to some com-
plaints from British critics that the film was self-consciously designed to
sell artificial British stereotypes to audiences abroad. Alexander Walker
complained:
This is Britain class-consciously packaged for the Yanks. Clever to

open it stateside first. The downside is now it’s viewable over here
it seems overhyped and over-praised . . . To them its sociology, to us,
it’s familiar telly satire.39
Walker’s assessment of the film as possessing televisual qualities –

small-scale, sitcom-style jokes, television actors and writer – means that
it could not, for him, live up to the exaggerated expectations caused
by the publicity. The seeming necessity of the US ‘endorsement’ and
these televisual qualities may, in fact, be linked. The recognition of this
television film as a film was, in all likelihood, aided by widespread dis-
tribution in countries with a more vibrant cinemagoing culture than
that of Britain. The success of the film internationally made its discur-
sive separation from ‘television’ more robust than that of other Films
on Four. Its highly visible distribution campaign had made Four Wed-
dings feel more like a Hollywood movie than a British television film.
By the time Four Weddings reached television transmission, it was the
most financially successful British film ever made, not only taking over
£200 million at the international box office, but also selling over a
million copies on VHS in the space of one month in April 1995. Chan-
nel 4’s involvement in this film allowed them to annex some of the
resultant good publicity, reflecting the good will toward the film by
association.
The film had achieved such prestige and popularity that its premiere
on television was, almost by nature, an ‘event’. John Hill notes the sim-
ilarities between television’s role as remediator of film material and the
role of cinemagoing in its heyday:
Cinemagoing was only exceptionally an ‘event’ and, in a number of

respects, television has taken over the cinema’s former function of
catering to the ‘regular cinemagoer’. While this is true of most tele-
vision scheduling of films, however, television can also use the film
as an ‘event’, breaking up the televisual flow and offering a ‘special’
experience.40
The crucial aspect of this definition of film as television event is that it

is a ‘special’, or irregular and unusual television occurrence. As Daniel
Dayan and Elihu Katz argue in their seminal exploration of (pre-
planned) media events, ‘the most obvious difference between media
events and other formulas of broadcasting is that they are, by definition,
not routine. In fact, they are interruptions of routine; they intervene in
the normal flow of broadcasting and our lives.’41 As specialized features
in the broadcast context, television events contradict the traditional, if
often-challenged, conception of television’s textuality as comprising a
ceaseless ‘flow’. If a film premiere on television is an ‘event’, the text
is doubly separated from televisual flow: first, as an individual text, and
second, as a specialist text. Jane Feuer asked a crucial question regarding
how television-as-text should be understood:
At the level of aesthetic superstructure an even more difficult contra-

diction arises: is television a thing-in-itself (i.e. a specific signifying
practice) or is it merely a means of transmission for other processes
of signification (cinema, news, ‘live’ events)?42
Broadcast television was and is both of these things at different times

and in different contexts. The presentation of events on television –
the paratextual features of the broadcast and their attendant modes of
address – renders these ‘other processes of signification’ subject to televi-
sion’s ‘specific signifying practices’. Television events require television
to act as a remediator of other cultural forms. In this case, the ‘other’
cultural form is one that shares some of its visual regime with televi-
sion: film. How were television’s ‘signifying practices’ used to render
this particular remediation an ‘event’?
Four Weddings’s television premiere achieved event status because the
film had remained in the public cultural consciousness through frequent
intertextual reference to it on television and in the press. Immedi-
ately before the broadcast on 15 November, the Channel 4 continuity
announcer stated: ‘Film on Four extends an invitation to the televi-
sion premiere of the most successful British film of all time.’ The same
message of success had also frequently been rehearsed in television mag-
azines. The Radio Times ran an editorial piece about television funding of
feature films, illustrated by a large publicity still from Four Weddings with
the caption ‘Happy Ever After: Four Weddings and a Funeral was made
for £3 million and became Britain’s biggest ever box office success’.43
Images from the film appeared on five different pages of the magazine,
as well as on the front cover. Similar images appear throughout the TV
Times, on the cover of which the film was pictured alongside The Body-
guard (Mick Jackson, 1993) as one of two ‘blockbuster’ feature films on
television that week.44 Furthermore, both magazines, and most daily
newspapers, included it as a ‘pick of the day’ transmission. Through
the volume of text and images related to the film, television magazines
added to its pre-structured status as a noteworthy television ‘event’,
drawing attention to the film’s prestige, popularity and success.
The primary means of structuring expectation for Four Weddings’s
television premiere was through intra-channel cross-promotion. The
advertising campaign shown on Channel 4 (and ITV) for several weeks
prior to the transmission played upon the special status of weddings –
as suggested by the film’s title – to promote the ‘event’ of the televi-
sion premiere. Four Weddings’s original pressbook points out that the
film ‘concentrates entirely on the moments of drama and crisis which
weddings and funerals are’.45 These moments of ‘drama and crisis’ are
precisely the kind of ‘festive’ occasions that traditionally constitute
media events, though clearly on a grander scale than those depicted
in the film. The idea of ‘weddings’ is the essential component of the
film’s publicly circulated image, what John Ellis refers to as the ‘narrative
image’, which usually consists of the aggregate of the publicity stills that
form the major part of advertising campaigns.46 The narrative image of
Four Weddings is succinctly conjured by the film’s title: the film focuses
on the life events that are weddings and funerals, and the attendant
ceremonies, social protocols and ‘moments of drama’ associated with
them. The narrative image importantly also has a distinct social milieu,
that of the English upper middle class. The narrative image of the film,
then, centres on a group of well-dressed, attractive and vaguely quirky
people involved in such ceremonies. The most prominent publicity still
for the film (Figure 2.2), which shows the group gathered in wedding
attire around a covered coffin, neatly summarizes the simple promise
of the title. Because of the highly successful soundtrack album and sin-
gle from the film, the ‘narrative image’ must be extended to include
a ‘narrative sound’. ‘Love is all Around’ by Wet Wet Wet had become
entwined with the film, the popularity of each feeding back into the
other. The ongoing resonance of the narrative image and sound of the
film is a key strategy used in the marketing campaign for the televi-
sion premiere. All of the advertisements for the transmission contain
Figure 2.2 Interstitial advertisement for Four Weddings, broadcast before part
four of Jake’s Progress (Channel 4, 2 November 1995)
extracts from ‘Love is all Around’, and end with the main publicity
still used for the film (Figure 2.2). Here, the advertisements exploit the
ongoing memory of the film’s narrative image and sound, reminding
the audience of the film’s ubiquitous presence in mainstream culture
during the previous year. The short television holdover assisted in this,
since the film’s narrative image and sound were still fresh in the public
imagination.
The wedding event conceit of the promotional campaign drew on the
‘fore-structure’ of the television event described by Paddy Scannell. He
proposes that a formative aspect of the television event is the use of
television form to structure expectation and anticipation:
Events . . . are known in advance. They are forward looking and looked
forward to. For those who will participate in the event-that-is-to-
come (performers and audiences), the occasion, from its very begin-
ning, is invested with expectations. Thus, events have a fore-structure
and, intimately linked to this, a structure of anticipation.47
The way in which this expectation is structured parallels the way in

which life events are planned and organized, as Dayan and Katz note:
‘The major media events . . . follow the same pattern. We were invited,
perhaps even commanded to attend the wedding. We were urged for
days in advance to prepare ourselves.’48
The Four Weddings promotional campaign was structured around the
premise of invitation and preparation. The first advertisement, shown
three weeks in advance of the date of transmission, was a ‘teaser’ –
style promotion, only 15 seconds long. It consisted of a single screen
with the legend ‘You have a date’ accompanied on the soundtrack
by the opening bars of ‘Love is All Around’ and a male voice artic-
ulating the same statement. The legend appears in pink writing, and
in a font which suggests a wedding invitation. This intertitle is fol-
lowed by a short scene from the end of the film, at Charles’s (Hugh
Grant) wedding. The use of this particular clip distils most of the key
narrative and thematic promises of the film – its wedding narrative,
the location-specific mise-en-scène and, most importantly, its famous
star in his defining role. The teaser promotion thus makes use of the
fore-structure of the invitation, with a brief idea of the film’s content.
The invitation to the wedding is simultaneously an invitation to the
transmission.
Creating an event of the film premiere of Four Weddings helped attract
attention to Channel 4, utilizing the good will towards the film in order
to gain institutional prestige. While the success of the film’s theatrical
distribution was largely out of Channel 4’s hands, it was nevertheless an

important means by which to sell the television premiere to audiences
and advertisers. The high likelihood of large audiences for their popu-
lar hit provided serious bargaining power with advertisers. In the weeks
prior to the transmission, the channel was negotiating costs of a fixed
£133,000 for a 30-second slot, or £5500 per rating. These costs were high
by contemporary UK television standards, and huge for Channel 4. The
financial incentive alone was enough to encourage the heavy market-
ing of this transmission. The premiere of this particular film could also
draw attention to the ongoing Film on Four season, which included such
minor hits as Louis Malle’s Damage (UK/France, 1992) and Mike Leigh’s
Cannes triumph, Naked (UK, 1993). By attracting an audience to one of
the films in the season, the slot as a whole could benefit through the
publicity. The fact that the film was part of this season was mentioned
repeatedly during the promotional campaign for the transmission, and
the film was broadcast in the traditional slot and using the Film on Four
ident.
Making an event of Film on Four transmissions, particularly that of
Four Weddings and a Funeral, was a strategy that reflected the growing
necessity for Channel 4 to commercialize and compete in a broadcast-
ing environment undergoing rapid change. Market logic dictated that
films shown during this slot – on which a relatively large proportion of
the channel’s funds were spent – needed to work harder for the channel,
both commercially and in terms of institutional reputation and prestige.
The scale and structure of the marketing campaign for the premiere of
Channel 4’s ‘wonderfilm’ demonstrates a heightened response to this
kind of commercial pressure. Channel 4 had adopted film as an instru-
ment of institutional prestige from its inception in 1982. The use of
blatantly commercial strategies to market and sell the films, both for dis-
tribution and for their television outings, marks a shift in direction for
Channel 4’s feature dramas further still from the socially valuable televi-
sion ‘plays’ that were their progenitors and towards the heightened risks
and rewards of the commercial film industry.
Conclusion
This chapter has discussed the ways in which PSB film texts are inter-
woven into the television ‘supertext’, through paratextual positioning
and extra-textual promotion. It has explored some of the consequences
of broadcasting film on television during a period when terrestrial tele-
vision in Britain was at its peak popularity, and yet was in the gradual
process of change to accommodate newcomers to broadcasting in the
form of a burgeoning independent sector and slowly-but-surely growing

satellite and cable competition.
The case studies of Films 4 Today and of Blue demonstrate what a (pub-
lic service) broadcaster could offer British cinema in this context in place
of a theatrical distribution: the reproduction of the film, in the case of
Blue in as near an approximation as possible, and the exhibition of films
to a wider audience than they might otherwise reach. In remediating
these films, television becomes a medium of compensation for the main-
stream film industry, allowing the films a space to be seen and affording
audiences a chance to see them. In the case of the Films 4 Today, this was
a kind of ex post facto recognition of the quality and value of the 1970s
television dramas. In the case of Blue, this represented the dying throes
of Channel 4’s dwindling relationship with alternative cinema cultures.
By contrast, the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral shows Chan-
nel 4 engaging in explicit commercial strategies, as well as exploiting
television’s ‘signifying practices’ and the fore-structure of television
‘events’ to make the most of a clear commercial opportunity. Whereas,
in the past, single drama transmissions might have occurred as national
events for the purpose of stimulating public debate, Four Weddings and
a Funeral’s premiere was a television event explicitly designed to gather
large audiences for commercial purposes.
To suggest that television transmissions of films are events, presented
and packaged in such a way as to stand out from the usual flow of tele-
vision, is not only a challenge to the way in which the medium is read.
As Helen Wheatley argues, it may also undermine the fundamental prin-
ciples of PSB. In relation to BBC flagship programme The Blue Planet, she
notes that ‘to argue that [it] stands out of the regular broadcast flow,
therefore is to argue that the rest of television is boring, mundane, cheap
and of low quality’. 49 Using television’s paratextual modes of address to
enact rhetorical divergence between the ‘film’ broadcast and the ‘rest’
of television makes a similar suggestion, implicitly saying that there is
something culturally more valid and valuable about a film than about
the television that remediates it. For television broadcasters whose cul-
tural legitimacy and reputation are based on the idea that television’s
cultural role is important and valuable, this is a dangerous implication
to make. The culturally diminished status of television in relation to cin-
ema was to become clearer as the PSBs made further forays into the film
industry, not only as patrons of filmmakers and sources of finance, but
as key players in the commercialized British film culture of the turn of
the 21st century.
3
Commercialism and Quality:
Television Institutions and the
British Film Industry, 1998–2002
During the 1990s, the relationship between cinema and state in Britain
underwent vast changes. Successive governments led by John Major and
Tony Blair paid greater attention to the film culture as part of a new focus
on ‘creative industries’. New policies in support of the film industry were
initiated, including tax breaks for British cinema, and public funding
for film production raised through the proceeds of the National Lottery,
initiated in 1994 by the Major government as a means to raise non-tax
public finance for ‘good causes’. Initially Lottery funds were distributed
to individual film projects via national Arts Councils, and, after 1998,
invested in three ‘consortia’, which were to operate like mini-studios
designed to encourage a competitive domestic industry.1 In 2000, a new
quasi-non-governmental body was created to oversee all aspects of the
public intervention into film culture. The Film Council (later, the UK
Film Council) was responsible for the dispersal of millions of pounds’
worth of funds for feature film development, production and distribu-
tion. The focus shifted from subsidy to investment, and the expectation
was that the films produced by the British industry should aim for pop-
ular mainstream appeal and commercial success. Through these various
funding mechanisms, the intention was to move British cinema from
an undercapitalized artisanal business to a fully functioning indigenous
‘creative industry’.
A new confidence boom in the British film industry had begun. The
clearest manifestation of this for the PSBs was Channel 4’s decision
to consolidate its filmmaking operations in one single, semi-vertically
integrated mini-studio, FilmFour Ltd. Aligned with a more aggressively
commercialistic Channel 4 under Chief Executive Michael Jackson,
FilmFour began to follow a strategy of producing larger-budget films
with an intended international reach. In 2000, after a number of notable
83
successes including Mrs Brown (John Madden, 1997) and Billy Elliot
(Lee Hall, 1999), BBC Films announced that they would be support-
ing middle-budget features. Under David Thompson, the filmmaking
arm of the corporation pursued a policy of co-production or distribu-
tion deals, often with Hollywood studios or their subsidiary ‘indies’
(such as Miramax), to achieve this aim. Both PSBs, then, were follow-
ing the prevailing logic of the industry – public investments are best
placed in backing films designed for the popular mainstream. Evening
Standard journalist and critic Alexander Walker concluded his compre-
hensive (and tendentious) survey of the industry in the 1980s and 1990s
with this assessment of the situation at the turn of the 21st century:
Essentially the British film industry was in the same state that it
had always been – or at least for the last forty years. The switchback
of . . . success and that of abysmal failure. The exhilaration of boom,
then the all too common reality of bust.2
In 2000, Walker’s pessimism was not shared by many in the indus-

try, which was experiencing an unprecedented expansion in terms of
finance and aspiration. However, the commercial ambitions of most
of the films backed by FilmFour, BBC Films and the UK Film Council
went unfulfilled. After only a four-year period as a separate subsidiary, in
September 2002 FilmFour was scaled back: its distribution and sales arms
closed, and its production arm was re-integrated into Channel 4’s Drama
department. The closure of FilmFour Ltd signalled that the confidence
boom of the early 2000s had, as Walker predicted, bust.
This story of ambition and failure, of boom and bust, will be explored
in this chapter, with particular reference to some of the ways in which
the PSB film operations, particularly FilmFour, attempted to distance
themselves from television. By spending more, and aiming at an inter-
national commercial market, the PSBs (and the film industry as a
whole) aimed for their films to gain recognition as films, defined via
the supposed international standard – Hollywood mainstream cinema.
By moving into film production so defined, the PSBs film operations
moved away from their origins in television drama. This was evident
in institutional reorganizations underway in the mid- to late 1990s.
The separation of FilmFour from Channel 4, and BBC Films from the
rest of the BBC Drama department, can be read as a disavowal of tele-
vision. In the new corporate structures of both institutions, ‘film’ is
independent of and distinct from ‘television’. The chapter discusses the
position of PSBs within the wider context of the British film industry,
Television Institutions and the British Film Industry 85
particularly in relation to its growing commercial and internationalist

ambitions. The second part considers how the commercial redirection of
the industry manifested itself critically; how the evaluation of publicly
funded popular cinema and the definition of ‘quality’ may have altered.
Drawing on these ideas, the third part examines two specific examples
of FilmFour film productions on which commercial expectations were
placed, which were later dashed. The chapter assesses the commercial
orientation of the industry at the turn of the 21st century, taking into
account an important feature which was consistently sidelined in dis-
cussions of the film industry: the fact of industrial and institutional
convergence with television. The way in which filmmaking arms were
arranged, and their products were distributed, promoted and packaged
in the manner afforded mainstream cinema, allowed for that rhetorical
divergence from ‘television’ to be maintained, though in ways that are
complex and nuanced.
‘More than a Television Channel’: Institutional

restructuring and commercialism
Both the BBC and Channel 4 underwent large-scale changes in the

1990s: changes to corporate and management structure, changes to cre-
ative and editorial policies, changes to strategy and, crucially, changes
to ethos and character. The distinct film departments FilmFour and BBC
Films formed part of complex organisms that were, in the 1990s and
early 2000s, rapidly evolving to cope with vast technological as well
as social and cultural shifts that would fundamentally alter the mean-
ing and value of broadcasting in Britain. Here I chart some of the key
changes in British broadcasting in the 1990s and early 2000s, and situate
the film arms of the broadcasters within them.
For Channel 4, many of these changes are directly related to the
1990 Broadcasting Act, in particular to alterations to the broadcaster’s
financial arrangements. We have already seen how the end of the ‘guar-
anteed income’ funding formula in 1993 put Channel 4 under pressure
to deliver audiences to advertisers in a way that it had never previously
been expected to, and meant that the channel was obliged to pursue
more ruggedly commercialistic strategies in scheduling and program-
ming. However, a hangover of the 1980s funding formula remained,
in which Channel 4 was required to pay a stipend to the ITV compa-
nies from excess profits above a certain threshold. Though designed to
prevent Channel 4 from becoming too nakedly populist, many (particu-
larly Chief Executive Michael Grade) saw this compromise as iniquitous
and damaging. In 1997 Chris Smith, the Secretary of State in the newly
created Department of Culture, Media and Sport, ended this funding
formula, freeing up significant funds to be spent within the corpora-
tion. The 1996 Broadcasting Act was also instrumental in the changes to
Channel 4 as an institution. It broadened the Channel 4 Corporation’s
powers both to extend Channel 4 broadcasting on newly established
digital broadcasting platforms and, crucially, to establish new sub-
sidiaries and to invest in existing companies. Taken together, these two
events sowed the seeds of the Channel 4 Corporation’s expansion in the
succeeding years.
In July 1997, Michael Jackson became the new Chief Executive of
Channel 4. With more capital to invest in diverse outlets, and a leg-
islated right to do so, Jackson aimed to transform Channel 4 from a
publisher-broadcaster to a cross-media corporation, expanding into dig-
ital and other subsidiary commercial ventures. FilmFour Ltd was, then,
only one part of a major corporate expansion, one that sought, as the
subtitle of the 2000 Annual Report put it, to make Channel 4 ‘more than
a television channel’. In February 2001 4Ventures was established, an
umbrella subsidiary of the Channel 4 Corporation responsible for com-
mercial projects, such as the FilmFour channel, digital channel E4, the
corporation’s sales arm Channel 4 international, and Channel 4 interac-
tive. The corporate structure of Channel 4 was becoming more complex,
and the creation of various auxiliary outposts of the C4 Corporation
was, as the 2000 Annual Report states, ‘the next stage of Channel 4’s
strategy to transform from a single television channel into a network of
media business on a range of platforms’.3 ‘Television’, in its traditional
form, was being relegated in favour of other media: digital broadcasting,
new media and film.
The BBC was also preparing in the late 1990s for a digital future, after
having spent much of the decade searching for its soul among unpopu-
lar and centrally driven changes in managerial structure brought about
by Director General John Birt. Taking seriously the challenge from the
1990 Broadcasting Act that a proportion (at least 25 per cent) of pro-
grammes should be sourced from independent production companies,
Birt installed the detested ‘Producer Choice’ model of commissioning
in 1993, wherein programme commissioners were free to outsource
production if the BBC’s in-house units were priced uncompetitively or
run inefficiently. The Channel 4 model of publisher-broadcaster, where
programmes were commissioned rather than produced, proved to be
a blueprint for restructuring the BBC, concentrating control over pro-
gramming in fewer hands than had previously been the case, though
also ironically making the decision-making process more bureaucratic

and time-consuming. The Birtist restructuring weakened the BBC’s pro-
duction base, and installed a cost-conscious and risk-averse managerial
culture at the top of the corporation that undermined the public ser-
vice values meant to be at the heart of the broadcaster. Reshaping the
institution to make it more market-oriented was a means of ‘selling’ the
broadcaster to an unsympathetic Conservative government, driven by
free market principles, which had so far stopped short of privatization.
‘Modernizing’ the BBC was seen as a prerequisite for a successful charter
renewal, which was, of course, subject to the favour of the government.
As well as achieving a new charter in April 1996, Birt negotiated addi-
tional funds to aid the corporation’s transition into the world of digital
broadcasting. However, the price paid was confidence: BBC staff came
through the Birt years feeling undermined and lacking the self-assurance
the institution had once instilled in its workers.4
Greg Dyke replaced Birt as Director General in 2000, and made clear
from the outset that he would reverse some of the changes of the
1990s to stem the deleterious effects they had had on creativity and
confidence at the BBC. He streamlined the management structure, and
reduced the layers of editorial control over programmes. He also made
decisive moves to increase the corporation’s – and particularly BBC
One’s – competitiveness. His success at doing so, with a tiresome sense
of inevitability, led to accusations of ‘dumbing down’, of mortgaging
programme quality for bald populism. As Georgina Born recorded:
Ratings success came with serious political dangers. Howls of rage

issued from rival broadcasters. Columnists berated Dyke for selling
out on public service broadcasting and making life difficult for com-
mercial competitors. The paradox at the heart of the BBC burst once
again on to the centre of Britain’s political stage: success was OK, but
not too much.5
Public spending on cultural forms was increasingly subject to market

logic (or market rhetoric), and popularity and cultural and politi-
cal legitimacy danced an uneasy tango. Public service broadcasters, it
seemed, suffered from a ‘failure requirement’: if they did their job too
successfully – if programmes conceived of as addressing citizens rather
than consumers proved excessively popular – then arguments defending
the need for public intervention were increasingly subject to question.
This paradox, as we shall see, would also apply when public funding
became a more prominent feature of British film production.
The move in a commercialistic direction in the 1990s was a result

of mounting pressure on PSBs to modernize and become competitive,
much of which resulted from provisions in the 1990 Broadcasting Act.
Fearing the future security of licence fee income, BBC management
began to pursue a more self-sufficient strategy to supplement their
income, including BBC World, an international, advertising funded ser-
vice, and the exploitation of corporate assets in BBC Worldwide, the
rebranded commercial arm from which 15–20 per cent of the broad-
caster’s income was intended to derive. Such investments could exploit
the strong brand identity of the BBC as well as its huge library of pro-
grammes. These activities were risky, not only because of the vagaries of
financial investment, but also because of the potential brand damage –
a loss of trust in the broadcaster – and, of course, the political risk of
undermining the public service ethos that underpinned the corpora-
tion. As Andrew Crissell put it, ‘if the strategy succeeds too well, the
commercial tail will soon start to wag the public service dog’.6 Indeed,
it’s arguable that this was precisely what had happened at Channel 4.
The 1990 Broadcasting Act, as we know, had obliged the Channel to
sell its own advertising airtime, and thus to be more competitive and
commercially robust. Niche markets, in particular younger viewers (aged
16–35) and the wealthy ABC1 social demographic were targeted. Both
of these groups are valuable to advertisers, divesting the Channel of the
need to achieve larger audiences. Young people had historically been
underserved by public service broadcasters and arguably formed one of
the ‘minorities’ that Channel 4 should look to serve.7 The ABC1 demo-
graphic were targeted with high-quality current affairs, drama and doc-
umentary programmes of the kind Channel 4 prided itself on – indeed,
as we have seen, Film on Four was aimed at this market section. Actively
seeking particular commercially expedient audiences is a step away from
Channel 4’s public service ethos of serving a range of minority audi-
ences, and towards a more commercially minded model of provision.
In this context, in 1998, FilmFour Ltd was created. Film was separated
from the Drama department, where it had once been dominant but
integrated, and moved to an independent unit of its own. Following a
‘mini-studio’ model, FilmFour Ltd integrated film production, sales and
distribution arms into a separate subsidiary of Channel 4. FilmFour was
separated from its parent corporation geographically – by moving from
offices in Horseferry Road to Charlotte Street – and, more importantly,
institutionally. Film was purposely and forcefully distinguished from
television. The selection of Paul Webster as the head of FilmFour sym-
bolized the severing of ties to television. A former Head of Production
at American independent Miramax, Webster’s realm of experience was

within the film industry only, in contrast to his predecessors, Davids
Rose and Aukin, who both had theatrical and/or televisual career his-
tories. FilmFour was a key part of the new Channel 4: it was a signal
of confidence, ambition and, crucially, the corporation’s claim to be
‘more than just a television channel’. It would carry the increasingly
important brand values of Channel 4 – being cutting-edge, innovative,
iconoclastic and cool – in a wider international forum. FilmFour was
still financially dependent on Channel 4, but confidently distanced itself
from the broadcaster, and more abstractly from ‘television’.
BBC Films operated, after a Birtist restructuring of the drama group
into Series, Serials, Singles and Films, as a separate unit, headed by
David Thompson. It continued under Dyke, who acknowledged that the
unit was modelled after FilmFour; indeed, it too had a separate office in
central London until 2007. This demonstrates again the rhetorical and
institutional separation of PSB filmmaking operations from their televi-
sion origins. As with FilmFour, it is a statement of ambition, a desire for
their works to be seen outside the context of television drama and in
a wider, international context of film. BBC Films did not take the same
financial risks as FilmFour, but the commissioning strategies pursued
by the units had parallels in that fewer films were supported at higher
budget levels. FilmFour’s stated ambition, according to Michael Jackson,
was to ‘kill the middle’, in other words, only to fund experimental cin-
ema on tiny budgets or mainstream cinema on robust ones.8 BBC Films
took a different route, pursuing the ‘middle’ that was now, seemingly,
left vacant. Thompson announced in 1998 that BBC Films was moving
‘upscale’, seeking co-production agreements for middle-budget main-
stream cinema. Thompson invoked the televisual origins of BBC film
to justify the corporation’s involvement in the industry:
What we do carries on from the original Play for Today tradition –

but today if you want to work with the best of British talent, you
have to be involved in the film industry. The prime imperative of
the BBC has never been to make a profit, but we have a remit to
support challenging and innovative work, authored pieces by writ-
ers and directors. Interestingly, there isn’t a contradiction here – in
the British film industry it’s the risk taking productions that usually
work best.9
Thompson’s language of ‘remit’, and supporting ‘challenging and inno-

vative work’, echoes BBC Films’ PSB status while, simultaneously, he
appears to accept the hierarchy of film over television where ‘talent’ is

concerned. This echoes David Hare’s ardent desire to work with film in
1978. Twenty years later, it appears, the talent had won out, and were
supported to work in film. The kind of film being supported in the late
1990s, though, was different to the filmed plays of the 1970s: bigger in
scale, budget and ambition; lower in politically radical, challenging or
progressive content and in address to a specifically ‘British’ audience.
Both broadcasters’ film operations were institutionally and rhetorically
if not financially separate from their television origins. This was impor-
tant as, in the late 1990s/early 2000s, ideas as fundamental as what
defined ‘film’ in Britain were rapidly changing.
Bigger than what? Television and the British film industry
In his Sight and Sound post-mortem of the company, Geoffrey Macnab

suggested that ‘FilmFour was very much an invention of its era’.10 So far,
I have discussed changes in the television industry that resulted in
such an invention, but the film industry was also at this time being
reinvented through new state-led initiatives centred on the ‘creative
industries’. British film production benefitted from a greater than ever
before public intervention in film funding, though increasingly with
the expectation that such investment would see commercial return.
FilmFour’s expansion, from a small unit within a broadcaster, to a
£30-million-a-year semi-integrated studio, reflected a general optimism:
‘When FilmFour Ltd came into being, it was riding the crest of a
wave of confidence about what a British film company could achieve,’
journalist Andrew Pulver noted.11 The self-confidence and ambition of
the company are demonstrated by Head Paul Webster’s claim in the
1999 Channel 4 Annual Report that ‘FilmFour Ltd aims to be the UK’s
pre-eminent film company, with a mission to supply a range of commer-
cially and creatively successful films to UK and international cinema-
going audiences’.12 As we have seen, this was admired and emulated in
the early 2000s by BBC Films, though more cautiously in approach.
This confidence in the abilities of a British film company had histori-
cal echoes, from J. Arthur Rank’s attempt to crack the American market
with popular British cinema in the 1940s, to the high-stakes gambles
made by the Goldcrest Company, which invested large sums in intended
blockbusters that failed to see a return in the 1980s.13 Three main sim-
ilarities between the story of FilmFour and its historical precedents
present themselves: financial overextension, particularly by making
higher-budget films; the making of films for explicitly commercial,
rather than (or as well as) for social or cultural, reasons; and attempt-
ing to market films on the international (particularly the American)
market. (A fourth similarity may be the signal failure of the compa-
nies to produce the hit film for which this strategy was designed.) The
three strands of the strategy intertwine, and there is a seemingly logical
argument which runs something like this: British films cannot be sus-
tained in their domestic market, since there is no particular preference
for British cinema among British cinemagoers; thus, British films must
find a place in the international marketplace; to do so, the films must
follow a ‘commercial’ mainstream (read: ‘Hollywood’) formula; in order
to compete with Hollywood, they must have higher budgets. This logic
was behind the commercial redirection of public funding bodies like the
Lottery-funded consortia or the UK Film Council, and for the industry
as a whole. To justify the spending of public funds on them, British films
apparently need a presence within mainstream film culture. The lack of
a wide distribution for films on which public money had been spent was
one of the major grievances for opponents of public intervention.
In 1998, the Department for Media, Culture and Sport’s Film Policy
Review Group published A Bigger Picture, which focused on the film
industry’s global nature and the lack of capitalization in the British
industry. Its main aim was to build a ‘sustainable’ British film indus-
try, and, in an attempt to address British film producers’ main bête
noire, the foreign-dominated distribution sector, the paper proposed a
‘distribution-led’ approach. The main feature of this paper, in typical
New Labour style, was the suggestion of partnership between the pub-
lic and private sectors in film investment. In practice, this meant a new
emphasis on popular, mainstream cinema, an idea not particularly well
received in all corners of the industry, as Geoffrey Macnab reported in
October 1998:
There was disquiet on the emphasis on commercially focused films,

and how exactly such films were to be defined: ‘You wouldn’t nec-
essarily have chosen Trainspotting and The Full Monty as commercial
projects,’ [Andrea] Calderwood is quick to point out.14
Of course, a formula for foolproof commercial success has scarcely been

achieved even by Hollywood behemoths, and it is a particularly pre-
carious enterprise in Britain, where surprise commercial success for
relatively small films had become a pattern in the 1990s. Indeed, the title
of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport paper begs the question
‘bigger than what?’, and I want to suggest that the answer, implicitly,
is television, and the public service purposes that broadcasters had

brought to British cinema. In proposing a ‘distribution-led’ approach
to industrial support, the paper negates television in two ways: first, and
most obviously, as a distribution platform for cinema in itself. Second,
in suggesting that films with a better chance of domestic distribution
be privileged, the logic described above is implicitly followed: that the
films should be made to compete on the international commercial mar-
ket. In previous years, PSBs had prioritized their public service remit
in their filmmaking; a lack of funds and, perhaps, a lack of commer-
cial will precluded them from making the ‘bigger picture’ kind of films
that the DCMS paper deemed necessary for a buoyant British industry.
The perceived result of this was that the British film industry was in
thrall to television commissioners whose real interest lay in the kind of
socially relevant but hopelessly parochial work that could not achieve
the large-scale (international) popularity needed for commercial success.
Television was holding the film industry back. Television was the smaller
frame to which ‘A Bigger Picture’ was an answer.
The launch of the Film Council on 2 May 2000 further consolidated
the commercial direction of the publicly subsidized industry, and was
more overtly anti-television than the 1998 paper had been. Film Council
Chief executive John Woodward stated unequivocally in his presenta-
tion at the launch: ‘We are interested in films that really can play in
cinemas on a Friday night, and we will not be backing films whose nat-
ural home is television.’15 Woodward made explicit what had previously
not been spoken directly: that the terms of definition for British ‘film’
were changing and, crucially, diverging from association with television.
Measures taken in the early 2000s to change the way in which the state
and the industry related to one another had a somewhat coherent aim,
which was to ensure that British films looked like, were marketed as, and
had the size, the scope and the scale of films. The terms of definition for
‘film’ were shifting to a model in which Hollywood was the standard to
attain.
Hollywood and Europuddings: International co-production
The main consequence of this redefinition of ‘film’ for the PSBs was a
perception (prevalent throughout the industry) that budgets needed to
increase in order for films to compete with Hollywood. Both FilmFour
and BBC Films were granted larger pots of funding, and, as trade jour-
nal Broadcast reported in 2002, ‘recently there has been a distinct push
for bigger budgets’.16 The perception persisted that for British film to
have an international profile (an apparent prerequisite for domestic

success), British film companies needed to spend larger amounts of
money on their films. The most vocal critic of the Film Council and
industry’s commercial direction was Alexander Walker. He argued that
‘the truth, that the size of a film’s budget is totally unrelated to the
size of its potential box office is never admitted’, and that past his-
tory including ‘Goldcrest’s and Lew Grade’s hubristic efforts to “crack
Hollywood” with blockbusters’ demonstrated the wrongheadedness of
this approach’.17 That renewed attempts were being made by the PSBs
to ‘crack Hollywood’ is evidenced by their presence in Los Angeles –
FilmFour set up a sales office there in October 2000, BBC Films in
November 2001. Both PSBs, following the prevailing logic of the indus-
try, were attempting, at some level, to compete commercially with
American films. Just months before the closure of FilmFour, in May
2002, Paul Webster was still trying to make the case for this approach:
‘we’re trying to span the spectrum . . . making films which appeal to C4
and at the same time to the international marketplace’.18 This statement
does not recognize that traditionally ‘films which appeal to Chan-
nel 4’ were those same films that had been deemed too ‘small’ for the
international marketplace.
British cinema has historically fared badly on the international mar-
ket; as Sarah Street argues: ‘in Britain, film exports have been associated
with profligacy, big budgets, empty “internationalism” and a misguided
pursuit of Hollywood-style reputation and profits’.19 Given the long-
term difficulties of entering the international film market, it is easy to
question the wisdom of successive waves of attempts to export British
cinema, particularly to America. However, J. Arthur Rank, the pre-
eminent figure in British film for much of the post-World War II period,
felt compelled to try, as Geoffrey Macnab explains:
For Rank . . . competing in the world market in general, and in

America in particular, was the essential prerequisite to competing in
the home market. To have a successful national industry in a rela-
tively small country like Britain, Rank estimated, it was necessary to
make international films.20
Rank’s estimation has echoed through the history of British film, and
can explain the commercial objectives of FilmFour, BBC Films and
the rest of the British industry at this time. How, then, did the PSB
companies become involved in ‘international’ films? One of the most
important strategies used by both PSBs was to co-produce films with
international film companies, usually based either in Europe or in the

United States. Of the 112 feature films in which FilmFour or BBC Films
were involved in the 1998–2002 period, 86 were co-produced with for-
eign companies. Partner companies in the PSB films varied, but tended
to be either European film and television companies (58 out of the
112 films) or Hollywood studios or their ‘independent’ subsidiaries like
Miramax (28 films), in addition to British public sources of finance
(Arts/Film Council, regional film finance initiatives, British Screen or
the BFI).
To suggest that international co-production in itself is a sig-
nal of mainstream commercial ambition is to oversimplify. Often
co-production deals, particularly with European companies, involved
films destined for the international arthouse market. Examples of such
niche targeting include Invincible (Werner Herzog, 2001), Dancer in
the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000), and Bread and Roses (Ken Loach,
2000). All three films, however, do evidence some of that American-
biased ‘internationalism’: the dialogue in Invincible is spoken in English
although the film is set in Berlin; the latter two examples are both
set in America, although their narratives explore the lives of immi-
grants. Frequent European co-producers European included Canal +
(France), Road Movies Filmproduktion Gmbh (Germany) and PolyGram
Filmed Entertainment (formerly the Netherlands). FilmFour and BBC
Films were sometimes minority partners in European films primarily tar-
geted at specific national audiences, such as Laurent Cantet’s Ressources
Humaines (1999), supported by BBC Films, or Jan Svankmejer’s Little Otik
(2000), supported by FilmFour. European co-producers similarly pro-
vided funds for nominally ‘British’ cinema: for example, Very Annie-Mary
(Sara Sugarman, 2000), supported by Canal +, is set in Wales, with a
Welsh director and an Australian star (Rachel Griffiths); Hotel Splendide
(Terence Gross, 2000), supported by Ateliers du Cinema, Canal + and
the European production fund, is set in an English resort, with another
Australian (Toni Collette) in the lead role.
‘European’ films in which the PSBs invested frequently had
English dialogue, with English-speaking stars, often well-known
from Hollywood movies. Examples here include Rachel Weisz and
Ralph Fiennes in Sunshine (Istvan Szabo, UK/Germany/Austria, 1999),
Joaquin Phoenix and Ed Harris in Buffalo Soldiers (Gregor Jordan,
UK/US/Germany, 2001), and Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes in It’s
All About Love (Thomas Vinterburg, Denmark/UK/Germany/Italy/Japan,
2002). Concessions like these to the international marketplace
demonstrate the complexity of transnational film funding. Such films
could fit under the description ‘Europudding’, a term coined in the late

1980s (originally for a television series called Eurocops [ZDF, 1987–1993])
to describe internationally co-funded film and television productions
which, because of their multiple sources of finance and conflicting
international interests, became unwieldy and, for many, unwatchable.
A good example of such a film from the FilmFour stable is Simon Magus
(1999): a co-production between Britain, France, Germany and Italy,
it is set in 19th-century Poland, but with dialogue in English, and
British-Australian, Irish and Dutch stars (Noah Taylor, Stewart Townsend
and Rutger Hauer). Generically, it is a mix of historical drama, com-
edy and fantasy, and thematically it encompasses a broad palette of
anti-Semitism, social exclusion, mental illness, poetry and early capital-
ism. FilmFour Chief Executive Paul Webster referred to its director as ‘a
vastly inventive, complete one-off, has an obscure-ish view of the world
but is a natural image maker’, an auteurist description that masks the
competing national interests at work in the film.21
One of FilmFour Ltd’s perceived strengths was the negotiating ability
of its management to form international partnerships. Two key deals
were struck: one with German company Senator Film Produktion, the
other with Warner Brothers. The Senator deal was sealed in January
2000. The companies agreed to co-produce and jointly acquire dis-
tribution rights to a slate of 14 features over two years. Eleven fea-
tures resulted from this deal, a sixth of the total films produced by
FilmFour Ltd in the 1998–2002 period. The agreement was made with
the intention of producing commercial mainstream films with budget
levels, source material, directors and stars to match. Similar expecta-
tions were placed on FilmFour’s American co-productions. It signed
a co-production deal with Warner Bros in May 2000, and had links
through Webster to Miramax, the Disney-owned ‘indie’ which success-
fully distributed a number of ‘arthouse’ hits in North America in the
1990s and early 2000s. This could explain the large number of films
(24 out of 66) co-financed by American companies. FilmFour’s work
with American partners varies from adding funds to independent films
with star directors, like David Lynch’s The Straight Story (France/UK/US,
1999), or Takeshi Kitano’s Brother (US/UK/Japan, 1999), to achieving
deals which attracted American finance to British films, like Sexy Beast
(Jonathan Glazer, UK/US/Spain, 2000). More importantly, though, links
to US studios offered a greater opportunity for British films to achieve
that all-important North American distribution.
For the PSBs competing in a difficult marketplace, taking a more glob-
alized approach to raising film finance was a way of spreading risk, and
raising the budget levels of films was perceived to improve their chances
internationally. The perceived result of this was that the films produced
were less tailored to a British audience; they were general, homogenous
and dealt with universal rather than specific (national) themes.22 How-
ever, the films themselves are predominantly set in Britain, star British
people (with British accents – a sometimes overlooked but important
factor in determining ‘Britishness’); the personnel of the films tend
to be British, or the stories drawn from British sources. Indeed, such
‘Britishness’ was crucial for films to qualify for tax relief; a require-
ment was imposed that productions be ‘culturally British’ according to a
system of points given on the basis of, among other things, the nation-
ality of the personnel involved, the source materials, and the locations
of production and postproduction.23 With three prominent exceptions
(Death to Smoochy [Danny DeVito, 2001], Buffalo Soldiers [Gregor Jordan,
2000], It’s All About Love [Thomas Vinterberg, 2001]), FilmFour produc-
tions had at least one (and usually more) British star. A majority of
FilmFour Ltd’s (63 per cent) and BBC Films’s (69 per cent) films were
set in Britain. In other words, the commercial ambitions of the PSBs did
not necessarily preclude them from making ‘British’ films. To pursue
solely commercial aims, the PSBs would have had to abandon ‘British’
films altogether, because the overwhelming evidence suggests that there
was little domestic or international demand for them. The PSBs had
to balance the competing demands of commercial enterprise and cul-
tural relevance by producing films about Britain that had some proven
marketability.
A ‘Cultural Burden’? Evaluating publicly subsidized film
I have described so far the industrial redefinition of British film to fit a

commercial, international standard, and, crucially, to move away from
television’s smallness and lack of ‘cinematic’ ambition. I now want to
consider the critical and evaluative consequences of this redefinition.
To define British ‘film’ as a mainstream commodity was, in effect, to
orient the judgement of a film’s quality in line with a pre-established
‘international’ discourse about what made ‘good’ cinema. In practice,
this meant using a value-system based upon the products of Hollywood,
the most successful international commercial film industry. This was
by no means a new phenomenon. American cinema had set the inter-
national standard for popular cinema since the 1920s by virtue of its
industrial dominance. Sarah Street notes:
arguments based on an uncritical acceptance of Hollywood’s superi-

ority, invariably conceal the economic underpinnings of that success,
resulting in a discourse that associated Hollywood with ‘universal’
standards, technical and thematic modernity. This observation is cru-
cial because it reveals the extent to which claims that foreign films
were ‘inferior’ were inextricably related to Hollywood’s defence of its
own hegemonic position.24
The same arguments were also used to keep other nations’ film products
from American cinemas. Geoffrey Macnab noted that American ‘show-
men’ (theatre proprietors) in the 1940s claimed that the exclusion of
foreign product from their ‘fair and deregulated film market’ was an
‘indication of the superiority of US movies’.25 Discourses of quality and
industrial practice thus work in a feedback loop, to the detriment of
kinds of cinema outside that hegemonic mainstream.
The values that make American cinema ‘superior’ to other national
cinemas are inchoate, ill-defined and perhaps even non-specific. As
Michael Walsh noted of silent-era American cinema:
The U.S. film industry typically explained the international success

of its films by seeing them simply as being of better quality. Quality
described a unitary standard of aesthetic worth and is important for
what it excluded as much as for what it included.26
To aim for Hollywood-style commercial cinema is to produce films

which fit an aesthetic standard that appears mysteriously only to apply
to American cinema. The ‘quality’ of American cinema could only be
defined in opposition to the deficiencies of other cinemas. A good exam-
ple of the way this worked in practice is a list of the perceived ‘faults’
of British cinema given to J. Arthur Rank by American colleagues during
his attempted incursion on the American market in the 1940s. British
films were criticized for the following reasons:
• The action was too slow.

• There was too much dialogue.
• The actors talked too fast and their accents and slang words were
difficult to understand.
• The actresses looked dowdy and the actors seemed effeminate.
• The physical quality of the films often looked inferior to American
productions.27
These five objections can clearly be related to certain truisms which

persist about British cinema: that it is obsessed with ‘heritage’ and adap-
tation (hence, slowness and too much dialogue); that it is insular (thus,
accents and slang are difficult to understand); that it lacks an adequate
star system, or that British film stars are quick to move to Hollywood
(hence, the ‘dowdy’ or ‘effeminate’ acting talent); and that it is slavishly
tied to a realist aesthetic, or, more recently, that it ‘looks like television’
(inferior physical quality).
When Julian Petley investigated the critical scrutiny of British publicly
subsidized films, he found that
critical discourse relates not only to the content of certain films, but
also to the manner of their funding. What it amounts to, in short, is
an argument that films which cannot survive unaided in the market-
place – in other words, films which depart from what is taken to be
the basic Hollywood narrative model – do not deserve to exist and
are most certainly not worthy of public subsidy.28
Petley outlines how some critics reported (exaggeratedly and with great
relish) about ‘lottery largesse’ on certain ‘uncommercial’ film projects.
However, he states, the economics on which these analyses are based
are flawed by a misunderstanding of the film industry. The piece of jour-
nalism that, for Petley, exemplifies this trend in writing about publicly
subsidized films is Jacques Peretti’s Guardian article ‘Shame of a Nation’.
Peretti argued:
The Americans, have a fantastically fascistic rigour when it comes to

the requirements of a formula movie. British directors, ably assisted
by a huge slush-fund of lottery cash, feel free to splash indulgently
about in any subject matter they choose, unburdened by constraints
like story, or box-office success.29
Peretti conveniently ignores a number of facts: that this ‘fascistic rigour’

produces many, many films of extremely poor quality; that there is a
massive disparity in the costs involved in making a British film and in
making a Hollywood one (a Lottery ‘slush-fund’ is a figment of Peretti’s
imagination); and he neglects to mention those Lottery-funded films
that were a critical or commercial success. The Peretti article is symp-
tomatic of how wholeheartedly the terms of the debate about ‘quality’
had changed. British cinema financed through the commercially ori-
ented public subsidy methods were now being judged by the standards
of commercial cinema, rather than on what might previously have been

considered legitimate ‘cultural’ grounds.
Of course, defending public spending on cinema on ‘cultural’ grounds
is equally troublesome, since films funded this way must be expected to
have sufficient cultural, social or artistic value to justify public spend-
ing. James Caterer, via Margaret Dickinson, refers to this principle as
‘carrying a cultural burden’. Publicly funded films are put in the diffi-
cult position of having to justify their own existence through ill-defined
non-market criteria. For proponents of public funding, Caterer argues,
this presents something of a predicament: ‘this “burden” is one which
both weighs the film down – suggesting that it may creak or even col-
lapse under the weight of institutional expectation – but also one which
somehow insulates it against criticism’.30 For critics antagonistic towards
public subsidy for film, like Alexander Walker, there should be no such
insulation. Caterer argues that Walker’s interpretation of the burden of
publicly funded films was ‘financial rather than cultural’, which is evi-
dent in the way in which his reviews frequently total up the financial
loss made by these films. In fact, the critical attention paid by Walker
(and others) to subsidized British films was emphatically cultural in
nature, focusing as it did on the perceived ‘quality’ of the films:
The astonishing critical venom . . . directed at the Film Council-

funded comedy Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2003) illustrates that
popular cinema funded from the public purse remains subject to close
scrutiny on the grounds of ‘quality’, a discourse which reveals various
hierarchies of taste and cultural value.31
Caterer thus argues that a ‘popular’ cultural form was compared nega-
tively to imaginary criteria of ‘quality’, against which it could not hope
to stand up. The suggestion here is that the criteria of judgement used
are essentially inappropriate for popular cinema. Caterer chastises the
critics both for fetishizing the financial burden of these popular pub-
licly funded films, and for judging the films by the cultural criterion of
‘quality’.
The consequence of the commercial turn in the ‘quality’ debate is
the critical conflation of the means of funding a film with aesthetic
evaluation: ‘It is the way in which the film’s funding is repeatedly men-
tioned in the same breath as its alleged defects which leads inescapably
to the conclusion that the film is being judged, at least in part, on extra-
cinematic grounds,’ Petley argues.32 That the critical criteria for films
produced using public funds are somehow different, perhaps harsher
than those for films produced in purely commercial contexts reveals the
commercialist logic in the critical mind. This logic insists that the most
popular films are the best films. This is not the consensus around quality
that exists when it comes to television. Though, in the 1990s, pub-
lic service broadcasting and its institutions were undergoing significant
corporate changes with attendant philosophical reorientation, ‘quality’
remained a key pillar of the argument for public service broadcasting.
Indeed, in an era of greater competition from new players on the televi-
sion markets, ‘quality’ was one of the unique selling points upon which
the traditional broadcasters would rely for legitimation and brand recog-
nition (see Introduction). Despite a fierce debate between proponents of
unregulated markets and advocates of public broadcasting, there exists
a tentative consensus that quality in British television has, generally,
been protected from the worst excesses of the market by public interven-
tion in the form of regulation and, in the case of the BBC, a guaranteed
income independent of commercial forces in the shape of the hypothe-
cated tax of the licence fee. So, in arguments about public intervention
for film we find an inversion of those applied to television: whereas pub-
lic subsidy/funding in television acts in the critical mind as a guarantee
of quality broadcasting, public subsidy in film seems to invite critical
opprobrium, regardless of the actual quality of the film itself.
The presence of public money in a film product seems to affect critical
evaluation more than the presence of public money in the broadcasting
system. Though television broadcasting is considered to be a more pop-
ulist medium than cinema, ironically the cultural bulwark that has been
set up to ensure quality in television is considered unnecessary at best
and destructive at worst in film finance. Working within the commer-
cially oriented British film industry, then, the PSBs found their films
operating under a critical double standard: films were now placed in the
context in which the terms of judgement were based on the commercial
standard set by Hollywood, a standard that, because of differences in
budget level, personnel, infrastructure and simply size, British popular
cinema could not possibly hope to attain in full. Unlike in television,
where, despite being under persistent threat, intervention in the name
of public service was understood as a valuable protector of quality, cul-
tural, artistic, or, even, moral criteria that may previously have been
used in the defence of publicly funded films seemed no longer to apply.
Two FilmFour failures
I want to end this exploration of the relationship between two rapidly

changing and precarious industries by exploring in detail films produced
by the FilmFour subsidiary which, to a large extent, exemplify the per-

ilous process of producing and distributing films in Britain. So prevalent
was the invocation of these films as totems of the company’s downfall at
the time of FilmFour’s collapse that it was reported that ‘staff at FilmFour
fiercely resent what they feel is undue attention paid to Charlotte Gray
and Lucky Break’.33 Lucky Break (Peter Cattaneo, 2001) was a prison-based
comedy expected to follow the success of its director’s debut feature, The
Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997). Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong,
2001) was an adaptation of a bestselling novel by a popular author,
with a bankable star and wartime setting and a total budget of around
£14 million. It was expected to provide FilmFour with the same kind
of prestige achieved by Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, UK, 1998), but failed
both as a contender for major awards and to sell at the box office. In this
short case study, I explore the commercial prospects of these two films,
how they fell short of expectations, and the connections with television
culture that were implicated in their failure.
Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks had been a bestseller when it was
published in 1998. Independent company Ecosse Films acquired the film
rights with the expectation that the popularity of the book would make
it easy to market. The transfer of material from one medium to another
may well carry a ready-made audience, but literary enthusiasts are quite
often negative about changes in story, character or tone in film adap-
tations. The changes screenwriter Jeremy Brock made to this end led
to criticism from reviewers: ‘The shift in emphasis, no doubt effected
to make the film more audience-friendly, confuses the motivations of
Charlotte’s character and brings a phoney note to the film.’34 The film
thus was placed in the position of having to both please fans of the novel
and conform to film narrative conventions. The expectations of the for-
mer would obviously be difficult to satisfy under the constraints of the
latter. Lucky Break was similarly under pressure to perform well from
the outset. The film prematurely garnered high expectations as director
Peter Cattaneo’s follow-up to the hugely successful 1997 film The Full
Monty. Neither of the other key players in that film (producer Uberto
Pasolini, writer Simon Beaufoy) had been able to capitalize on its suc-
cess with their next projects, a phenomenon apparently described as ‘the
curse of the Monties’ in the industry.35 The Full Monty had been an unex-
pected commercial hit, and the elevated commercial expectations for
Cattaneo’s successor film were naïve at best. The ‘curse of the Monties’
indicates how fragile and unpredictable commercial filmmaking in the
UK can be.
The Full Monty provided Lucky Break’s promoters with a rather ambiva-
lent point of comparison. In both the teaser trailer and the theatrical
trailer for the film, an intertitle reads ‘From the director of The Full
Monty’, thus explicitly connecting the two films. Though promotions
invoked The Full Monty, frequently, the caveat was offered that Lucky
Break is a different film altogether. Peter Cattaneo stated explicitly in
the press book: ‘I hope people will see Lucky Break as a separate entity
and not as a follow-up to The Full Monty’,36 a message repeated fre-
quently during promotions in August 2001. In spite of these entreaties,
the temptation for reviewers to compare the film with The Full Monty
proved irresistible. Every review in a major newspaper mentioned the
earlier film, usually as a point of comparison; as Independent on Sun-
day reviewer Nicholas Barber put it, ‘it’s tempting to play Spot the
Similarities’.37 Among these were the ensemble cast, importance of male
camaraderie and the plot device of a performance as a means to escape
an inequitable social situation. Many reviewers displayed disappoint-
ment and dissatisfaction that the comic element of the film did not live
up to the promise of The Full Monty, and that Lucky Break lacked much
of its charm.
The film suffered worse by comparisons with a different text alto-
gether, the prison-set television comedy Porridge (BBC1, 1974–1977).
Susan Sharpe wrote, echoing the opinions of a number of critics: ‘the
clichés are strictly televisual: pompous governor . . . camp fraudster, clue-
less bleeding heart drama teacher – it’s assumed we know and like
these people from “Porridge” ’.38 Unflattering comparison to a tele-
vision sitcom also afflicted Charlotte Gray. The sitcom was ’Allo ’Allo
(BBC1, 1984–1992) and the comparisons were made not only due to
the shared wartime setting but because of the stylistic decision made to
have the French characters in the film speak French-accented English,
‘Franglais’, rather than subtitled French. The derisive comparisons with
that sitcom were problematic for a film marketed as a serious pres-
tige picture, and seriously damaged its credibility. The comparison was
so pervasive that, as Geoffrey Macnab puts it, ‘for British viewers . . . it
couldn’t escape the shadow of the sitcom ’Allo ’Allo’.39 For British
films, comparisons with television are especially damaging, given their
reputation for being small-scale and aesthetically ‘uncinematic’. More-
over, it suggests that the pleasures that the film offers are nothing
out of the ordinary or worth going to the cinema for. Television, the
‘bad object’, is used as a reference point by which to deride the two
films.
Another televisual point of comparison for Lucky Break was its star.
James Nesbitt was a television actor who, though popular in the UK
through his role in ITV’s Cold Feet (tx ITV 1998–2004), had never had
a starring role in a film prior to this one. One of the main historical
criticisms of British film is that it has no star system, as Geoffrey Macnab
notes:
Stars are a crucial marketing device, and the absence of an established

star system is constantly cited as a key factor in the failure of succes-
sive waves of British filmmakers to carve out a slice of the American
market.40
While it might be true that Britain has no established film star sys-
tem, there are nevertheless a number of British actors who star across
film, television and theatre. Lucky Break’s cast was largely made up of
figures like this: Timothy Spall, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie and Lennie James.
Of the principal cast, only Olivia Williams had an international pro-
file, thanks to her supporting roles in Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1999)
and The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999). To compensate for the
film’s lack of a major film star, it was promoted explicitly as an ensemble
comedy.
If Lucky Break ‘solved’ the problem of the lack of a British star sys-
tem via television, Charlotte Gray bypassed it altogether by employing
an international star in the lead role. Australian Cate Blanchett had pre-
viously starred in internationally successful films Elizabeth, The Talented
Mr Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999) and The Gift (Sam Raimi, 1999).
Although one of the film’s taglines describes the title character as ‘an
ordinary woman in an extraordinary time’, Cate Blanchett is deliber-
ately constructed as extraordinary both in beauty and in acting talent.
The film’s press book quotes Blanchett as stating: ‘Charlotte Gray is per-
haps the best role for a woman I’ve read in 15 years.’ Director Gillian
Armstrong comments that the character is a meditation on the fluctuat-
ing nature of identity in times of crisis. Through describing the role in
these terms, the promoters clearly establish Blanchett’s performance as
complex and nuanced, the kind of performance usually found in films
estimated to be of high quality. This structures an expectation of the
kind of passionate performance for which Blanchett is famed. To con-
vey this message, the film’s theatrical trailer is dominated by selected
close-ups of Blanchett’s face from the film, with background music and
dialogue excerpts forming the audio soundtrack. Here, only the audio
carries any indication of what to expect of the film’s narrative, free-
ing the image to sell Cate Blanchett. The promotional materials for
the film strongly implied a fundamental link between Charlotte Gray
the character, Cate Blanchett the actress, and Charlotte Gray. The film’s
promotion thus relied on Cate Blanchett’s face as its ‘narrative image’

and her superlative performance as a unique selling point.
In December 2001, the American distributors of Charlotte Gray,
Warner Bros, decided to place the film under consideration for the
Academy Awards. The film was therefore released at selected cinemas
in the United States and Canada on the 28th. This release strategy
was risky. When the film failed to win any nominations, it appeared
in cinemas alongside more successful prestige pictures. It was difficult
for Charlotte Gray to compete with these films without the marketing
tool of awards nominations, and it failed to find an American audience.
The film was released in Britain on 22 February 2002, the same date
as strong award contenders Ali (Michael Mann, 2001) and A Beautiful
Mind (Ron Howard, 2001). Furthermore, it fared badly in comparison to
British films such as Iris (Richard Eyre, 2001) and Gosford Park (Robert
Altman, 2001) which had achieved nominations for both the American
and British Academy awards. It took a disappointing $1.9 million during
the course of its British distribution, and only $741,394 from 52 screens
in the US. It was most successful in Australia (thanks, probably, to direc-
tor and star), where it took over $2 million. In the UK, Charlotte Gray was
promoted explicitly as a prestige, ‘heritage’ picture. Most reviewers were
unconvinced of its ‘quality’ status. This assessment, by Tom Charity,
summarizes neatly the critical consensus on the film: ‘a disappointingly
middling middlebrow drama’.41
Whereas Charlotte Gray was uncomplicatedly marketed as a pres-
tige historical picture, the genre of Lucky Break is rather unclear
from its marketing. The teaser trailer described above focuses on the
group of inmates, but the longer theatrical trailer focuses on the
romance between protagonist Jimmy and social worker Annabel (Olivia
Williams). Scenes involving these characters are intercut with the titles:
‘Welcome to Long Rudford Prison / the last place on Earth / you’d expect
to get lucky’, explicitly setting the film up as primarily a romantic com-
edy. The decision to emphasize the romance element was taken after
the romantic sub-plot tested well with women over age 25 at test screen-
ings, and further to distinguish Lucky Break from The Full Monty, another
ensemble comedy.42 The film was promoted both as an ensemble and as
a romantic comedy. The critics responded to the multiplicity of genre
types rather differently; instead of seeing it as a generic hybrid, critics
found the film’s tone uneven: ‘[it] can’t make up its mind whether it’s
a cheeky chappy comedy, a caper movie, a romantic drama or a socially
aware look at the prison system’.43
Lucky Break was signally unlucky in its theatrical release, on the Friday
before August Bank Holiday in 2001, in order to attract the family audi-
ence associated with holiday weekends. The summer of 2001 had not
had a dominant blockbuster film; indeed, some large-budget Hollywood
films released in June and July had underperformed at the box office,
including Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001) and Planet of the Apes (Tim
Burton, 2001). Some reviewers saw this as a potential boon for the film,
such as Empire magazine’s Mark Dinning, who stated that ‘in a sum-
mer full of soulless blockbusters, at last a movie with genuine heart’.44
FilmFour released the film on over 270 prints nationwide, accompanied
by a large advertising push. The prints and advertising cost (the sin-
gle biggest outlay of funds by the distributor) of the release was around
£2 million, an enormous figure for an independent British film. These
factors, combined with a lack of real competition on the date of release,
would seem to give Lucky Break a competitive edge. Nevertheless, it took
only £348,613 in its first weekend, and was seventh in the UK top ten,
sliding to ninth the following weekend, with only £228,034. One poten-
tial reason for the poor opening weekend, banal as it may be, was the
weather conditions, with Saturday 25 August being the hottest Bank
Holiday Saturday in London for 60 years in an unusually hot summer.
The films each in their own way show how ill-advised the commer-
cial redirection of FilmFour was. A section in the Lucky Break press book
in which Paul Webster states that Peter Cattaneo and producer Barnaby
Thompson ‘bring an audience-friendly sensibility that guarantees qual-
ity and commerciality’ reveals the extent to which the company had
abandoned the original principles of Channel 4 films. The idea of being
‘audience-friendly’ and commercial is recognisably distinct from the
concepts of innovation and risk which traditionally underlay Chan-
nel 4 films. In the past, the PSB made films that would not or could
not be made by the market. During the early 21st century, they were
instead producing substandard films which could be made by any com-
mercial film company, with the added problem that FilmFour’s name
would be associated with films that were commercial and artistic fail-
ures rather than the edgy, important works to which it had previously
been attached.
FilmFour was born of a rival industry blamed for many of the film
industry’s ‘problems’: the smallness of its ambition, competition for
domestic audiences, the poverty of British film’s aesthetic. FilmFour
attempted to answer these issues by disavowing television: by fund-
ing films as defined by the mainstream commercial model increasingly
dominant in the industry as a whole. At the same time, FilmFour

also appeared to separate from its raison d’être: to produce innovative,
non-mainstream work suitable for its parent channel. Geoffrey Macnab
argues that the two aims are, in fact, incompatible: ‘When you pursue an
unabashedly commercial and mainstream policy, as FilmFour did, you
can no longer claim you’re looking for the new Ken Loach or Terence
Davies.’45 And FilmFour was still financially dependent on its parent
company. It was subject to the vicissitudes of two industries that were,
at this time, unpredictable and fragile.
In 2001–2002, the television industry suffered a debilitating down-
turn in advertising revenue. Channel 4 found itself unable to sustain its
swollen portfolio of business ventures, and new Chief Executive Mark
Thompson cut back on all the Channel’s non-core activities, including
4 Ventures and FilmFour Ltd. After incurring huge losses, FilmFour was
dramatically scaled back in July 2002. Its distribution and sales arms
closed, and production was re-integrated into the Drama department
under its head, Tessa Ross. Not only had the corporation failed to pro-
duce a commercial hit, but its reputation had also been badly hurt. One
unsympathetic observation, reported by Geoffrey Macnab, encapsulates
the damage FilmFour’s commercial adventure had caused: ‘There was
no profit and no hits, but the real sin is that their films weren’t very
interesting. If they didn’t make money, there was nothing else to be said
about them.’46
Conclusion
British film culture at the beginning of the 21st century took a decisively
commercialistic turn. The industrial and institutional definition of ‘film’
was shifting, and films were increasingly being defined as potentially
lucrative commodities rather than cultural goods, as products rather
than as artforms. The discursive construction of British cinema, at policy
and industry levels, was moving away from the small-scale, low-budget
filmmaking that had dominated British production in the 1980s and
1990s. In other words, the film industry was attempting to extricate
itself from association with television. A period that is usually charac-
terized as one of intensified industrial convergence was, on a discursive
and rhetorical level, one of attempted disengagement, or divergence.
The separation of film from television, by outspending and outgrow-
ing the rival medium, was intended to make British film more appealing,
both domestically and internationally. However, as the cases of Lucky
Break and Charlotte Gray demonstrated, the commercial redirection
of FilmFour ended in failure after the company did not produce a

commercial hit. The terms by which British films were judged changed
alongside the emphasis on ‘audience-friendly’ cinema. Publicly subsi-
dized cinema, carrying its ‘cultural burden’, was judged (harshly) on
terms that were simultaneously cultural and economic, because the
dominant discourses of value and quality emanating from the indus-
try were based on the films’ popular, mainstream appeal. Herein lies
another, crucial, divergence from British television. Proponents of ‘qual-
ity’ television have historically been suspicious of populist definitions
of ‘good’ television, and public subsidy has been justified as the best
means of insurance against the commercial excesses of the industry.
In film culture at the turn of the 21st century, though, public sub-
sidy appeared to be sponsoring these excesses both at a practical level
(though by no means to the extent that Walker and Peretti suggest) and,
crucially, through the proliferation of market rhetoric. Though the tele-
vision industry was increasingly subject to such changes, defences of the
public remit of its institutions on the grounds of ‘quality’ persisted. The
divergence between the two industries was also, then, taking place at a
discursive and evaluative level.
Television had previously been blamed for restraining British cinema’s
ambitions. However, in the context of commercial expansion, the ambi-
tiousness of British film actually stagnated. Huge risks were being taken
both by PSB film arms and across the industry, but many of these were
financial rather than artistic or cultural risks. In an effort to produce
‘films’ as defined by the dominant discourse – commercial, interna-
tional, popular, mainstream – FilmFour attempted to extricate itself from
association with television, and with the traditional institutional iden-
tity of its parent company. The price of this extrication was a damaging
loss of reputation and confidence that would affect the company, and
British film in general, for the next few years.
Part II
Convergence and Divergence
in the Digital Age
4
Digital Departures: Television
Institutions and Low-Budget
Production
At the turn of the 21st century, digital technology was gradually

providing new production techniques, delivery models and exhibition
platforms for film and television, causing anxiety and exhilaration about
the futures of both mediums. Two broad schools of thought on digital
cinema emerged. The first optimistically heralded a new age of audiovi-
sual capability, both in terms of enabling expensive, breathtaking special
effects and because the new availability of cheap but reasonable-quality
equipment allegedly ‘democratized’ filmmaking. The second school was
apprehensive about the potential for digital technologies and effects to
overtake ‘traditional’ celluloid filmmaking, and particularly the loss of
analogue ‘indexicality’; renewed cries of ‘the death of cinema’ resulted.
It is difficult to look at the emergence of digital technology with any
retrospective clarity, given that there are good reasons to suppose that
the moment has not yet passed. However, among the doom and enthu-
siasm, it is clear that responses to digital filmmaking have tended to
be culturally and industrially specific. By contrast to Hollywood cin-
ema’s use of computers to generate artificial worlds and events in movie
spectacles:
in Britain, the advances in digital technology have been primar-

ily regarded as a new opportunity for stimulating low-budget film
production, and consequently a number of new funding schemes
have been introduced in part to nurture projects which could take
advantage of the new possibilities.1
Both Channel 4 and the BBC contributed funds to schemes such as

these, with the overall objective, as Duncan Petrie noted in 2002, of
identifying and developing new talent. Alongside other public funders,
111
112 Convergence and Divergence in the Digital Age
like the UK Film Council and regional screen agencies, the PSB film
arms cautiously embraced digital technology’s potential to streamline
filmmaking processes and reduce cost and risk.
This chapter examines PSB involvement in digital filmmaking from
1999 to present, focusing particularly on three different iterations of
the same basic principle: the use of digital production methods to
bring down the cost of risky film projects, often those made by debu-
tant filmmakers. First, I explore the early interventions of the FilmFour
Lab, which made two digital features, My Brother Tom (Dom Rotheroe,
2001) and Daybreak (Bernard Rudden, 2000). The case study consid-
ers the use of digital technology in the production and aesthetics of
these films, and the extent to which it contributed to their perceived
‘experimentalism’. Warp X, a scheme jointly financed by Film4 and the
UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund, might be seen as a successor to
the Lab, particularly considering its shared head, Robin Gutch. I dis-
cuss the aims and identity of the Warp X scheme, and how the slate
exemplifies the changing expectations of digital technology in low-
budget filmmaking: that, as the definition and quality of the technology
increases, so to do the commercial aspirations attached to films pro-
duced this way. Finally, I examine three micro-budget feature film
schemes – the regionally focused Digital Departures, its successor iFea-
tures and Film London’s Microwave – supported by BBC Films. Three
films, My Brother Tom, Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012)
and Kicks (Lindy Heymann, 2008), are analysed in detail to demonstrate
the textual and aesthetic consequences of the industrial shift from ana-
logue to digital. The chapter reconsiders the emergence of both digital
convergence – of the material composition of moving-image media as a
series of zeros and ones – and divergence – the rhetorical effort put into
identifying and presenting these texts as films, despite their ambiguous
ontology as a result of this convergence.
The FilmFour Lab: Digital experiments
When Michael Jackson moved from the BBC to become the Chief Exec-
utive of Channel 4 in 1997, an attractive element of the job at the rival
broadcaster was its tradition of supporting British film. A film buff him-
self, Jackson was keen to strengthen this culture within Channel 4 by
separating FilmFour from the mainstream channel (see Chapter 3), and
by pursuing markedly more commercial goals with the filmmaking arm.
His objective was to make FilmFour a standalone independent film pro-
duction company, in the vein of the hugely successful Working Title,
Television Institutions and Low-Budget Production 113
albeit one that was supported financially by its parent corporation. How-
ever, FilmFour emerged from a tradition of support for film at Channel 4
that extended beyond the mainstream Film on Four slot. The Indepen-
dent Film and Video Department, primarily a space for community
access to the airwaves and in order to support the workshop movement,
also had a significant history of funding low-budget and experimental
fiction film, and ensuring that it found a space, albeit marginal, in the
broadcast schedule.2 The IFVD, when FilmFour was created, was headed
by Robin Gutch, who had been recruited to Channel 4 three years pre-
viously from the BBC’s Community Programming Unit, a documentary
department designed, like the IFVD to widen access to the airwaves.
Gutch had commissioned a number of critically acclaimed projects for
IFVD, but in 1998 it was clear that the days of the department were
numbered: its alternative content was increasingly out of step with the
prevailing culture at Channel 4, and its programming gradually more
marginalized in the schedules. The IFVD was clearly not going to sur-
vive long as Channel 4 evolved, and it did, indeed, fold quietly in the
early 2000s.
In this context the FilmFour Lab was created, in 1999, with Gutch as
its head. Jackson wanted all the filmmaking operations at Channel 4 to
be housed under the FilmFour imprint, and, as Gutch put it, ‘FilmFour
Lab was an attempt to have a banner, if you like, for the kind of work
that IFVD had done, but within a FilmFour context.’3 The FilmFour
Lab’s priority, like its predecessor’s, was to commit funds to low-budget
experimental work from innovative but untested directors. The 1999
Channel 4 Annual Report describes it as ‘the purest area of risk within
FilmFour Ltd, establishing itself as a champion of radical, low-budget
filmmaking’.4 Because it supported films with modest commercial ambi-
tions, Paul Webster described the Lab as a ‘cultural fund’, and FilmFour’s
support as ‘subsidy’.5 Gutch noted that the FilmFour Lab was indeed
given considerably more ‘commercial licence’ than the rest of FilmFour,
and that ‘FilmFour Lab was, to some extent seen as a bit of a hang on
to the old remit’. The Channel 4 remit to which he refers requires that
it support innovation, aesthetic experimentation and minority voices,
and provide an ‘alternative’ to mainstream media. The FilmFour Lab
thus ostensibly represented that area of risk in which Channel 4 had
traditionally (if marginally) operated. In an article on the Lab published
in The Guardian in 1999, Andrew Pulver summarized these changes:
The Lab’s central purpose is to pick up the slack left by Channel

4’s ever-burgeoning feature film division. As FilmFour’s production
budgets drive relentlessly upwards, the Lab intends to nurse low-

budget, riskier films that might otherwise be left behind.6
In this sense, the Lab formed a bookend of FilmFour’s strategy to ‘kill

the middle’.7 In keeping with this aim, the Lab produced a number
of short films from emerging filmmakers to provide a ‘leg-up’ in the
film industry, but it also developed and funded feature films such as
Andrew Kötting’s This Filthy Earth (2000), loosely based on Emile Zola’s
La Terre, teen sex-comedy Large (Justin Edgar, 2001) – described by
Gutch as ‘Birmingham’s answer to American Pie’ – and Joel Hopkins’s
international comedy-drama Jump Tomorrow (2001).
Daybreak a fast-paced exploration of Edinburgh’s club scene, was the
FilmFour Lab’s first feature film. It had already been in development
for three years, supported by agencies such as Scottish Screen and the
Arts Council, and was projected as a ten-minute work-in-progress at the
Edinburgh Film Festival in 1996. The film was intended as a highly
visual and kinetic piece, with a flexible production schedule based
around improvisation with its cast of non-professional actors. The ad
hoc nature of the film created problems for producers in financing the
project, since funders tend to prefer a finished script, or a strong draft,
on which to judge a film project’s feasibility, creative merit or commer-
cial potential. The film underwent a protracted development process,
which (ironically, given the intentions of the filmmakers) involved
extensive script redrafting and the sculpting of a more conventional nar-
rative formed around three main characters. Consequently, as Duncan
Petrie describes, ‘the original conception of the project began to be
gradually eroded’, the end result being the general exclusion of its
‘more ambient, liminal – and essentially risky – elements’.8 Narrative
changes made during this development process drove up the budget of
the film, necessitating as Petrie put it ‘creative compromises’.9 During
the process, Daybreak transitioned from a film with modest but risky
ambitions for a small, selective audience, to one aiming for a wider
appeal.
By putting up the funds for the feature to be made, FilmFour rescued
Daybreak from ‘development hell’, a decision Andrew Pulver attributed
to the production team’s willingness to shoot on digital video rather
than celluloid film. Reflecting on the project, Gutch recalled that a sense
of risk involved in producing films digitally was palpable at the time:
We definitely set out [ ] to make digital films which now seems, sort
of, so what? But at that point was still quite sort of controversial.
It was still seen as very different.
The controversy largely emanated from a general sense that, though

digital video was more flexible, quicker and cheaper than film, it was
an untested medium with an uncertain relationship to existing media
forms. The association of video aesthetics with television as opposed to
film may have discouraged some filmmakers from using the medium,
despite its significant production advantages. Indeed, Daybreak’s direc-
tor was keen to distance DV from video aesthetics, arguing that DV
style ‘was different from cinema, but not video’.10 At the time, Robin
Gutch emphasized the difference between Daybreak’s aesthetic and that
of other well-known DV films such as Festen (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)
and The Idiots (Lars Von Trier, 1998), arguing that the film would
instead show that ‘digital can be amazingly beautiful’.11 He would later
acknowledge, though, that the vogue for digital video in the low-
budget (European) sector owed a debt to the Dogme project, with the
international prestige of films like Festen a clear motivation for digital
production techniques to be encouraged.
The filmmakers’ commitment to exploring a specific aesthetic for the
DV medium conformed to the remit of the Lab to encourage innovation.
However, as Petrie argued, efforts to make the film ‘accessible’ ended in a
product that is unlikely ever to reach an audience, noting that ‘the tragic
irony . . . [is that] the very pressures exerted to make the project more
conventional and therefore more accessible have had the opposite effect
in that it is more likely that Daybreak will never reach an audience’.12
This prophecy has indeed come to pass: the film was released neither
theatrically, nor on VHS/DVD, and was broadcast only twice by Channel
4, both times during the night. Part of the problem for the distribu-
tors was that the cost of over £40,000 to transfer a digital video print
to celluloid was prohibitive for a film designed to appeal to minority
tastes. Daybreak’s production history thus reveals the complexities of the
PSB becoming involved in experimental film funding, particularly in an
untested medium (as digital was at the time). An important part of the
FilmFour Lab remit was to experiment and innovate – traditional Chan-
nel 4 PSB purposes – but without sufficient focus on ensuring a decent
platform for these experimental films, the risks taken in the name of
public service are only partially justified.
After Robin Gutch left in 2003, the FilmFour Lab was integrated into
the new, slimmed-down FilmFour department under Tessa Ross. The role
of its new head, Peter Carlton, was to ‘work across the slate, provid[ing]
a different perspective and taste’ to the other FilmFour staff.13 However,
the new FilmFour’s move away from the kind of profit-seeking projects
that had been the Achilles heel of FilmFour Ltd brought with it a loos-
ened reliance on the Lab to continue the ‘remit’ side of the equation.
Gutch’s departure from Channel 4 was partly inspired by his sense that
the FilmFour Lab’s unique purpose would be reduced in the context of
the integrated FilmFour. He explains:
FilmFour Lab only worked in the context of FilmFour being a profit

driven company, so it was the alternative to that. Once FilmFour
itself, the main FilmFour had become much more focused on classic
FilmFour . . . there wasn’t really a lot of rationale for having it.
Gutch’s move away from Channel 4 was not the end of his associa-
tion with Film4, but he was proved right about the fate of the FilmFour
Lab. Though Carlton continued working in the new FilmFour context,
the banner, and soon the department itself, was discreetly disbanded
in 2004–2005. The kinds of experimental, low-budget digital films that
were supported by the FilmFour Lab were not forgotten, but their
funding now came from elsewhere, as we shall see.
Digital production was seen, at this early stage, as a good opportunity
for inexperienced filmmakers to learn their craft. Digital video, in its
various forms, is relatively cheap, lightweight and easy to handle and
it allows for the filmmaker to take many more hours of footage than
s/he will need, providing more options for editing. It is an attractive
choice for filmmakers on a low budget or tight schedule, and for a fund-
ing body like the FilmFour Lab, with limited resources to expend on
untested talent. Duncan Petrie argued that, despite the potential of dig-
ital video for aesthetic experimentation, conservatism was common in
publicly funded, low-budget digital film:
Outside the subsidised domain of artists’ film and video (tradition-

ally supported by the Arts Council rather than agencies such as the
BFI), digital filmmaking in Britain seems to be dictated more by
the conventions of narrative storytelling and verisimilitude than by
formal experimentation, despite the rhetoric of novelty continually
advanced by the advocates of the technology.14
Along these lines, Nick James complained in 2001 that many of

these filmmakers were less motivated by the image-creation aspect of
filmmaking, and more by a desire to construct narrative: ‘It’s as if they
just want to tell stories and they see film-making as a less onerous and
more glamorous method to do so than writing a book.’15 ‘Experimen-
tal’ cinema in the context of the FilmFour Lab describes the support of
untried filmmakers, assuming that these are the people most likely to
bring new voices or fresh perceptions to filmmaking. The potential of

DV for creating formally inventive works outside the established con-
ventions of narrative cinema remained largely untapped by the films
made for the FilmFour Lab. Digital production did nevertheless offer an
opportunity for films that lie at the margins of cinema to be made, and
initial testing of a digital aesthetic to be conducted. The FilmFour Lab
achieved, to some extent, its aims of supporting new filmmakers, even if
the films themselves were not truly the ‘experiments’ one might expect
of the ‘riskiest’ area of FilmFour.
In the debates on the emergence of digital filmmaking, techno-
fetishism rubbed up against celluloid snobbery in arguments that invert
debates going on in the BBC drama departments in the 1970s. For if,
as Nick James suggests, some low-budget filmmakers working with dig-
ital technologies were initially unconcerned about the way their films
looked and were thus indifferent to the lure of celluloid, they represent
the inverse of the television writers who, under producers like David
Rose, were so keen to have their plays shot on film. Filmmaker Saul
Metzstein argued in 2001: ‘There isn’t necessarily a linear connection
between the medium you make a film in and the medium in which
it’s broadcast.’16 In this context, digital technologies offered opportu-
nities for filmmakers who, like Dom Rotheroe, may have struggled to
find funding, and an outlet for their ideas. The FilmFour Lab operated
before the explosion of digital exhibition opportunities on the Inter-
net, and thus theatrical exhibition was still prioritized as the primary
aim of the (low-budget) filmmaker. The use of digital technologies has
become so commonplace, that, as Robin Gutch noted, a £500,000 bud-
get is now considered healthy and generous for a debut feature, whereas
when the FilmFour Lab was operational trying to make good films on
budgets under one million pounds was considered a fool’s errand. Dig-
ital technologies have therefore opened doors that were once simply
closed when production methods involved the time and expense of
celluloid.
My Brother Tom: Light and dark

The Lab’s second digital feature – also supported by the newly formed
Film Council and British Screen – was My Brother Tom a drama about
abuse, love and obsession. It was commissioned by FilmFour Lab on
the strength of its first draft script, and the Lab also committed funds
towards further development, including a ten-minute screen test. Direc-
tor Dom Rotheroe, an experienced director of non-fiction programming
but new to genre filmmaking, took veteran Director of Photography
Robby Müller and two actors (including a young Ben Whishaw in his
film debut) for a few days’ shooting on DV. The film was greenlit on
the strength of this test. The combination of traditional development
process and digital production equipment enabled FilmFour to reduce
the risk and cost attached to a project involving an untested produc-
tion team. It tells the story of teenagers Tom and Jessica, who meet
in the woods and develop a deep (and later sexual) friendship. Both
are sexually abused by an authority figure: Tom by his father, whom
Jessica witnesses forcing Tom to perform oral sex; and Jessica by her
next-door neighbour and teacher, Jack, whom Tom murders in anger
in the film’s climax. Their friendship develops through the creation
of a mystical, magical playground in nearby woods, by sharing nick-
names with each other and creating a den. The film’s main proposition
is that suburban life ignores, conceals or is even implicated in an inher-
ent darkness; in short, that ‘in suburbia, no-one can hear you scream’,
dialogue spoken by Jack in the film’s opening scene. My Brother Tom is a
film predicated on a dialogue between light and dark; between the heal-
ing properties of nature, and the human capacity to inflict and conceal
devastating harm.
The film presents its unusual characters, story and taboo subject mat-
ter within a largely familiar narrative structure, utilizing traditional
continuity editing techniques in addition to handheld camerawork to
produce a conventionally realist aesthetic rather than enhancing the
more fantastical elements of the film’s story. The narrative, though,
depends upon the creation of a visual distinction between the magical
world of the woods and the claustrophobic world of suburban interi-
ors, which contain the insidious menace. This distinction is enhanced
by the particular qualities of the digital image, and the way in which it
registers dark and light. Exterior scenes, particularly daytime ones, have
a warm aesthetic, exploiting the summertime and autumnal temporal
setting of the film. The wood in which Tom and Jessica meet is set apart
from the other locations in the film as a haven from the darkness inher-
ent in suburban life. Long shots of the canopy, and a lake in which
the teenagers frolic, are naturally lit, with the shadows cast through the
trees creating a soft dappled effect in takes which for this film are unusu-
ally still and long. Tom and Jessica’s den in the woods tends to be framed
intimately in medium two-shots where orange light approximates torch-
light, bathing the space in a soothing glow. This space is outdoors, yet
provides a sanctuary from the teenagers’ difficult lives. The film employs
a distinctly warm visual style for outdoor scenes to create the sense of
magic and mysticism of the woods.
Interior settings, by contrast, tend to be lit more starkly. The two

scenes of abuse in the film – Jack’s attempted seduction of Jessica, and
the sexual, physical and verbal abuse exacted on Tom by his father –
both take place indoors, and have a harsher visual regime. This under-
lines the fact that the sequences reveal events that usually remain
hidden from view. In the seduction scene, as ‘Uncle’ Jack molests his
young neighbour, the camera lingers on Jessica’s impassive face, frozen
in fear, in a long close-up. The viewer is able to register (and feel) Jessica’s
extreme discomfort, in large part because the white light harshly reveals
every tiny change in expression on her face. In the second abuse
sequence, Jessica follows Tom from the woods to his home, spying on
him through a window and thus becoming witness to the abuse. The
sequence is filmed with a steadicam in long take, so the viewer’s per-
spective appears to be the same as that of Jessica, forcing us too to
become witnesses, as Figure 4.1 shows. The scene is filmed through a
window, framed by curtains, emphasizing the illicit look of the cam-
era at events that are meant not to be seen. The lighting of the scene
emphasizes this function, with the sterile indoor lights coming from
the house starkly revealing the events unfolding. In an inversion of cin-
ematic convention, moments in the film that are darkest in tone are lit
most brightly.
DV is a good medium for presenting these distinctions because of the
way in which it registers light, particularly artificial light. The flattened
Figure 4.1 Jessica witnesses Tom’s father abusing him, My Brother Tom
DV image bestows the interior scenes with an uncomfortable closeness,

even when, as in the example above, the camera is set at some distance
from events. In My Brother Tom’s scenes of abuse, the digital image exag-
geratedly reveals what had previously been hidden. This is the key idea
of the film: to make visible what had lain dormant and unrecognized,
even where this is distressing. The film exploits the seeming lack of
manipulation created by handheld DV camerawork to involve, perhaps
even incriminate, the viewer in scenes of intense unease.
The specificity of the film’s lighting design and visual style, its aes-
thetic reinforcement of the narrative themes of light and dark, comes
as a result of the use of digital video. The flatness of the image, the
uncomfortable closeness to unpleasant events, and the way in which
the camera forces the viewer to face images that are meant to be con-
cealed are all made possible through the use of the lightweight mobile
camera, and through the stylistic and material specificity of the digital
image.
Film4 and Warp X: Outsourcing experimentation
While still Head of the FilmFour Lab in 2001, Robin Gutch argued:
‘I don’t think we’ll bring budgets down hugely by fetishizing digi-
tal technology. It can be part of the answer . . . ’17 Just four years later,
though, in partnership with producer Mark Herbert, he initiated a new
all-digital film studio, Warp X. Warp X was the result of a funding initia-
tive jointly managed by the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund and
Film4, called the Low Budget Film Scheme. The funders were specif-
ically looking for a reliable studio to develop digital films on small
budgets. Herbert’s contacts at EM Media and Screen Yorkshire, regional
screen agencies for the East Midlands and Yorkshire, as well as with
Optimum Releasing, combined with Gutch’s wealth of production expe-
rience (and, of course, contacts at Film4) to, as Gutch put it, ‘tick all
the boxes’. Housed as a separate unit within the flourishing Sheffield-
based Warp Films production company, Warp X was awarded £3 million
to produce a slate of digital films. A press release stated this aim
explicitly:
The launch of Warp X comes at a time when the British film indus-
try is beginning to explore the implications of digital technology
for traditional production and business models. The harnessing of
cutting edge digital technology with low budget production meth-
ods, namely high definition, will enable Warp X to be well placed
to take advantage of the coming digital transformation of film

distribution.18
Warp X, then, is not only a low-budget film operation, but a specifically

digital one. It was also clearly marked as a project that aimed for its films
to find a significant audience, a consistent problem for experimental
and low-budget cinema. This marks a radical change in attitude towards
digital technology in a short amount of time.
Between the establishment of the FilmFour Lab and the mid-2000s,
digital technology had moved from an object treated with suspicion
by established filmmakers, to one which inspired an explosion in new
forms of filmmaking. In 2008, a report commissioned by the UK Film
Council estimated that around 100 films per year were being made
on low- and micro-budgets (that is, under £1 million), of which only
around 18 per cent were shown in UK cinemas.19 An influential fac-
tor here was a growing range of digital technologies becoming ever
more accessible to low-budget producers. The report found that ‘The
main shooting medium for these films was most commonly Mini DV
(31%), followed by HD (21%), Digibeta (12%), HDV (11%), 16mm
(10%) and 35mm (8%)’, which shows an overwhelming majority of
low-budget films being made using digital technologies.20 Moreover,
the quality of such technologies, particularly the image definition and
sound capture and editing capabilities, was improving, with much HD
technology able to approximate the conventional look, sound and feel
of 35mm filmmaking by the time the Warp X project began. In addi-
tion, an expansion in the accessibility of digital post-production special
effects enabled filmmakers with sufficient determination to create high-
quality visuals for modest productions. This was the approach of Gareth
Edwards’s Monsters (UK, 2010), a science-fiction film whose special
effects won the film considerable critical and commercial success. Robin
Gutch noted that this film ‘changed the landscape’, arguing that it really
showed ‘what you could do’ with digital production methods on small
budgets. More than anything, the film’s success demonstrated that dig-
ital production methods and a small budget are not impediments to
commercial success.
Warp X films demonstrated creative solutions to some of the con-
straints of working on small budgets. A Complete History of My Sexual
Failures (Chris Waitt, 2008) was a comedic documentary, in which the
research process – that is, the filmmaker quizzing his ex-girlfriends
about how their relationships went awry – is the content of the film
itself. Clearly influenced by the work of Michael Moore and the recent
independent hit Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004), the film nev-
ertheless made a virtue of its low-fi production methods. Bunny and
the Bull (Paul King, 2009) made a creative virtue of its low budget
by filming entirely in-studio against a green-screen, adding the film’s
colourful backdrops and props in post-production. The premise of the
film allowed it to do this: because it is set inside the protagonist’s head,
the backgrounds, special effects and stunts need not be verisimilitudi-
nous; they need only effectively convey the story. Many of the Warp X
films were reviewed favourably because of these creative solutions,
though none truly achieved the magic combination of overwhelming
critical and commercial success.
‘Commercial success’, of course, is relative to budget, and may be
more productively expressed, as it often is in industry parlance, as the
‘ability to find an audience’. This was the key objective for the Warp X
slate, though each funding body involved in the scheme had different
ideas about how this could be achieved. The UK Film Council and Opti-
mum tended to favour high-concept genre pieces, like Hush, Donkey
Punch and A Complete History of My Sexual Failures. Gutch noted that
the first of these were, in fact, pound-for-pound, the most commercially
successful of the slate, alongside Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011). Film4’s
taste, on the other hand, leant more towards films like Tyrannosaur
(Paddy Considine, 2011) and Berberian Sound Studio, the former an
intimate and devastating domestic drama, the latter an eccentric psy-
chological horror. These were the kind of films that, Gutch suggested,
might have been funded by the FilmFour Lab. The financial investment
of different parties in the Warp X slate meant that funding decisions
were based on a series of compromises. Film4, alongside the other
parties, had significant editorial control over the Warp X slate.
Given Film4’s level of influence over the films produced under the
Warp X slate, and the synchronicity of Gutch’s movement to Warp X
with the FilmFour Lab’s integration into the body of Film4, one
might suggest that the ‘old remit’ side of Film4’s operations was now
being ‘outsourced’ to Sheffield. Some of the objectives of Warp X are
noticeably similar to those of the FilmFour lab (and to PSB principles
generally):
• to source a diverse range of filmmaking talent and mentors

• to provide new opportunities to increase the participation of groups
currently under-represented in the UK film industry
• to create much-needed progression routes into the UK film industry
for identified filmmaking talent.21
In partnership with Warp X, then, Film4 was still involved in making

the kind of cinema that the Lab represented, and, crucially, these films
still carried the Film4 brand. The Warp X slate culminated in the release
of For Those in Peril (Paul Wright, 2013), and the operations have now
folded into Warp Films. The relationship between Warp and Film4 is
still strong, though, as the funder has a first-look deal with Warp for any
feature project currently in development with the company.
Celebrating its tenth year in 2013, Warp is now recognized as one of
the UK’s leading film production companies. The origin story of the
company’s name, perhaps apocryphal, is that it was supposed to be
called Warped, but the ‘-ed’ tended to be lost when spoken, leading to
the eventual title. The story gives an indication as to the kinds of prod-
uct that the company aims to make: boundary-pushing, risky, quirky
and cool. These attributes conform to the traditional image of Film4 as
a brand, and the types of films that the PSB tended to support. The part-
nership with Warp Films allows Film4 to continue to make the riskier
productions on which it built its reputation. In turn, the support that
Warp has received from Film4 (alongside other funders) has been cru-
cial to its success. As Gutch noted, ‘[its] history would be certainly very
different and possibly quite a lot shorter . . . without them. They’ve been
in pretty well every film.’ So, although the FilmFour Lab signalled the
end of Film4’s direct institutional involvement in low-budget British
filmmaking, through sympathetic partnerships with parties that share
similar tastes, the PSB has continued to support the growing low-budget
digital sector.
‘Welcome to a new world of sound’: Creativity and constraint in

Berberian Sound Studio
Berberian Sound Studio was the penultimate release from the Warp X
slate, achieving a small distribution in September 2012 after a debut
at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The film was produced on a budget
of just over £1 million, which is on the larger side for the Warp X
scheme, particularly since it was a less ‘commercial’ prospect than some
of the other films produced. Much of the budget was spent on studio
equipment and lighting, which is used to create the oppressive envi-
ronment of the titular studio, to connote rather than show explicitly
the graphic content of its film-within-a-film, and to provide a clear
(and handsome) genre-appropriate aesthetic. The film is, in many ways,
a brilliant response to the constraints that such restrictions as time
and budget produce. As Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson puts it,
‘Strickland has conjured so much with so little – which sounds like a
definition of the artifice of movies.’22 In this short case study, I explore

how the film uses a clever premise and the use of particular effects as
creative solutions to the constraints of low-budget filmmaking.
Ostensibly an affectionate homage to 1970s Italian horror movies,
the film is also a psychologically centred exploration of the affect of
film sound effects. The film begins with the lonely, diminutive figure of
English sound engineer Gilderoy (Toby Jones), arriving at the Berberian
Sound Studio. He has been hired by famous Italian director Giancarlo
Santini (Antonio Mancino) and his surly producer Corragio (Cosimo
Fusco) to work on ‘The Equestrian Vortex’, a low-budget exploitation
horror film about witches, torture and revenge. More used to working
on children’s television and natural history documentaries in his shed,
Gilderoy becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the film’s brutal con-
tent and descends slowly into a mental breakdown, caused in equal parts
by the fictional horrors that surround him and the unhealthy work envi-
ronment of the studio. The bulk of the film’s ‘action’ takes place within
the sound studio, where actors expressively perform ADR for the film’s
soundtrack, and foley artists produce the sounds of flesh being hacked,
hair pulled out, skin branded with hot pokers and bones broken, all with
various types of vegetable matter. Unsurprisingly, the soundtrack carries
much more story information than the visuals. Most of the key story
action is implied, not shown explicitly.
Snippets of information about the content of Santini’s movie are
drip-fed throughout the narrative. The only images shown are its title
sequence, which takes the form of a blood-red background with block
writing and vertiginous, shuddering line-drawn images, apparently from
the film’s narrative. The sequence appears after a jump cut, with a sud-
den burst of sound providing an assault on the viewer’s senses. The
audience is thus given a shorthand introduction to the content of
the film-within-a-film. Details of this film’s plot are delivered through
the stage directions given to provide context for the voiceover perform-
ers. A typical example of this is the direction to the two female leads,
encased in a tiny recording booth, that the sequence they are providing
dialogue for unfolds: ‘Teresa and Monica surreptitiously enter the secret
equestrian library and find a treatise on witchcraft.’ The actresses provid-
ing Teresa’s and Monica’s voices continue to whisper the film’s dialogue
onto the soundtrack, framed in an intimate medium-close-up so that
their (performed) wide-eyed terror can register with the viewer. In other
performance scenes, actors portraying a witch and a goblin manage to
embody hideous creatures purely through the bizarre vocalization of
non-verbal utterances, in both cases gradually building to a frenzied

crescendo. The way in which Berberian Sound Studio and its film-within-
a-film produce horrors is ironically inverted: whereas, despite Santini’s
protestations to the contrary, ‘The Equestrian Vortex’ is clearly shown
to provoke sadistic pleasure in explicitly showing the torture of on-screen
characters (through vaginal mutilation, drowning, burning and so on),
Berberian Sound Studio’s terrors are stimulated in the imagination of the
viewer, both visually through watching the hysterical performances of
the diegetic actors and, more importantly, aurally.
Berberian Sound Studio, as its title suggests, is a film about sound, and
about the important role it plays in creating cinematic affect. Sound is
used to convey temporal setting, then, but also to tell the film’s paral-
lel stories. Not only are the main encounters between the viewer and
‘The Equestrian Vortex’ through the sound effects and snippets of dia-
logue we hear, but sound is also used to tell Gilderoy’s story, particularly
to indicate psychological fragility. He uses his sound effect tapes – the
ticking of a carriage clock, the chirruping of birds – to remind him of
home, but his use of falsified sounds will gradually lead to an inability
to distinguish between real and fictional worlds. Whether in the form of
dialogue or sound effects, much of the crucial information in the film is
carried aurally rather than visually.
By carrying two interlinked stories in one film, by stimulating the
viewer’s imagination through verbal allusion to the plot of the film-
within-a-film, by providing story information largely through sound,
and by combining these aural effects with specially designed light-
ing to create mood, Berberian Sound Studio offers aesthetically satisfying
answers to the challenge of low-budget film production’s various con-
straints. Gutch argued that a disciplined director and production team
can do much to keep down budgets on films, citing Ben Wheatley’s work
on Kill List (made for around £650,000) as an example. Costs can be
brought down not only through the use of digital production methods,
but also by fully exploiting cost-effective post-production techniques.
However, it is important that this is not used as an excuse to drive
budgets down too far. As Gutch noted, the ‘creativity in constraint’ argu-
ment is ‘sometimes used by financiers as a get out of jail free card’.
In other words, the use of such imaginative storytelling techniques
as is evident on Berberian Sound Studio is unique to a film with this
particular narrative, aesthetic and tonal sensibility. Low budgets may
necessitate creative solutions, but they are by no means a stimulant to
the imagination that is desired by the filmmaking community.
BBC Films and micro-budget film schemes
The involvement of a public funding body brings complications as well

as support to projects like the Low Budget Film Scheme and Warp X.
In addition to the constraints of already low budgets, the responsibilities
associated with PSBs, laid out not only in their remits but also in gov-
ernment policies regarding the moving-image media industries, mean
that there are a number of hidden additional costs to producing films
in this way, for example the Skills Investment fund, ensuring that a cer-
tain percentage of budget is spent on training. Peter Carlton suggested
that this ‘create[d] a “high low-budget” bracket of films costing up to
around £1.2 million, where a private sector-only production might be
able to make the same film at £800,000–£1 million’.23 The public sta-
tus of the broadcaster entails upon it obligations absent from private
investors in this kind of micro-budget scheme, as Jane Wright of BBC
Films argued: ‘as [the BBC is] funded by licence fee payers . . . we can’t
ignore guild minimums and other standards’.24 For the BBC, attention
to maintaining certain ‘standards’ is crucial both to the way in which
the institutional bureaucracy works and to the corporation’s public rep-
utation and brand image. The following case study examines the BBC’s
involvement in three ‘micro-budget’ film production schemes. It con-
siders how the schemes reflect aims of the PSB and how the BBC uses
(or excludes from record) the supported films to bolster its image as a
major public film funder.
The Digital Departures scheme took place in Liverpool as part of its
celebrations for the 2008 European Capital City of Culture year. It was
run by the regional film agency Northwest Vision and Media, and its
other partners were the UK Film Council and the Liverpool Culture
Company. It was a competitive scheme in which teams of filmmakers
applied for funding of up to £250,000 to make a digital feature film
which was developed, shot and post-produced in Liverpool. Three film
projects were eventually selected and made in 2008: Terence Davies’s
nostalgic film-poem Of Time and The City (2008); Salvage (Lawrence
Gough, 2008), a horror shot on the former set of Brookside (Channel 4,
1982–2003); and Kicks. The films were intended for national and inter-
national distribution, and the BBC took television rights in exchange for
their part in the funding of the scheme. Steve Jenkins, at the time head
of Film at BBC programme acquisitions, sat on the selection panel for
Digital Departures, which endowed him with a certain level of agency
over the quality of the filmmaking by championing projects which
were likely to attain these standards. So, although this was a scheme
predicated on low budgets and new film producers and/or directors,

the BBC and other agencies involved had a reasonable amount of con-
trol over the quality of the eventual products of the scheme. Though
the BBC’s connection to Digital Departures was through programme
acquisition rather than commissioned through BBC Films, the depart-
ment was given a credit in each film; they were promoted using BBC
Films branding, and included, for a time, as part of the BBC Films
catalogue.
Digital Departures was followed by a successor scheme, iFeatures,
which moved the region of interest from the north-west of England to
the south-west. Based in Bristol, iFeatures was initially set up in 2009 by
Christopher Moll, in order to ‘forge a stronger, more confident on-screen
identity for cities in the English regions’.25 Like Digital Departures,
the scheme comprised a competition to develop film projects that had
strong regional themes and representations and, for shortlisted projects,
support for further script development. Three features were then green-
lit and awarded production funds of up to £350,000 to make a digital
feature film. The first slate of iFeatures included Al Siddons’s In The Dark
Half (2011), a thriller set in suburban Bristol, Mark Simon Hewis’s 8 Min-
utes Idle (2014), a romantic comedy about a call-centre worker who finds
himself living at his office when he is evicted from his family home,
and Kasia Klimkiewicz’s Flying Blind (2012), starring Helen McCrory as
an aerospace engineer who causes a security alert by pursuing a relation-
ship with a younger Muslim man. As with Digital Departures, the BBC
was a key partner in iFeatures, though there were important collabora-
tions too with various local and national screen agencies like South West
Screen and the UK Film Council. Whereas Digital Departures exploited
a moment of cultural interest in a particular city, iFeatures is an expres-
sion of a wider desire to open up moving-image production to regions
outside of London. Becoming less metro-centric has been a long-term
goal of the BBC: it was the inspiration for the creation of such depart-
ments as English Regions Drama, and one of the motivations for the
£942 million change of premises for various BBC departments includ-
ing Children’s, Sport, Radio 5Live and BBC Breakfast to the Media City
complex in Salford in 2012.26 The expressed goal of iFeatures (and Digi-
tal Departures), then, is consistent with long-term stated aims of the PSB
to decentralize production and create more regional and localized rep-
resentations of Britain. The use of low-budget film schemes to do this,
though, suggests a general lack of confidence in the ability of such cities
to deliver the higher-quality, mainstream productions associated with
the parent company, BBC Films.
The iFeatures scheme was renewed in 2012 by Creative England –

the umbrella agency which replaced regional screen agencies following
the closure of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2010. The new remit
of the project, titled iFeatures,2 widened the scope of the scheme to
include any film project located in an English region, not just the south-
west. Though the specificity of the scheme to the south of England had
been lost, the focus on strong regional films was retained, to the extent
that one of the greenlit films from the second round of competition was
actually titled Norfolk, a clear indicator of regional interest. The website
announced: ‘Our scope is now broader but we’re still hungry for films
that can capture a sense of place, and even time. Tales of the way we live
and the world we live in that will challenge, move and entertain audi-
ences across the world.’27 The films are put, therefore, in the difficult
position of satisfying two conflicting aims: local or regional representa-
tion and specificity, but global scope of interest. The iFeatures scheme
shows how the public status of funding schemes, particularly those with
small pots of money (where the funder’s risk is somewhat lower than for
films with higher budgets), can influence the choices of which projects
to back. There is a convergence here of objectives between public fund-
ing agencies and the BBC: to make films that say something about a
particular region, albeit small films that are nevertheless expected to
find an international audience.
Film London’s Microwave (launched in 2006) is an ongoing project
designed to support first-time filmmakers by providing up to £100,000
worth of funds as well as bespoke training, development and support.28
The scheme’s first round produced the Heathrow-set horror Mum and
Dad (Steven Sheil, 2008), the urban drama Shifty (Eran Creevy, 2008)
and Freestyle (Kolton Lee, 2008), a teen romance set on South London’s
basketball courts. All of these films were unlikely to have been made
without this kind of support, and certainly not on higher budgets. The
Microwave website offers this description of the scheme’s ‘ethos’:
• Championing unique and visionary talent to get out there and make
films.
• Challenging and supporting film-makers moving from shorts to
features.
• Offering advice and sharing industry knowledge with micro-budget
film-makers.
• Encouraging debate and raising the profile of micro-budget film-
makers across the UK and internationally.29
There are obvious parallels between these aims and those of the
FilmFour Lab and of Warp X, particularly around support for new
filmmaking talent, and the use of public funding to widen the range
of voices in the film industry. The BBC’s involvement in these schemes
is a clear example of the use of BBC funds as a kind of public subsidy, a
stimulus for the low-budget filmmaking sector. Microwave does not dis-
tinguish itself as digital-specific, though films made through the scheme
have all been shot digitally, as it is unlikely that a feature could be made
on celluloid for the same cost.
In return for their financial support, the BBC again take televi-
sion rights to the Microwave films, and the BBC Films logo features
prominently on these film’s credit sequences and in their promotional
material. Micro-budget features are different from other BBC Films mate-
rial in quality, genre, themes and, crucially, target audience, which is
considerably more youthful than the expected audience profile for the
average BBC Film. The presence of BBC Films in these low-budget,
slightly edgier films is good for the institution’s brand image, making
it appear more contemporary than is suggested by the remainder of its
film output, which is decidedly more middle-brow. Films like Freestyle,
Shifty and Kicks are clearly oriented towards a youthful and cultural
minority audience with whom the BBC has difficulty associating itself.
In PSB terms, the provision of funds to these films clearly conforms to
objectives of social cohesion, diversity and serving under-represented
minorities. In other words, the association with this kind of film is a
potential boon for BBC Films’ image and legitimacy.
The most obvious way in which BBC Films associates itself with these
films is through its own online catalogue. Herein are some interesting
omissions. The 2011–2012 catalogue contained entries on the Digital
Departures features Of Time and the City and Kicks but not Salvage, and
of the first round Microwave films, Shifty and Freestyle were included but
not Mum and Dad. The unifying feature between the two absent films
is, of course, genre: both are (rather gruesome) horror films, the rights
to both of which were sublicensed to the low-budget pay-TV genre ser-
vice, The Horror Channel. The decision to omit these films from the
catalogue indicates the importance of maintaining BBC Films’ brand
identity. The catalogue acts as a promotional tool for BBC Films. Jacqui
Barr, head of marketing at BBC Films, argued that ‘we want to highlight
titles that are a strong indicator of our brand, in order to encourage
partner investment in our films’.30 In maintaining the BBC Films brand,
then, certain low-budget digital titles are emphasized over others. That
horror films do not fit with the BBC brand is understandable, given the
genre’s popular reputation for low-quality, trashiness and exploitation,
particularly at the low-budget end of the scale.
Conversely, though, the uptake of the other micro-budget features
acts as a recognition and avowal of their quality. The 2013 BBC Films
catalogue displays the films made as part of the iFeatures and Microwave
schemes in their own separate section. Their presence alongside other,
higher-profile BBC Films also confirms their status as serious films, albeit
different to the higher-profile, glossier and better-marketed mainstream
BBC Films. In an environment of digital convergence, this kind of affir-
mation is crucial not only as a means of promotion and marketing, but
also in terms of producing a level of ontological security: although shot
digitally, and thus materially identical to other digital media, these texts
are distinguished as films. To summarize: they are (serious) films because
they have attained sufficient quality to be presented alongside other
BBC Films. For low-budget digital films, then, institutional identification
is an important factor in both cultural and ontological legitimacy, even
where the institution is more readily associated with the rival medium
of television.
Kicks: Making a film in a televisual city

Though all three films selected for the Digital Departures scheme
were intended to reflect, represent and celebrate the city of Liverpool,
there are strong reasons to argue that Kicks is the most representative,
not only in aesthetic, but also in narrative. Its story concerns Nicole
(Kerrie Hayes), a lonely, neglected 15-year-old in love with her favourite
Liverpool footballer, Lee Cassidy (Jamie Doyle). Queuing outside Anfield
stadium to catch a glimpse of her idol, she encounters Jasmine (Nichola
Burley), equally obsessed with Liverpool FC, but for different reasons:
she wants to marry a famous footballer to achieve wealth and fame.
Jasmine encourages gauche Nicole to go to bars, and try to access VIP
areas, but they are unwilling to engage in the kind of sexual barter-
ing required to gain entry. The girls meet and kidnap Lee, enticing
him to an abandoned caravan with the promise of sex and alcohol.
When she realizes that Lee is a misogynist and sexual predator, a dev-
astated Nicole threatens to shoot him in the foot, ending his career,
but she relents and unties him, for which he repays her by violently
kicking her in the stomach. The film ends with Jasmine and Nicole,
dreams shattered, walking away from the city as the sun rises on a new
day, filmed in long shot, with Liverpool fading into the background
(Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2 Leaving the city behind at the end of Kicks
The film is a meditation on contemporary Britain’s obsession with

celebrity. Its narrative, though, is specific to Liverpool, a city whose
culture revolves to a large extent around football, but that also has a
reputation as a glamorous evening playground for the rich and famous.
Jasmine encapsulates this culture. Her career aspirations are focused on
the single objective of marrying a famous person, but she is scorned
by her worldlier friend Jade (Laura Wallace), who shows expertise in
navigating Liverpool’s night-time culture and achieving that sought-
after proximity to the VIPs. Jade, unlike Jasmine, conforms to the
stereotype of Liverpool women: her hair is highlighted blonde and
bouffanted, her skin is covered in the orange lacquer that results from
spray tanning, she wears excessive make-up and tight-fitting clothes.
Jasmine seems rather to embody instead the femme fatale of the Film
Noir, with her long dark hair, smoky eye make-up and oriental silken
dresses. She represents two complementary ideas: the generic conven-
tions the film wants to emulate, and a wider existing culture of young
women who exploit their sexuality for material gain. This particu-
lar subculture thrives in Liverpool, and it is for this reason that the
film’s director, Lindy Heymann, noted that ‘in Liverpool, certainly, it
felt like this situation could happen’, adding that she was concerned
that a similar scenario happening in real life could disturb the film’s
distribution.31
Heymann also described the importance of casting the film from the
Liverpool area, because ‘it was a particular world we wanted to honestly
reflect.’32 The casting of Kerrie Hayes as Nicole most clearly demon-

strates this, as the actress grew up in Liverpool, and thus looks and,
more importantly, sounds authentic, speaking in her natural ‘scouse’
accent. Nicole embodies Liverpool as a space. In the first shot of the title
sequence an old car tyre frames Nicole’s face, with a reverse shot fram-
ing a cityscape within the same tyre. Nicole and the city are juxtaposed
in such a way as to suggest they are intertwined. The opening goes on
to set the lonely figure of Nicole against a number of Liverpool back-
drops, like the artwork Turning the Place Over by Richard Wilson, built
in Liverpool city centre for the Capital of Culture year, or the docks
which are among the city’s most famous assets. Nicole navigates the
city expertly. She introduces Jasmine to secret locations: the Liverpool
training ground, the garage in which Lee parks his car, and the set of
stairs-cum-statue which provides a view inside his apartment. In dif-
ferent ways, cultural and aesthetic, the main characters are used as
Liverpool archetypes in order to tell a story that is positioned as specific
to the place.
Kicks, then, is an evocation of a city with a certain reputation in con-
temporary culture. How does this tally with its status as a low-budget
digital film? As with all low-budget films, financial constraints meant
that creative decisions were all-important in achieving the aesthetic. The
tensions associated with action set-pieces in more conventional thrillers
had to be provided in this case through, as Heymann puts it, ‘things
we could control, which was the way that we shot it, the locations
we chose’.33 The film’s aesthetic is created in large part through canny
use of location shooting. Though many of the film’s key scenes are set
in the more confined and intimate space of the interior of a caravan,
this is shown through establishing shots to be housed within larger,
more striking locations, the abandoned docks of Liverpool’s water-
front. According to Heymann, ‘You couldn’t have found a better place
to create tension.’34 Location and aesthetic are inherently connected
in Kicks.
However, despite Heymann’s sense that Liverpool offered up these
impressive spaces to create the striking visual style, the location pre-
sented a cultural challenge:
I went up there initially being quite cynical, I suppose, because so

much television gets shot in Liverpool. We were very conscious that
we wanted to make a movie, a movie that would have its own unique
sensibility . . . I was paranoid about making something that looks like
television.35
This comment emphasizes the central importance of the aesthetic dis-

tinction of (digital) film in relation to television. Liverpool has strong
enough connections with television to render it an aesthetically ‘televi-
sual’ space. There is some evidence to support this idea: the Liverpool
Film Office has produced a (not comprehensive, but extensive) list of
moving-image media produced in Merseyside, which lists 139 feature
film projects (stretching back as far as the Lumière Brothers’ film of
Liverpool docks made in 1896) but nearly 250 television projects pro-
duced in the city.36 Alongside a subject matter that can be seen as
belonging to trashy, tabloid culture, the associations with the low-brow
and degraded medium were, to this director, to be avoided at all costs.
Heymann’s paranoia about televisual aesthetics in the film, though
clearly the result of some artistic snobbery about television and its cul-
tural status, are exacerbated by identical material composition of digital
moving-image media. It is thus a matter, as Heymann quite rightly
points out, of how the filmmaker treats the story content and stylis-
tic form, rather than the literal process of filmmaking as distinguished
from television production. Liverpool offered the epic landscapes and
dark, brooding locations that Heymann wanted to achieve the generic
feel of a thriller, but these came alongside a series of cultural assump-
tions about the city that render it rhetorically a ‘televisual space’. For a
filmmaker on a modest budget, making a film with digital production
techniques, these connotations were a challenge to be overcome.
Conclusion
Advances in the quality of digital video, including HD, have meant that
digital aesthetics are no longer as distinctive as they were in the early
2000s. No longer is there the kind of video flatness of My Brother Tom,
and digital capture and imaging is now used as standard on film projects
at all budget levels. In 2001, Saul Metzstein argued with great prescience
that ‘in five years’ time . . . none of us will be able to tell the differ-
ence between something shot on film and something shot on video’.37
In addition to greater definition and vastly increased computing power
being brought within the means of the budget filmmaker, the growth of
digital 2K and 4K projection in UK cinemas (culminating in over 90 per
cent penetration by April 2013), in addition to a wealth of other digi-
tal platforms for distribution (DVD and Blu-Ray, streaming, download,
video on demand and so on), obviates the need for celluloid film. Micro-
budget films’ ability to be distributed across many different platforms,
including cinemas, attests to the lack of distinction made between the
image quality of digital and film. This seems to evidence an aesthetic

logic of convergence: that the specificities of audiovisual media con-
tract, and that there is no tangible distinction between different media
produced digitally. However, Duncan Petrie argued:
For digital to have any major impact it must serve at the centre of
contemporary cinema culture and not just at the margins – it is clear
that the pressure is for digital video to approximate the aesthetic
conventions of the cinema.38
Whereas established rhetorics of digital convergence convince that dig-

ital media must be alike, this concept clearly proposes that a particular
‘cinematic’ image quality and aesthetic is privileged culturally, and thus
all digital audiovisual media called ‘film’ must conform to this particu-
lar aesthetic. As Lindy Heymann’s paranoia about making a digital film
in a televisual city attests, there is a significant desire to separate – to
distinguish – the two media, even where technically and aesthetically
they converge.
Under a digital technological regime, the term ‘convergence’ refers
to the reduction of all audiovisual elements to code, and the conse-
quent ability of any audiovisual work to be exhibited in any way. This
is a problem for the (public service) broadcaster in a post-digital age;
how can terms which previously seemed incontrovertible and common
sense, like ‘film’ or ‘television drama’, still be meaningful when their
purest constituent parts are the same? The separation has much to do
with how the producing institution conceives of these films and their
quality/value, and, consequently, how they are presented to the public.
Even low-budget films are made distinct from television through care-
fully managed discourse although, as the case of Kicks attests, creative
and aesthetic choices can also play a strong role in maintaining medial
differences. The ontological and institutional statuses of these texts are
inextricably linked to one another: British films that bear the marks
of film-funding agencies – including those associated with broadcast-
ing institutions – rather than television are easier than those without to
identify as legitimate films as opposed to video or television, even where
they are made of the same ‘stuff’, the ones and zeros of binary code.
5
‘Great Films You Know, Great Films
You Don’t’: The Birth and Life of
the FilmFour Digital Channel
The FilmFour digital channel’s slogan cannily encapsulates the digital

channel’s aims and ethos: that the channel simultaneously will cater to
a viewer’s existing tastes and introduce them to directors, film cultures
or individual films that they may never have otherwise encountered.
FilmFour promises to act as a catalyst for film culture: maintaining the
centrality of certain films in the culture and introducing new ones.
These aims are continuities of Channel 4 tradition. FilmFour was Chan-
nel 4’s first digital subsidiary; so as Channel 4 extended into the new
digital broadcasting environment, it took with it one of its core brand
values – the commitment to film culture. Here, I assess FilmFour as a
digital broadcaster, both in terms of the offer it made to its viewers and
potential subscribers on its opening night and in terms of the content
shown on the channel over the course of its first decade.
I begin the story of FilmFour right at the beginning, with its open-
ing night programming. The first night of FilmFour was simultaneously
broadcast on terrestrial Channel 4 as a means of promoting the new
digital channel. Close attention to the promotional strategies of this
opening night programming reveals an address to a specific type of
audience: the youthful middle-class audience with which Channel 4
increasingly aligned itself. FilmFour was thus marketed as the provider
of ‘quality’ film, indicated by the promotional mantra ‘classic film, cult
film, independent film, foreign film’. It was proposed, explicitly and
implicitly, as the alternative to current film provision on television, and,
to a certain extent, to television itself. I then test these claims against
FilmFour’s actual content, using a sample survey of channel schedules
during the 1999–2009 period. I consider how changes in carriage, fund-
ing arrangement and identity during the course of these ten years are
manifested in the kinds of films that were shown on FilmFour, and how
135
they were scheduled. The case study pays close attention to the subtle
shifts in the channel – from alternative to mainstream, from specific to
general, from digital narrowcaster to television broadcaster. This chapter
considers how FilmFour’s position as a digital broadcaster has evolved,
how its function and identity have shifted with the rapid changes in the
digital broadcasting environment.
Launched in November 1998, FilmFour was originally a premium sub-
scription channel, available on Sky analogue and digital satellite, NTL
cable and ONDigital, Britain’s first digital terrestrial television provider.
It performed well in its first year, attracting 250,000 subscribers to the
channel by the end of 1999. In February 2001, Channel 4’s digital sub-
sidiaries were incorporated into a new umbrella company, 4Ventures.
This commercial arm aimed to boost overall funding for the corpora-
tion, and incorporated pay-TV channels, web services and FilmFour Ltd.
In April 2001, FilmFour expanded into a portfolio of channels, includ-
ing the main FilmFour channel and its timeshifted +1 variant, FilmFour
World, which broadcast foreign-language cinema from 4pm to 10pm,
and FilmFour Extreme, which shared a channel to show controversial
and ‘cult’ cinema between 10pm and 4am. In November 2002, fol-
lowing the heavy losses incurred by 4Ventures, Chief Executive Mark
Thompson drastically restructured the company. By April 2003, 4Ven-
tures had halved its losses, partially helped by a more commercial,
mainstream outlook taken by the corporation generally. This is exem-
plified at FilmFour by the decision in March 2003 to close World and
Extreme, after audience research found that 70 per cent of surveyed
customers wanted more repeats of mainstream films. The ‘arthouse’
services were replaced by FilmFour Weekly, which showed films in a
stripped schedule, repeating the same three (usually Hollywood) films
at the same time for a week. FilmFour, alongside the other digital sub-
sidiary channels E4 and More4, was disassociated from 4Ventures in
January 2005, and brought back under the corporate management of
Channel 4. In July 2006, Film4 was rebranded and became a free-to-
air, advertising-supported channel on the digital terrestrial Freeview
platform. Because the channel is now, like all other Channel 4 dig-
ital subsidiaries, supported by advertising, its funding is contingent
not on individual subscriber income, but on the traditional television
economics of selling audiences to advertisers.
FilmFour, then, has been something of an experiment in digital broad-
casting for Channel 4. Some of the changes demonstrate the mutability
of particular channels in an unstable (digital) broadcasting environ-
ment. It is also important to remember that the channel was a subsidiary
The Birth and Life of the FilmFour Digital Channel 137
of a larger corporation, and its history is inextricably bound up with

that of its parent company.1 Taking into account these contexts for
FilmFour’s content and character, this chapter examines FilmFour’s indi-
vidual positioning in relation to Channel 4’s brand identity and to film
culture as a whole.
‘A Different Sort of Film Channel’: The opening night

simulcast of FilmFour on Channel 4
The opening night of FilmFour is a significant watershed in the history

this book tells for a number of reasons. It was Channel 4’s first foray
into the digital broadcasting marketplace. Though it would later be fol-
lowed by E4 (in 2001) and More4 (in 2005), FilmFour represented the
corporation dipping its toes in a potentially lucrative new pond: digital
television. The opening night simulcast of FilmFour is also interesting
for the ways in which it manifests, represents and consolidates the core
brand values of FilmFour both as a broadcaster and as a film producer.
The intention of such promotion is to make ‘FilmFour’ mean something
to the interested British consumer, and the following analysis outlines
exactly what this ‘something’ was: the beginnings of a brand identity
built around being cutting-edge and cool.
Before beginning, it is important to establish the industrial and insti-
tutional context in which FilmFour was launched. Throughout the
1990s, there was an increasing sense of threat to established broadcast-
ing institutions from satellite and cable television, though the take-up
of multi-channel television was slow in the UK relative to the United
States. In 1998, a minority of British television-owning homes – around
28 per cent – were able to receive satellite or cable television.2 The
perception (and fear) among broadcasters was, however, that when dig-
ital multi-channel broadcasting was introduced at the end of that year,
the rules of the game would change irrevocably. With the support of
successive governments keen to harness the alleged powers of the ‘dig-
ital revolution’, and with digital terrestrial television legislated for in
the 1996 Broadcasting Act, widespread multi-channel television was
coming, whether the British public wanted it or not. The established
broadcasters’ options appeared to be to evolve or to expire. Under the
premiership of new Chief Executive Michael Jackson, Channel 4 began
to make significant changes to their corporate structure, programming
policy and broadcasting strategy. This period of Channel 4’s history, as
Georgina Born describes, was dominated by strategists, positioning and
projection: ‘a new emphasis was given to strategy, and a number of
executives from pay television and strategists with management con-

sultancy backgrounds were recruited.’3 A key part of the strategy at
Channel 4 was the aggressive targeting of a particular audience, the
younger end of the television market, the 18–34-year-old demographic,
and the top-end ABC1 demographic. FilmFour sought subscribers of a
similar demographic profile. Another response to increasing competi-
tion was to venture into profit-seeking web-based media and pay-TV,
a policy designed both to shore up the corporation financially and to
spread some of its existing remit commitments (including the Chan-
nel’s expertise in foreign and independent cinema broadcast) among
new digital platforms.
Cable and satellite television operate under significantly different eco-
nomic models to traditional broadcast television. Rather than depend
solely on income derived from selling audiences to advertisers, the sub-
scriber model offers satellite and cable broadcasters a steady flow of
money from individual consumers. In turn, though, suppliers must
ensure an attractive programming offer to entice customers to sign up
for subscription services. Freed from regulations in place for public ser-
vice broadcasters to ensure a balanced, mixed schedule catering to a
wide range of tastes, UK cable and satellite providers have tended to
cater for niche audiences by theming channels. A priority in multi-
channel broadcasting had always been to provide channels dedicated to
recent popular movies, with Sky being the main provider of this kind of
channel. Alongside live sports broadcasts, films were perceived as com-
modities for which subscribers would be willing to pay a premium. Sky
TV had long-term output deals with all the major Hollywood studios,
which meant effectively that they had a monopoly on first run pay-TV
rights to the most desirable film content. FilmFour could not, by virtue
of its size and budget relative to Sky, compete directly on this level.
FilmFour had to market itself in opposition to the other movie chan-
nels, and the best option was to define the channel by its difference.
A key distinction FilmFour sought to make was the superior quality of
its product, partly by virtue of the fact that it was a ‘premium’ service.
There are two kinds of subscription channel: basic tier channels, sold
to consumers as part of a package, where fees are shared between a num-
ber of different suppliers; and ‘premium’, where the consumer subscribes
individually to a particular channel. FilmFour cost at least £5.99 per
month, which was rather expensive for a single-channel package.4 The
costing of the package had obvious consequences for the levels of
take-up, since it was beyond the means of many potential customers.
However, as Georgina Born notes, there were two key incentives for
FilmFour to go premium as opposed to ‘basic tier’. The first is finan-

cial: not only are the earnings higher, because each subscriber pays
exclusively for that channel, but also the film rights for premium chan-
nels are cheaper, and can be sold on to terrestrial (or, in the case of
FilmFour, bought as a package for FilmFour and the main channel).
The second consideration is broadly cultural: Born states, ‘[p]remium
status yields substantial cultural cachet’, to which the prestige and repu-
tation of American premium channels like HBO attest.5 In other words,
by maintaining the exclusivity of ‘premium’ status, the channel builds
on a reputation for cutting-edge quality. The channel thus had to be
promoted to a small number of self-conscious, discerning consumers.
It did so by establishing a distinctive and exclusive brand identity.
Branding became an increasingly central strategy for media institu-
tions during the 1990s. As Catherine Johnson puts it:
[d]espite some of the anxieties and inconsistencies in the adoption of

branding by the British television industry, the emergence of digital
television in the late 1990s consolidated the role of branding as a
central strategy in the changing media landscape.6
Channel 4 has been one of the more aggressive harnessers of the

power of brand identity. As Born suggests, the expansion of the Chan-
nel 4 corporation’s identity into a coherent, recognizable brand with
knowable products was a central feature of its defensive strategy: ‘The
strategic plan argued for C4’s diversification through extending its
“core reputation” as a brand, considered to centre on four strengths:
film, entertainment, sports and factual.’7 Clearly, the FilmFour channel
responded to one of these strengths particularly, but it also contributed
to Channel 4’s overall brand identity. Branding not only works by differ-
entiating one channel from another and indicating the particular niche
to which the channel caters. Branding creates a powerful sense of identi-
fication between buyer and supplier, and as such is an important tool in
attracting subscribers to digital/cable networks. Banet-Weiser et al. sug-
gest that branded networks cultivate a ‘sense of belonging’, arguing that
it ‘it is not so much the programs on the individual channels that are
important, but the designs for the channel themselves.’8 So, for their
channels to carry a particular identificatory ‘brand’ is a key strategy for
media companies in the competitive multi-channel environment.
The opening-night programming of FilmFour was a major oppor-
tunity for it to stake its claim for viewer attention (and subscription
fees) in the competitive digital broadcasting environment, to establish
its distinctive brand identity and to define itself by difference from

its competitors. Described by Stephen Armstrong of the Sunday Times
as a ‘breathtakingly saucy piece of cross-marketing’, on 1 November
1998 the opening night of FilmFour was simultaneously broadcast on
terrestrial Channel 4.9 The evening began with a short programme
which lasted around 15 minutes and comprised a series of monologues
about FilmFour by presenter Johnny Vaughn, appearances by British
and American celebrities, and promotional adverts for the new channel
illustrated by clips from the films it would broadcast in the subsequent
months. The aim of this programme was to propose FilmFour as an alter-
native to the low-brow offerings of its rivals, by undermining through
caricature promotional techniques associated with such film products.
The programme begins by parodying the glamour of the Hollywood
awards ceremony. Over a high-angle long shot, a male voiceover, in
an exaggeratedly theatrical tone, states: ‘Live from Channel 4’s London
headquarters, FilmFour proudly presents (pause) FilmFour! An evening
of cinematic pageantry with your host, a Mr Johnny Vaughn!’ The host
emerges from a silver Mercedes-Benz car. His attire is hyperbolically
formal and consists of traditional icons of Hollywood excess: top hat,
dress coat and white scarf, and a large cigar. There is no diegetic sound,
but instead a soundtrack of old-fashioned orchestral Hollywood-style
music. Vaughn is followed by a steadicam-mounted camera keeping
him in medium close-up, which occasionally switches to a point-of-
view shot from his perspective, allowing the viewer to see a small crowd
of ‘paparazzi’ waiting outside the building. He proceeds to the doors of
Channel 4’s Horseferry Road headquarters, and through the backstage of
a television studio, miming pompously giving orders to runners. As he
finally reaches the stage door, the camera cuts to a long shot of a tele-
vision studio, kitted out with a podium, a screen and a small group of
chairs, seemingly ready for a chat show. He approaches the podium to
a brass fanfare which swells to a crescendo as he speaks his opening
line: ‘Welcome to a milestone night in the history of British film: the
simulcast launch of FilmFour!’
By parodying Hollywood presentation in this way, the programme
subtly conveys a critique of the industry itself: Hollywood film is fake,
low-brow and thus culturally inferior to other types of film, that is,
the kind of cinema that FilmFour will offer. The ‘Hollywood’ presen-
tational mode is lampooned throughout the programme as excessive
and phony. There are three ‘guest appearances’ by British film stars
which are in some way faked: Johnny Vaughn introduces an ‘endorse-
ment’ from Ewan McGregor, which seems actually to be merely an
unplanned encounter between the FilmFour camera crew and the star.
Emily Watson, crying with emotion at the honour of being asked to
promote the channel, is shown (through a slow zoom out) to have used
onions to produce tears. An ‘interview’ with Robert Carlyle appears to
be a poorly reconstructed composite of a genuine interview in which
he has been insulted by the questions and annoyed by the interviewer
and becomes aggressive towards the end. Because the re-editing is exag-
geratedly bad, the audience are supposed to know that this tape is a
fake, and thus can infer that there was, in fact, collusion from Carlyle.
The interview is a fake of a fake, beneath which is the genuine coopera-
tion of the actor, who has been willing to perform the self-parody. Here
the opening night subtly tells its audience that FilmFour is endorsed by
‘real’ (British) stars, and will give you unfettered, ‘real’ access to them.
Again, this is juxtaposed with the suggestion that more mainstream
modes of presentation are inauthentic and inferior. In case this mes-
sage has not been made clear enough throughout the show, presenter
Johnny Vaughn makes the point explicitly towards the end. Infuriated
by mistakes and mis-steps throughout the programme, Vaughn finally
breaks down and begins an apparently spontaneous and unscripted rant
to camera: ‘This is ridiculous! What do we need this set for? All this
black tie business? This is FilmFour! Not some cheesy pseudo-Hollywood
thing.’ This speech finally underlines the point made by the opening
programme: that a channel like FilmFour does not need Hollywood’s
spirit of glitz and glamour because it is offering something of higher
value and more authentic.
The main message of the evening was that FilmFour would be dif-
ferent in the same ways that Channel 4 had traditionally been ‘differ-
ent’: by being cutting-edge, rule-breaking and outside the mainstream.
An advertisement for FilmFour transmitted prior to the opening pro-
gramme illustrates this point. The male voiceover claims that FilmFour
is ‘brought to you by the people who break taboos when others want to
play safe’. Connections are set up to a film which, at the time, nicely
encapsulated this spirit of rule-breaking: Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting
(1996). As well as the use of clips from the film – of which there are
three in a 30-second ad – the background music is Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for
Life’, famously used in its soundtrack. Even the Scottish accent of the
voiceover performer recalls the milieu of the film, impersonating its
star, Ewan McGregor. References to Trainspotting were not limited to
this advertisement; they recur throughout the opening evening. David
Gritten of the Daily Telegraph was moved to comment: ‘The channel’s
motto would appear to be: “If you liked Trainspotting, you’ll love this.”’10
Trainspotting became the representative film of FilmFour – edgy and

provocative perhaps, but also successful, and popular with the channel’s
target market of 16–34-year-old upmarket males. As a channel manager
interviewed by Georgina Born noted:
there was an audience we thought was complementary, which wasn’t

saying, ‘I go to the [British Film Institute] and I want to see inde-
pendent films’, but who were saying, ‘Yes, I do like some Hollywood
films, but I like films that are a bit more interesting; I hate it when
they’re formulaic. I like the clever, independent, cutting-edge films
Channel 4 does.’11
The idea of a ‘complementary service’ was expressed during the course

of the evening as the difference between standard Hollywood fare and
‘quality’ cinema. This careful designation of FilmFour’s content as ‘qual-
ity’ in opposition to the kind of content available on other channels
was expedient because FilmFour needed to be positioned to compete
with the mainstream Sky Movie channels.
FilmFour’s version of ‘quality’ is linked to definitions of the term that
assume it is synonymous with the tastes and desires of a particular social
class. This statement, from the week’s Radio Times, makes this more or
less explicit:
Claiming to offer ‘the best in modern contemporary films’,

FilmFour . . . will be wooing not so much the multiplex-goer as the
seasoned arthouse aficionado. ‘It’ll be like having a repertory cinema
in your own living room’, says press officer David Shaw.12
Sites of cinemagoing are used as synecdoches for the kinds of films

shown there, and in turn, the kind of person likely to want to view
the film. Independent or arthouse cinemas are largely visited by middle-
class audiences, whereas the multiplex is perceived to be for those
with less discerning taste. This is the mainstream audience assumed to
be most interested in Hollywood movies, the audience to which Sky
Movies is targeted. FilmFour, then, via aligning itself with the arthouse,
is aiming at the more specific, ‘high-brow’, discriminating audience.
This distinction between the ‘multiplex and the arthouse’ is made clear
in a generic blacklist delivered during one of Vaughn’s monologues:
‘No mindless blockbusters, no inane action romps and certainly none of
that straight to video rubbish.’ This suggests that these genres are pop-
ulist and of low quality. By contrast ‘great’ films are defined, both in the
interstitial advertising and by Johnny Vaughn’s mantra-like repetition,

as ‘classic films, cult films, independent films and foreign films’. The
version of ‘quality’ gels with the tastes of the anticipated audience for
the channel – a middle-class audience that desires an ‘alternative’, a
television ‘arthouse’.
The discourse of taste surrounding FilmFour is that of the film con-
noisseur rather than the film fan, the film buff rather than the movie-
goer. The opening night addresses itself to an audience of cinephiles
through frequent reference to cinemagoing as a cultural activity. The
idea of a ‘cinema in your home’ returns a number of times, but, more
explicitly, the evening also featured a series of short talking heads by
film actors and celebrities recalling memories of cinemagoing, called
‘Cinema Stories’. These play on the nostalgia of the audience for
the experience and enjoyment of going to the cinema. Actor Brenda
Blethyn’s interview is particularly interesting. She recounts trips to the
cinema as a child, when cinema programmes were continuous. She
would arrive in the morning and remain watching the same film repeat-
edly, much to her mother’s chagrin. Her description of being hypnotized
by the screen repeating Calamity Jane is analogous to the experience of a
film channel through which films flow one after another. It seems para-
doxical to employ discourses of nostalgic, locale-based cinephilia as a
selling point for a television channel. The ‘Cinema Stories’ suggest that
FilmFour might provide a kind of enjoyment that is lost, but that can
be reproduced through the facsimile cinephiliac exercise of watching a
‘quality’ film channel. There is a tension at play here. Through refer-
ence to sites of cinemagoing, FilmFour begins to extricate its identity
from association with television proper, to suggest that it is more than
‘just’ television. However, Blethyn’s story points to parallels between
television presentation of film and archaic cinephiliac practices. The
suggestion here is that FilmFour is a different kind of television; a chan-
nel that acts as a remediator of (quality) cinema rather than a television
broadcaster.
Throughout the opening night simulcast, elements that could be per-
ceived as weaknesses of the channel, like showing films that aren’t
recent, aren’t Hollywood and aren’t ‘popular’, are rebranded as ‘clas-
sic’, ‘independent’ and ‘cult’. The linguistic turn here exemplifies how
discourses of ‘quality’ are specific to a group of consumers bounded by
class, wealth and status. FilmFour represented the first part of a long-
term strategy for Channel 4 to establish its brand on digital television.
This strategy aimed for the corporation to be viewed as the alternative
to the norm. This requires an address to an audience that is dissatisfied
with what is already offered them. In film culture, this audience is

congruent with that to which the arthouse cinema appeals. Through
parody and humour, the opening night simulcast proposed that what
was already on offer was tacky, low-brow and inauthentic. Defined in
opposition to this, FilmFour appears an attractive choice to a partic-
ular type of film viewer who had hitherto been sidelined by pay-TV.
As part of the Channel 4 brand, FilmFour could extend the corpora-
tion’s reputation for being edgy, risky and different into the new terrain
of digital television. Furthermore, though, the opening night proposed
that FilmFour was not just ‘different’ to the other movie channels avail-
able on television, but that it was different to television itself. It was to
provide a viewing experience of a new order: it was to be a new context
for exhibiting independent cinema, rather than a television broadcaster
in the sense of the term that was becoming obsolescent in a brave new
digital world.
‘Classic films, cult films, foreign films’? FilmFour

channel survey
Catherine Johnson suggests that branding digital television channels

entails presenting both the ‘network as brand’ and the ‘programme as
brand’.13 Having analysed how FilmFour established its network brand
through its opening night promotions, I now want to turn my attention
to the latter, that is, FilmFour’s film programming, and its contribu-
tion to the channel’s image, self-identification and reputation over time.
This raises methodological questions: how might the work of a channel
over a long period of time be analysed? The first case study investigated
FilmFour’s offer to consumers by analysing interstitial material on a sin-
gle night’s programming. An equivalent focus on branding over the next
decade of the channel’s life would require access to thousands of hours
of broadcast material that is not (officially) archived. I want instead
to focus on the films that the channel broadcast and to analyse how
changes in the channel’s scheduling strategies worked with changes to
its identity over the first ten years of its existence.
I explore these strategies using quantitative data, by conducting
analysis on a sample survey of the films screened on FilmFour. Data
was collected from listings in the Radio Times (supplemented by The
Guardian, The Times and the IMDB) and collated into a database com-
posed of quantifiable units, as the examples in Tables 5.1 and 5.2 show.
I took a sample of data from a week’s schedule on the main FilmFour
channel – one in February, in June and in September – from each year
Table 5.1 Sample of FilmFour channel survey database
Day Date Slot Title Director Year Country Genre Star
Saturday 09 June 2001 6–8pm Yojimbo Akira Kurosawa 1961 Japan Action- Toshiro Mifune
Adventure
Saturday 09 June 2001 8–10pm The Manchurian John Franken- 1962 US Drama, Thriller Frank Sinatra
Candidate heimer
Saturday 09 June 2001 10–12pm The Jackal Michael 1997 US Action, Bruce Willis
Caton-Jones Adventure
Saturday 09 June 2001 12–2am Assault on John Carpenter 1976 US Action, Thriller Austin Stoker
Precinct 13
Saturday 09 June 2001 2–4am Leon Luc Besson 1994 France Crime, Thriller Jean Reno
Saturday 09 June 2001 4–6am Le Samurai Jean Pierre 1967 France Crime, Thriller Alain Delon
Melville
145
Table 5.2 Quantities (era, country, genre) in June 2001 sample week
Era Country Genre
1930–1939 0 Australia 1 Adventure 2

1940–1949 2 France 3 Action 5
1950–1959 2 Hong Kong 1 Comedy 6
1960–1969 5 Jamaica 1 Crime 7
1970–1979 5 Japan 2 Documentary 10
1980–1989 9 UK 6 Drama 10
1990–1999 18 US 29 Horror 1
2000–2009 3 West Germany 1 Western 1
between 1999 and 2009. The sample weeks represent a routine week’s
programming; weeks were carefully selected so that they did not fall in
a holiday period and did not contain any days that would be specially
marked or celebrated in a television schedule. Each film showing has
been counted as a separate ‘event’ in the database, and repeated films
still count towards totals where data is quantified. The results of this sur-
vey are best considered as illustrative rather than definitive. The survey
as a whole aims to demonstrate through analysing FilmFour’s schedul-
ing patterns the prioritization of certain types of films at different points
in the life of FilmFour. In particular, I am interested in testing the claims
made on the opening night: that FilmFour will provide ‘classic’, ‘cult’
and ‘foreign’ films (Tables 5.1 and 5.2).
‘Classic films’: Age

The term ‘classic’ connotes the high-brow, the serious or the canonized.
Promising to provide ‘classic’ rather than ‘old’ films, FilmFour positions
itself as a gatekeeper to historical cinema culture. It would be impossible
to assess through numerical data such a culturally relative and, ulti-
mately, subjective promise as to provide ‘classics’. However, the age of
the films broadcast on FilmFour certainly can be measured. The survey
counts as ‘classic’ any film made more than 20 years before its broad-
cast on FilmFour, which has the advantage of taking into account the
difference in time between 1999 and 2009 – a film made in 1980 may
appear to be more ‘classic’ from the lens of 2009 than it was ten years
earlier.
Before the addition of the portfolio channels in 2001, FilmFour
tended to broadcast more current than ‘classic’ movies, with films over
20 years old only accounting for an average of 19 per cent of out-
put in the sample weeks between January 1999 and February 2001.
This suggests that the subscriber-model FilmFour prioritized recent films

above ‘classic’ films. This seems logical, since consumers are unlikely
to subscribe at a high monthly rate for a film channel whose products
are not up to date. As we’ve seen, FilmFour’s selection had to compete
with Sky, which had both the buying power and the corporate mus-
cle to make deals with the major Hollywood distributors for television
rights to their most popular products. The scheduling of ‘classic’ film on
FilmFour thus had to be carefully measured, in order not to reduce the
attractiveness of the channel to new and existing subscribers.
However, a closer inspection of both the subscriber-model FilmFour
and its Sky rival presents a slightly different picture. Although older
films represent a minority of the films shown on FilmFour, this does
not necessarily mean that the majority of films shown were more up to
date. As can be seen in Figure 5.1, recent cinema, that is, films under two
years old, accounted for tiny proportions of films shown in this period,
never reaching more than 15 per cent of the sample week’s output (in
September 2002). This is largely because distributors and sales agents
tend to allow a ‘window’ between a film’s release and its appearance
on television, between four and eight months for pay-per-view cable
and up to 12 months for subscription movie channels. Of course, more
recent films were more expensive to lease from distributors for televi-
sion. This means that even Sky Premier, a channel designed to show
up-to-date popular cinema, only scheduled newer films in its peak-time
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
<2 years 3–5 years 5–10 years 10–20 years >20 years
Figure 5.1 Age of films shown on FilmFour during sample weeks

slots (beginning, as on FilmFour, at 8pm and 10pm), with the remainder

of the schedule bulked out with either older popular cinema, or more
recent but unfamiliar – often US made-for-television – movies. The aver-
age age of films shown on Film Four during sample weeks is consistently
between 15 and 20 years during the 1999–2006 period. As Figure 5.1
demonstrates, the majority of films shown in this period are between 3
and 20 years old. This undermines the claim that FilmFour is home to
‘classic’ cinema, at least as defined by the age of the films shown. How-
ever, it does conform to the ‘current’, edgy tone on which FilmFour had
clearly staked a large part of its identity.
The bulk of FilmFour’s output in its subscription era, then, is made up
of neither contemporaneous nor ‘classic’ cinema, but rather of recent
but not new films. To compare this with the Sky Movie channels in the
same period, though, their schedules are equally, if not more depen-
dent upon old and obscure cinema. Sky’s movie channel portfolio
between 1999 and 2003 consisted of Sky Cinema, dedicated to show-
ing ‘vintage’ Hollywood movies, and which would often show films
that could be considered ‘classic’ in precisely the vein of FilmFour’s
offerings, though intermixed with less well-known films from the 1930s
to 1970s; Sky MovieMax, a mixed genre, family-oriented channel that
largely showed B-films and American made-for-television movies; and
Sky Premier.14 With a larger portfolio of channels, and more sched-
ule time to fill, the Sky package relied not only on repeats of films
throughout the day (some films were shown three times in one day)
and across the week, but also on obscure and old films. Its brand
distinction, then, was that it could offer a recent film in its peak-
time slots daily, an offer that FilmFour did not match. The rhetoric of
‘classic’ that FilmFour employed, then, both differentiated it from its
competitor and conveniently concealed the fact that the bulk of the
channel’s offering was not new. While FilmFour was asking its sub-
scribers to pay a premium for its service, such a discursive move, the
creation of brand distinction regardless of actual content, was absolutely
necessary.
There is a significant change in the provision of ‘classic’ films after
FilmFour becomes Film4, the free-to-air digital channel, in July 2006.
Now, films over 20 years old account for between 48 and 60 per cent
of the films shown on the channel in the sample week. ‘Classic’ cin-
ema makes up a much more significant proportion of the schedules
during this period, though, unlike before, the scheduling of such cin-
ema becomes quite distinctive. This shift was parallel with an increase
in broadcasting hours: in 2007 Film4 began broadcasting in a 3pm
timeslot, which extended even further in 2008 to 1pm, and to 11am

in 2009. To accommodate these new daytime slots (and the broadcast-
ing strictures of watershed for non-subscription channels), older films,
generally made in the 1930s to 1960s, were broadcast, usually British
World War II films or ‘classic’ Hollywood movies. This is designed to
appeal to an audience of older people who are heavy daytime television
users, and is commensurate with a similar scheduling strategy in place
at Channel 4 for much of the period surveyed. For example, as Table 5.3
shows, in the daytime slots of the February survey week in 2007, films
of a similar era are broadcast in almost immediate succession on Film4
and Channel 4.
Although there are differences in genre across these films, the similar-
ities in era suggest complementary scheduling which creates a kind of
television ‘double-bill’. These scheduling decisions are likely to be based
on the need to fill afternoon schedules with cheap, freely available and
schedule-appropriate material. Broadcast rights to old films like these are
Table 5.3 Complementary scheduling on Channel 4 and Film4, February 2007
Date Start time Channel 4 Start time Film4
Monday 12:30 The Blue Dahlia 15:00 The Wicked Lady

26 February (George Marshall, (Leslie Arliss,
USA, 1946) [Film UK, 1945)
Noir] [Melodrama]
Tuesday 12:30 City That Never 15:00 Horse Feathers
27 February Sleeps (John H. (Norman
Auer, USA, 1953) Z. McLeod, USA,
[Film Noir] 1932) [Comedy]
Wednesday 12:30 A Ticket to 15:00 Death Drums
28 February Tomahawk Along the River
(Richard Sale, (Lawrence
USA, 1950) Huntington, UK,
[Western, 1963) [Adventure]
Comedy]
Thursday 12:30 The Defiant Ones 15:00 There’s No Business
1 March (Stanley Kramer, Like Showbusiness
USA, 1958) (Walter Lang,
[Crime] USA, 1954)
[Musical]
Friday 12:30 Dallas (Stuart 15:00 The Silver Fleet
2 March Heisler, USA, (Vernon Sewell,
1950) [Western] UK, 1943) [War]
usually bought in large packages from distributors, and are thus much
more economical material than high-profile, newer films. After 2006,
funds for Film4 receded as it moved from a subscriber-based business
model to an advertising-based one during a long-term decline in televi-
sion advertising funds. However, the change also brought with it new
potential audiences who use television in different ways compared to
premium channel subscribers. The afternoon cross-scheduling suggests
an address to a different niche – older viewers – who access the channel
through its new (free-to-air) platform.
When FilmFour became free-to-air, its identity was no longer quite
so contingent on comparison with Sky Movies and other pay-TV com-
petitors. It became the only free-to-air film channel on digital terrestrial
television (Freeview) and other digital platforms. Its competitors are no
longer other film-only channels, but all other channels broadcast free-
to-air on digital platforms. Rather than competing with Sky for the
provision of up-to-date films, then, Film4 was freer to schedule films
from a wider range of eras. Throughout its changes in identity and
carriage arrangement, FilmFour substantiated, to a certain extent, its
original claim to be the ‘home’ of classic cinema. Staking its identity
on these grounds would prove expedient as the financial model of the
channel from 2006 onward depended on its ability to show old films at
strategic times in the schedule. However, the increasing transmission of
‘classic’ films does also evidence a shift in the identity of FilmFour from
the innovative, the cutting-edge and the risky to a channel that is safer,
more general and more conservative.
‘Cult films’: Directors and stars

The second original promotional promise FilmFour made is that it
would broadcast ‘cult’ films. Like ‘classic’, the expression ‘cult’ is accom-
modatingly ambiguous, and could refer to a wide range of genres, eras
and forms of cinema. An increase in scholarly interest in ‘cult’ media
since the mid-1990s has provided different ways of recognizing, cate-
gorizing and describing ‘cult’ cinema, whether it is the kind of ‘trash’
cinema for which Jeffrey Sconce coined the term ‘paracinema’ in 1995,
or films that attract ‘fandoms’ of the kind analysed by Henry Jenkins.15
‘Cult’ is a difficult category to define, and does not immediately present
itself as a quantifiable characteristic of particular films. Most definitions
of ‘cult’ film agree that a large part of its identity is predicated not on any
particular quality implicit in the films, but on practices of consumption
that have grown up around them. Mark Jancovich et al. argue that the
cult movie should not be:
defined according to some single, unifying feature shared by all cult

movies, but rather through a ‘subcultural ideology’ in filmmakers,
films or audiences [that] are seen as existing in opposition to the
‘mainstream’ . . . ‘cult’ is largely a matter of the ways in which films
are classified in consumption . . .16
Studies of ‘cult’ film have noted the class and gender dimensions of film
cults, which tend to distinguish themselves from the ‘mainstream’ (as
Jancovich notes, a troublesome term in itself) by ‘Othering’ it, by rele-
gating such tastes to the lower middle class, and to feminine pleasures.17
As Joanne Hollows argues, the ‘processes of classification and catego-
rization through which cult gains a sense of its masculinized identity
are produced in opposition to an imagined feminized ‘mainstream’ ’.18
We have seen that FilmFour appealed to the same sense of ‘othering’
when it designated the offerings of its film-channel competitors as ‘rub-
bish’, and branded itself as an antidote to the mainstream. While there
are economically valid reasons for an ‘alternative’ film channel like
FilmFour to want to marshal these consumptive practices – brand iden-
tity, institutional loyalty, market distinction – at the same time film cults
have traditionally grown independently of, indeed, often in defiance of,
the promotional and economic practices of industry. Indeed, given that
‘cult’ identity is so predicated upon opposition to the mainstream, how-
ever defined, and wilful rejection of cinema as a mass medium, the use
of the description to promote a brand associated with that most ‘mass’
of media, television, seems ironic. The rhetoric is useful, then, in enact-
ing that separation from ‘television’ that was central to the promise
of FilmFour, however politically troubling the appeal to a particularly
masculine, exclusive and elitist set of sensibilities might be.
Another element of ‘cult’ sensibility that seems to conflict with a tele-
vision channel with the institutional history of FilmFour is the tendency
towards ‘bad taste’ and shock tactics that cult film seems to engender.
The FilmFour response to this was to create ‘FilmFour Extreme’, which
was initially a late-night weekend screening slot dedicated to the kinds
of ‘cult’ cinema that have these associations and later became one of
the spin-off channels (alongside FilmFour World) which expanded the
FilmFour portfolio in 2002. The separation of a particular schedule slot,
and later, channel, for such work aligns the FilmFour offering with the
traditions of cult film. For example, a late-night screening slot for such
cult films as Eraserhead (12am, 15 June 2001) or Ring/Ring 2 (2am and
3.40am, 22 February 2003) follows the cult programming ritual of the
‘midnight movie’ which Barry Keith Grant has suggested was central
to the construction of cult as transgressive and as ‘against the logic of

“prime-time” exhibition’.19 By carving out a particular ‘space’ on the
Electronic Programming Guide for such films, FilmFour Extreme took
this symbolic estrangement from the ‘mainstream’ one stage further.
A typical weekly schedule on FilmFour Extreme was made up of precisely
the kind of shock and schlock films that might be seen to constitute
‘paracinema’ in Jeffrey Sconce’s terms, in addition to European art films,
like those of controversial auteur Pier Paulo Pasolini, that challenged
censorship and, as Joan Hawkins has noted, were consumed in the US
with a similar cultish fervour as ‘bad’ cinema.20
In practice, the kind of ‘cult’ tendencies shown by FilmFour largely
conform to only a small subsection of cult attitudes outlined by Ernest
Mathijs and Xavier Mendik in their introduction to The Cult Film
Reader: film buffery and cinephilia. Mathijs and Mendik see these two
approaches to film appreciation as polar opposites. While both are
‘rebellious’ attitudes to cinema, cinephilia is ‘righteous, eclectic and
often pretentious’, condemning ‘mainstream’ taste, where buffery is
equally catholic but less discerning, as film buffs ‘revel[ ] in their appreci-
ation of, and trivial knowledge of, literally every single film.’21 Catering
to this impulse in the ‘cult’ fan, FilmFour has a long history of pro-
viding non-film material. Feature documentaries on particular directors,
eras, genres and individual, or exclusive interviews with directors and
stars were a key part of the schedules during the pay-TV era. The maga-
zine programme Filmspotting was also broadcast frequently, if not quite
regularly, on Friday nights between 1999 and 2002, showing up-to-
date information about the film industry. Even after the channel went
free-to-air, its image as a source of knowledge about movies was main-
tained by promotional campaigns and interstitials featuring popular
and well-respected directors and actors. An example of this is the ‘self-
portraits’, shown on the channel since its move to Freeview in 2006,
where medium close-up talking heads of actors and directors, filmed
in reverential long takes, allow the interlocutor to wax lyrical on a
given subject for some time. The angle of the camera and length of
time devoted to each particular comment suggest intimacy and insight,
regardless of how revealing the words of the speaker actually are. The
implication here, in an echo of the opening night promotions, is
that Film4 has unique access to film personnel, and that, such is the
respect for the channel, these busy and important people devote their
time and thought to these interviews. For the film ‘buff’, the promise
here is information; for the cinephile, it is intelligent interpretation
(Figure 5.2).
Figure 5.2 Danny Boyle discusses collaboration for a Film4 ‘Self Portrait’
The changes in FilmFour’s economic basis entailed a gradual loosen-

ing of the ‘cult’ aspect of the channel’s identity and promise. However,
Film4 did continue to market itself as an ‘alternative’ space, one where
viewers might find cinema outside of the usual mainstream fare, even
that which constituted rather a lot of the material on the channel itself.
Though this work was increasingly marginalized, either placed earlier or
later in the schedules, the channel maintained a stated commitment
to showing high-quality cinema. This is perhaps best represented by
the persistent presence of the work of directors from a cineaste pan-
theon, such as Mike Leigh (represented 16 times in the survey), Ken
Loach (10 times), Yasujiro Ozu (9 times), Atom Egoyan (7 times) and
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (6 times). The ongoing commitment to films
of this kind on Film4 is perhaps best represented by the Autumn 2011
season of films broadcast late at night to complement the showing of
Mark Cousins’s 15-part documentary series The Story of Film: An Odyssey
on sister channel More4 (3 September–10 December 2011). Each film
broadcast responded to the themes that Cousins had idiosyncratically
outlined in his lengthy love letter to the power of cinema. Where
possible (i.e. where the content of the film would not contravene broad-
casting regulations and the watershed) repeat screenings were held in a
morning slot, enabling multiple points of access to the selected movies.
Such sympathetic scheduling is a function of Film4’s cultural role, an
echo of the channel’s origins in Channel 4, the experimental public ser-
vice broadcaster. The Story of Film season indicates the ongoing, albeit
constrained, commitment of Film4 to cineaste tastes. So, although Film4

has gradually loosened ties to a ‘cult’ persona, with fewer leftfield selec-
tions and a far more mainstream choice of cinema on the channel,
especially in peak time, there remains a commitment to important, seri-
ous and canonic cinema, represented by the work of ‘auteur’ filmmakers.
This marginal but important part of the Film4 schedule furthers its rep-
utation as an arbiter of film culture. This is also an important function
of its offering of ‘foreign’ films.
‘Foreign films’: World cinema

FilmFour began with a strong showing of world cinema. In the first
three years, the number of ‘foreign’ films – that is, films not made
in the US or the UK – scheduled in the sample weeks either almost
matched or, in February 2001, exceeded the number of Hollywood films.
These films were not only shown in relatively large numbers, but were
also scheduled at audience-friendly times. So, between 1999 and 2004,
foreign-language cinema was often shown in the 6pm–8pm time slot
as well as appearing late at night or early in the morning, account-
ing for around 29 per cent of the films shown in the sample weeks
at 6pm until 2004. In later years the 6pm slot was no longer the pre-
serve of foreign-language cinema, which was replaced by family-friendly
(mainly) Hollywood cinema. What sort of ‘foreign’ films were shown
in the earlier years? As shown by Figure 5.3, the bulk of world cinema
scheduled on FilmFour has always come from Europe or Asia. Indeed,
France and Japan together account for a large proportion of the world
cinema output in most sample weeks between 1999 and 2005, averaging
at over half of the foreign language films during these periods. This is
perhaps unsurprising, since France and Japan are often considered to be
‘cineaste’ film nations. Indeed, much of the French and Japanese cinema
shown on FilmFour in the pay-TV period is by respected ‘auteurs’ such
as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Vigo.
Foreign-language cinema in the early years is also often related to
the ‘cult’ promise of FilmFour, with films by international cult directors
such as Takeshi Kitano, Luc Besson and Atom Egoyan frequently shown.
There is also a good representation in the 1999–2004 period of popular
genre cinema associated with particular film cultures like Hong Kong
action cinema, such as John Woo’s The Killer (1989), shown in February
1999, and Hard Boiled (1992), shown in September 2001; or Japanese
‘Yakuza’ crime films, like Takeshi Kitano’s Violent Cop (1989), shown
in February 2002. This conforms to the ‘cult’ appeal of FilmFour, by
showing kinds of cinema that are not mainstream in the West but, in
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
F S S J J J F S S J J J F S S J J J F S S J J J F S S J J J F S S
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
US UK English language (other) Europe Asia South America Other
Figure 5.3 Area of origin for films shown in sample weeks
their apparent kookiness, can attract a small, selective (largely male)

fanbase (which, as Jinsoo An notes, is sometimes the result of cultural
misreading).22 This kind of film is a much less prominent part of the
later schedules of Film4.
Although some of the foreign-language cinema shown in the sam-
ple weeks was relatively recent, much of the world cinema shown dates
from before 1970, making it, in the calculations for this survey, ‘classic’
cinema. The frequent recurrence in the sample week schedule of cele-
brated directors like Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as
well as Ozu and Godard, attests to the fact that much of the foreign
cinema shown belongs to a popular critical cinematic canon. FilmFour’s
scheduling of foreign cinema in these earlier sample weeks appears to be
highly selective, representing not a wide spectrum of world cinema, but
rather classic, highly regarded or well-known cinema. This is consonant
with FilmFour’s branding as a channel for film buffs, but also reveals
that the provision of world cinema is bounded by the other elements of
the brand image: the ‘classic’ and the ‘cult’.
There is a noticeable, and perhaps predictable, decline in world cin-
ema after the move to Freeview in 2006, with foreign-language cinema
representing as little as 5 per cent of the total output (in June 2009).
Curiously, though the overall number of foreign films shown declines
rapidly after 2006, the range of foreign cinema shown increases, with
more films from outside Western Europe and Japan shown in the sample
weeks, though foreign-language offerings tend to be relegated to late-
night slots in the schedule. A useful example here is the September 2009
sample week, which offered films from Russia, the Former Yugoslavia,
France and Iran. Each one of these was broadcast in slots between
11.10pm and 3am, with the exception of the French/Iranian animation
Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud, 2007), which had been a relatively suc-
cessful independent film release two years previously, and which had a
re-recorded English-language soundtrack, obviating the need for view-
ers to read subtitles. It appears that the judgement was made that the
wider, mainstream audience that could come to Film4 once it was free
to view would be less willing to read subtitles than the specific, dis-
criminating subscriber audience. The pressure to deliver audiences to
advertisers on the one hand, but to show the ‘alternative’ world cin-
ema that is an important part of its brand identity on the other, is
exemplified in the scheduling of foreign-language cinema after 2006.
However, the commitment to foreign-language cinema despite the chal-
lenge of persuading an uninitiated audience to watch unfamiliar cinema
with subtitles attests to the ongoing cultural objectives of Film4, in addi-
tion to its commercial aims. Although scheduling might militate against
large audiences, the provision of the films themselves remains a valuable
service to a British public woefully underserved with foreign-language
cinema, both at cinemas and through other distribution platforms.
Scheduling – Themes and seasons

The survey results show a relatively consistent scheduling pattern across
the history of FilmFour. Films tend to be scheduled into slots of around
two hours, which means that the channel originally broadcast five or six
films per day (6pm–6am) in 1999, rising to eight or nine films per day in
2009, as the broadcast hours expanded (11am–around 3am). In the early
period of FilmFour, feature films that did not adhere to the rhythms of
the broadcast schedule were supplemented with short documentaries
or short films, which were a key part of FilmFour’s promise to be an
‘arthouse’-style film broadcaster: rather than bulk out the schedules with
commercials, the focus was firmly on film and film culture. Scheduling
patterns changed in September 2006 with the move to Freeview, so
that the prime-time film began at 9pm instead of there being a film
at 8pm and one at 10pm. This allowed the channel to promote these
films explicitly as the major feature of the day’s schedule, which contin-
ues with the campaign slogan ‘Your films at 9’. This scheduling pattern
is sympathetic to the conventional rhythms of broadcast television.

It mirrors the organization of Channel 4 at prime time, which usu-
ally broadcasts its own feature programme at 9pm. Importantly, it also
allows for more adult content to be part of the featured film, as British
television regulations restrict sex, violence or bad language in television
material broadcast before the 9pm ‘watershed’. With the arrival of adver-
tising on the channel, there is less room in the schedule for short films,
and these have become a rarity since 2006. Working to more conven-
tional television programming patterns indicates again the movement
away from Film4 conceiving of itself as an alternative platform for inde-
pendent, alternative cinema and towards presenting itself as one of a
myriad choices of broadcaster in a competitive digital television market.
In keeping with its ‘arthouse’ identity, FilmFour consistently made
efforts to use programming practices akin to those of independent cin-
emas. This is most clearly shown in the scheduling strategy of film
‘seasons’: during the course of a week or longer, films linked by direc-
tor, star or nation of origin are shown together and cross-promoted in
order to strengthen their appeal to the viewer. Unifying film experi-
ences in this way has the dual function of promoting more than one
film screening at a time, raising the profile of the viewing experience.
Examples of such ‘seasons’ in the sample weeks include retrospectives of
Mike Leigh in September 1999, Zhang Yimou in February 2000, Ranier
Werner Fassbinder in February 2006 and Ken Loach in 2009, or the
week-long season of feature documentaries – including cult favourite
Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982) – in June 2001. Perhaps the best-
known theme for a FilmFour season is The British Connection, which is
repeated yearly and consists usually of a week’s peak-time and late-night
programming (9pm–3am) dedicated to British cinema, showing a range
of ‘classic’ and recent films, supplemented by interstitial interview mate-
rial (like the Kill List Special broadcast on Saturday 10 November) and
shorts. Seasons remain a key part of scheduling on Film4, with a page of
the website specifically dedicated to upcoming specials and highlight-
ing the ‘best’ of previous seasons. The rhetoric of ‘seasons’, ironically, is
also part of the offering on Film4OD, Film4’s pay-video-on-demand ser-
vice. Of course, the use of the temporally specific discourse of ‘season’
makes little sense when a viewer has free choice over the time at which
the video is watched, but the sense of curation, of careful selection of
complementary film experiences, that an expert hand is guiding the
viewer’s choice, remains: the website enjoins visitors to ‘[t]ry our themed
seasons for some great ideas of what to watch’.23 Film4OD also empha-
sizes continuities with Channel 4 and Film4; for example, in November
2012, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Channel 4’s launch, it offered

a range of Film4 films for 30p per download. Film4’s reputation and
brand identity as a space for the British film connoisseur extends beyond
the television channel, but the idea of a Film4 ‘season’ originated and
continues to manifest there.
Scheduling seasons, though, is not simply a useful intra-channel mar-
keting tool for Film4, or a means of appeasing a hardcore audience of
cinephiles. Seasons may also act as useful forms of cross-promotion for
other Channel 4 or Film4 products. In November 2010, to promote
the release of Another Year, Film4 showed a season of Mike Leigh Films
(including Life Is Sweet, Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky and
Career Girls, all supported by Channel 4) alongside various interstitials:
interviews, special reports from the Cannes Film Festival where the
film had been shown, and a bombardment of ‘Mike Leigh Specials’ –
15-minute programmes of interviews and clips from Leigh films. This
allows for interesting continuities and synergies between Film4 and the
other Channel 4 subsidiaries. For example, with the broadcast of the
drama series This is England ’86 in November 2010, Film4 programmed a
season of Shane Meadows films, alongside exclusive interviews with the
filmmaker and some of his frequent collaborators. Film4 is in a unique
position to cross-promote Channel 4 and Film4 products. The ability to
reach larger audiences with this kind of promotional material may be
seen to compensate for the loss of Film4’s identity as the best place on
digital television for foreign films, classic films and ‘cult’ films.
The change in the financial basis for Film4 brought with it a loosening
of the ‘arthouse’-style scheduling, which is not only represented by the
kinds of films scheduled, but how they are programmed. These changes
to the schedule, along with the broadcasting of certain kinds of films
at particular times of day (like ‘classic’ films in the afternoon), are evi-
dence of a shift in culture at FilmFour. Where once the films themselves
may have been the organizing principle of programming, alongside the
‘arthouse’ identity, after the channel becomes a mainstream television
channel its schedules are organized to fit with the patterns and rhythms
of television flow rather than to stand out from it. Film4, then, moves
from ‘arthouse’-style programmer, presenter and (exclusive) exhibitor of
film to television broadcaster and remediator of film.
This survey analysis has shown how the various changes in FilmFour’s
identity represent not just a change in marketing strategy, but a recog-
nisable shift in the kinds of films it transmitted and the ways in which
schedules were composed. Over time, the channel programmed fewer of
the kinds of movies – foreign, ‘cult’, independent – that had originally
given it its unique identity, a move easily interpretable as a loosening

of its commitments to the audience it aimed originally to serve. The
changes produced a new identity: Film4 was the only film-only channel
available on the Freeview digital terrestrial television platform (and free-
to-air on other digital television packages such as Sky, Virgin and BT).
This fact meant that it had, by necessity, an individual, unique identity
on that platform. The kinds of films that the channel was able to show
became more varied in terms of genre, era, star and quality. The iden-
tity of Film4 has always been that of the ‘alternative’. After it became
free-to-air, it became the ‘alternative’ not to other movie channels on
digital television, but to television itself. On this level, the branding of
the channel is an act of rhetorical divergence, the separation of FilmFour
from the ‘rest’ of (digital) broadcast television. The channel’s contribu-
tion to film culture on television, then, though perhaps more diluted
than it was originally, remains nevertheless an important supplement
to free-to-air digital broadcast television’s provision of film content.
Conclusion
During one of his monologues in the opening night programme,

Johnny Vaughn tells the audience that ‘tonight, Channel 4 has taken
the unprecedented step of devoting a whole evening’s viewing to the
FilmFour experience’. This utterance encapsulates the message of that
evening: that the night is a one-time-only event and an innovative pro-
motional move – ‘unprecedented’. However, it is the idea that there
exists a ‘FilmFour experience’ that I want to scrutinize particularly
because this expression summarizes neatly the concerns of this chapter.
‘FilmFour experience’ has two discernible functions as an idea. It sug-
gests that the FilmFour channel has an (already-formed) identity, a
brand image that makes the notion of a ‘FilmFour’ experience plausible.
And, further, it proposes that the FilmFour ‘experience’ will be different
from the experience of everyday television.
The FilmFour ‘experience’, to which viewers of the opening simul-
cast would have privileged access for one night only, was a facsimile
of arthouse cinema. FilmFour specifically positioned itself not as a new
television channel, but as an alternative exhibitor of films. The FilmFour
Weekly model, which was predicated on daily repetition, explicitly
undid the idea that a film screening is a special event. This move
indicates changes in digital television towards consumer convenience,
pre-figuring film/television ‘on-demand’ services. These changes have
diminished film on television’s ability to be a ‘special’ experience, and
evidence an important logic of digital convergence: that individual

media’s specific identities erode as they converge. FilmFour’s ‘alterna-
tive’ brand image thus takes on a different meaning: it is not only its
content which is different, but, in separating and emphasizing film
over other media, it appears to work against this logic. The fact that
Film4 uses television presentation, structure and platform to do this
demonstrates the deep complexities of the position of a PSB in digi-
tal broadcasting. At the same time, though, the stubborn endurance
of Film4’s ‘alternative’ brand image reflects the special relationship
with film culture ingrained in the Channel 4 Corporation’s image and
identity.
6
New Logics of Convergence: Film
through Online Television
The clamour in the early years of new media studies to coin neologisms
such as ‘viewser’ (viewer and user) or ‘prosumer’ (producer and
consumer) to describe the supposedly new, supposedly empowered con-
sumer of digital content attests to the excitement felt at the new possi-
bilities for media consumption that digital forms provided. A consensus
emerged that the arrival of web-based platforms would fundamentally
change the way in which television and cinema were experienced.
Among the zeal for these new forms, though, lurked considerable anx-
iety, particularly for pro-PSB scholars who found that arguments for
public broadcasting, especially those based around spectrum scarcity
and of broadcasting as a limited public good, were increasingly unten-
able. The widespread assumption started to be made that as audiences
become ‘viewsers’, institutional control over audience experience is lost,
and the purpose – and legitimacy – of the PSB slowly evaporates. How-
ever, others were more optimistic, noting that the long-term survival of
public broadcasting under increasingly unsympathetic political regimes
was evidence of the evolutionary strength of PSBs, as Jeanette Steemers
argues:
Public service broadcasters have survived to date by reinventing

themselves to meet the challenges of new technology, competition
and regulatory change. These companies are past and present masters
of justifying the grounds for their further existence.1
A key part of the survival strategy for both Channel 4 and the BBC was
to embrace new technologies and digital platforms for their content.
This strategy, in the BBC’s case, was underpinned by Labour govern-
ment policies that compelled the corporation to be a major driver for the
161
UK’s digital creative economy and encourage both Internet (broadband)

take-up in households and greater digital literacy (in fact, a long-term
goal of the BBC since the 1980s). Both PSBs therefore became impor-
tant players in the UK market for online video through the creation of
Internet media players that gave new ways for audiences to access their
material. In this chapter, I explore the BBC’s online content offer as
an example of how this played out in relation to the film material car-
ried across these online platforms. A large facet of digital change, from
the perspective of the broadcaster, was the reconceptualization of their
material: from ‘programming’ to ‘content’. This chapter will examine
this reconceptualization of ‘content’ categorized as ‘film’ across the BBC
website ‘database’.
Databasing and interfacing: Film on iPlayer
The prevailing rhetoric of new media studies can be encapsulated in

Nicolas Negroponte’s provocation ‘bits are bits’.2 In other words, there
is no material separation between any objects mediated digitally. How
can we conceive of the separate ontologies of online film and television
if we accept this idea? Dan Harries, following Henry Jenkins, suggests
that we cannot: ‘because digital media potentially incorporate all previ-
ous media, it no longer makes sense to think in medium-specific terms’.3
Yet, as Taisto Hujanen and Gregory Ferrell Lowe argue, ‘convergence
is a complex construct affecting much more than the mutual identi-
ties of different media: it is crucially about legitimating their social and
political roles in relation to everyday uses’.4 This section explores how
a broadcasting institution – the BBC – employs strategies of legitima-
tion for the cultural role of ‘film’ within its digital distribution system.
As I have been arguing throughout this book, the separation between
media forms under convergence is largely discursive and presentational.
The way in which film objects appear on iPlayer is a good example of
this principle. Specially labelled as such, film content is distinguished
in the database that underpins ‘viewser’ selection in the iPlayer. In the
following case study, I examine how this is done, and, using a particular
example of a how a low-budget British comedy Under the Mud (Solon
Papadopoulos, UK, 2006) appeared on the service, consider the poten-
tial uses of this popular and culturally legitimated online moving-image
media platform for British film culture more generally.
After an arduous, expensive and heavily criticized development pro-
cess, on Christmas Day 2007, the BBC iPlayer emerged from years of
beta testing and went ‘live’.5 Programmes broadcast on BBC radio or
Film through Online Television 163
television over the previous seven days were available to stream from
the BBC website or to download and keep for 30 days at no cost to the
user, provided the request came from a UK IP (Internet protocol) address.
It was launched with an aggressive marketing campaign across the cor-
poration’s many ‘old media’ platforms, with the slogan ‘Making the
Unmissable, Unmissable’. The campaign and tagline clearly proposed
the iPlayer as an individualized catch-up service, a radical departure
from the corporation’s traditional function as a communal broadcaster.
Indeed, as it was launched, a BBC spokesperson claimed that it would
be ‘the biggest change in the way we watch television since the intro-
duction of colour’.6 The overwhelming success of the new application
reaffirmed the corporation as relevant and contemporary. It has now
become a fixture for the BBC, and has grown in popularity, with an
average of around 250 million requests per month in 2013.7 With the
launch of this software and the revamp of BBC Online in 2008, the BBC
engaged in the challenge of being a traditional media corporation in a
digital age.
Film only comprises of a small proportion of the material available on
iPlayer. This is partly because film only accounts for a small amount of
the BBC television schedules on which the catalogue of available mate-
rial on the iPlayer is based, and partly because film (and sports broadcast)
digital rights are more expensive to acquire or negotiate for than tele-
vision rights. There is still much to be said about how this ‘old’ media
object is doubly remediated through the iPlayer website. It must be ‘dou-
bly’ remediated, because the iPlayer’s primary function is as a catch-up
service, and so it provides access to programming already broadcast on
the BBC. This is a crucial distinction in political and economic terms: if
the iPlayer was conceived to merely give access to film (and other con-
tent) for free to stream or download, then it would act as a distributor
of VOD. Not only would it be financially difficult for the BBC to sustain
such a function, but it would be politically ill-advised, as the institution
is under ever-increasing pressure to reduce its size and market influence.
The BBC’s function as a broadcaster would thus be under dispute, and its
legitimacy would deteriorate.
It is instructive to compare the film offering on the BBC iPlayer to
the equivalent online players of rival established broadcasters in the
UK. As of July 2013, film material is offered by both the ITV Player
and Channel 5’s Demand 5 service according to their catch-up televi-
sion rules that, like iPlayer, correspond to content broadcast on any
of their portfolio channels in the previous seven days. Unlike iPlayer,
though, content on these on-demand services is interrupted periodically
by advertisements, a commercial necessity for these for-profit busi-

nesses. As with the iPlayer, the film content on these platforms is largely
conceptualized as remediations of television broadcasts, complete with
televisual paratexts in the shape not only of idents and logos, but also
advertising breaks. As Elke Weissman notes, ‘although the wider flow of
broadcast television might be disrupted in the digital forms of television
consumption, programme texts are still likely to be part of a larger fab-
ric that includes idents, trailers and adverts’.8 Paratextual materials like
these idents ensure that the institution retains credit, and are a way of
extending the broadcasters’ brand identity into the online space.
The ITV Player also offers a catalogue of films for a small rental
charge. These are films for which ITV Studios Global Entertainment
holds the distribution licence, including the Carry on . . . series and some
titles from the ITC feature film library such as Sophie’s Choice and The
Eagle Has Landed. The film content offered by the ITV Player displays
two different models of online film/television: the first, like iPlayer,
requires the broadcaster to negotiate the licence for film titles from
sales agents or distributors for broadcast and online catch-up services
simultaneously; the second involves the exploitation of existing assets
at the disposal of the broadcast corporation. Like ITV Player, Chan-
nel 4’s online player, 4OD, operates simultaneously as a catch-up and
on-demand service, offering recently broadcast programmes and a selec-
tion of material from the back-catalogue. 4OD does not contain as part
of its database any material labelled or conceived of as ‘film’. Instead,
there is a separate platform for Channel 4’s online film content, called
Film4OD, which operates on a rental business model. Prices vary, and,
as with other on-demand services like iTunes, the more recent the title,
the higher the rental charge. As a commercial venture (in collabora-
tion with the VOD service FilmFlex, itself a joint partnership between
Sony Pictures Television and the Walt Disney Company), Film4OD is
able to offer a wide range of titles – some 500. More importantly, it
is not limited to the television schedule in any way. To draw some
‘analogue’ distinctions between the iPlayer and Film4OD user expe-
rience: where iPlayer can be thought of as a library, where choice is
limited, but material is publicly available and freely accessible (and
with the caveat that there is a strict time limit on use of those mate-
rials), Film4OD is a video store, where viewers pay individually per
title, and choice is greatly expanded, though a time limit (of 48 hours)
still applies. This distinction demonstrates in microcosm the differences
in offer between publicly funded and commercial models of online
distribution.
The film material broadcast on iPlayer, because it is timeshifted rather

than VOD per se, must be conceived of as television first, film second,
for the political justification of the licence-fee-funded iPlayer to work.
Milly Buonanno suggests that time-shift or archive-based media appli-
cations like the iPlayer remove the ingrained ability of the broadcaster
to influence the way in which material is viewed. This is done by dis-
rupting ‘the embedment of the contents into the context and the logic
of the programming’ and the ‘collective appointment-like’ broadcast in
a particular timeslot. Buonanno argues:
By making the television usable as an archive or a catalogue, to be

accessed according to individual taste and the time available, these
[PVR, VOD, DVD] devices work as ‘disembedding’ appliances in two
ways: they simultaneously disrupt the embedment of the contents
into the context and the logic of the programming, and the collective
appointment-like nature of a televisual transmission that is broadcast
at a precise and not revocable time slot. In this way the conditions are
created of an elective encounter, potentially unique at the moment it
happens, between a programme ‘taken out’ of its proper context and
a viewer who is ‘isolated’ in his or her own viewing.9
In other words, without the contextual conditions of television broad-

cast (precise temporality, collective engagement with the same object),
the usual relationship between broadcaster and public is broken down.
Under this system, the PSB loses its usual authority over the condi-
tions and manner of viewing. This model presupposes a fact which
has often been held in television studies as self-evident, that, as John
Ellis puts it ‘the schedule defines the everyday specificity of televi-
sion . . . . Scheduling is nothing other than editing on an Olympian
scale.’10 As discussed in Chapter 2, in the context of the broadcast sched-
ule, film transmission is an incursion, an event set apart from television’s
everyday ‘flow’. Without the ‘Olympian’ ability to edit the viewer’s
experience of the audiovisual material, the ability of the broadcaster to
present film in these terms to its audience is seemingly lost.
Although material on the iPlayer is bound to BBC schedules through
the seven-day rule, a user may encounter content in a number of differ-
ent ways through the iPlayer catalogue. Selecting a programme from a
list of a particular channel’s schedule on a particular day is just one of a
number of options for finding the item. Most of the programming con-
tent is, in fact, organized as material in a (personalized) database. The
user first encounters recommendations of content, based on a selection
of programmes made by the site editor, called ‘Featured’, or the most

popular programmes downloaded or streamed from the website. For
our purposes, though, the most interesting section of this database is
‘Categories’. This is the part where the role of the database in shaping
the viewer expectations is clearest. By categorizing the content by genre
and/or form, the site editor makes judgements about what information
is most salient to the website user, and how content may fit together.
As Nicholas Negroponte argues, this kind of content labelling is crucial
and unique to the functioning of digital media applications – all rely on
‘a bit that tells you about other bits’.11 Data headings can influence the
way in which the user perceives the piece of content s/he accesses: by
grouping the texts in a certain way, the database produces expectations
of the content.
Database labelling thus presents content within particular contexts,
depending on the information provided. In this, the role of the pro-
ducer of the database, or the site editor, is analogous to that of the
television scheduler: both provide certain elements of the context in
which the encounter between viewer and content takes place. The
levels of ‘interactivity’ and viewer choice in these online television
databases are actually more moulded and less freely selective than
some of the rhetoric of new media proposes. Anna Everett neatly
points this out, following Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the ‘already
thought’:
Since the hypertexts’ linking functions are delimited by an author’s

circumscriptions or choices, we can view computer linking as a form
of interacting with the already thought – the author-programmers’
preestablished inscriptions . . . the already thought is compelling,
Lyotard argues, because ‘[t]he unthought hurts’ and ‘we are comfort-
able with the already thought’.12
The iPlayer website offers both computationally worked-out, personal

selections of data (‘For You’ section), data organized by broadcast sched-
ule, and data categorized and grouped by theme or genre (Comedy,
Drama, News and so on). Despite the appearance of free choice, the
end user selects from a highly worked-through menu, one that has
had a considerable level of human agency behind it. The producer of
the database still exerts influence over viewing experience by labelling
content, presenting it in certain forms and mediating user expecta-
tion. Although texts are removed from broadcast schedules, then, the
producing institution does not cede complete control to the user.
What has this to do with ‘film’ content on the website? I have dis-
cussed in previous chapters the influence of the broadcasting institution
on the discursive distinction between film and television, as a mat-
ter of presentation and institutional structures of production. Despite
the material constitution of film and television content online being
identical, that is, consisting of binary code, their rhetorical divergence
is reproduced by the iPlayer database. Under the model of database-
producer as inscriber of expectations, the labelling of film content as
‘film’ on the website re-iterates its separation, its constitutionally differ-
ent nature compared to television. ‘Film’ is a label in the ‘Categories’
section of the database, enacting exactly this separation. Although film
material is located within different thematic and generic categories
(Comedy, Drama, Musical), it is always labelled with a small white icon
bearing the legend FILM beside the title in the catalogue, in much the
same way as one might expect a film listing in a newspaper or mag-
azine to appear. Indeed, the comparison with a listings magazine is a
useful one, as the iPlayer database enables the viewser to combine two
activities that once would have been separate: checking to see available
television content provided by the broadcaster (previously, in the list-
ings) and then accessing that content (previously, by being in front of
a television at the appointed time). In listings magazines, films on tele-
vision have traditionally appeared in a separate section, to guide the
viewer as to when and where to watch. In addition, within the sched-
ule information, film material tends to be separated and privileged,
usually with a special graphic. The iPlayer’s database remediates these
‘old media’ traditions, though with the added element of hypertextual
navigation that is a central part of digital media’s regime. This conti-
nuity with traditional ways of presenting information about television
material is a means of distinguishing film from television content, even
where it is doubly remediated through the PSB’s online player.
The separation and emphasis on the ‘film-ness’ of particular ‘bits’ of
iPlayer content can exert an influence on the way in which the con-
tent is perceived, in a way analogous to the television listing magazine’s
ability to structure expectation about a particular viewing experience.
I want briefly to explore a particular film’s appearance on the iPlayer to
consider the potential impact of such labelling for British film culture.
Under the Mud is a micro-budget British film made in Liverpool between
2004 and 2006. It began as a community screenwriting project, bring-
ing together 14 teenagers from the impoverished Garston area of the
city with independent production company Hurricane Films. Rejected
for funding by BBC Films, Film4 and the UK Film Council, the film
was eventually produced on an £85,000 budget, partially provided by

pharmaceutical corporation GlaxoSmithKline. It has been described by
its creators as ‘social surrealism’, and by The Guardian’s Helen Walsh as
‘Shameless the Movie’ and ‘the best British film you’ll never see’.13 Its
story concerns a day in the life of the working-class Potts family and
their lodger, Magic. The somewhat sprawling narrative revolves around
the conflicts caused by the family’s various eccentricities: the not-so-
wise counsel of pregnant 17-year-old Paula’s imaginary friend Georgina,
father Joe’s proud fashioning of illuminated, mechanical fairy wings for
his youngest daughter’s first Holy Communion dress, the pre-pubescent
son’s car obsession that results in him stealing the four-wheel drive of
the film’s criminal villain One Dig. The tagline for the film, ‘The family
from hell . . . or a hell of a family’, gives a strong indication of its comedic
tone, but also goes some way to indicating its concern with locating its
characters in a particular social environment, as indicated by Walsh’s
evocation of Channel 4 drama Shameless (2004–2013), set, like Under the
Mud, on a council estate. It is unmistakably low-budget, as evidenced
by the use of non-professional actors, low-definition digital production
methods and unevenness in the screenplay, which was, of course, fash-
ioned by non-professional writers. It is, nevertheless, a coherent (and
rather sweet) feature-length film.
Under the Mud achieved no theatrical distribution, though it had
an unconventional exhibition schedule that included touring the film
around Liverpool in a double-decker bus at various dates in 2008, and
a DVD release in 2009 for which the producers created their own dis-
tribution company. It was, in other words, a defiantly local small film,
targeted at the local communities that are represented in the film’s nar-
rative. However, in January 2011, the film was broadcast on BBC One.
This was clearly a coup for the producers, as the BBC One transmission
provided much-appreciated publicity. The film’s website announced on
12 January 2011:
There has been a lot of interest in UTM [sic] being shown on the BBC,
various websites and message boards have been full of support for the
small film that’s finally making it big. It was even featured as one of
The Telegraph’s TV Highlights.14
The television screening of the film thus provided it with the national
platform it had previously been denied. It was shown at 11.50pm, a
‘graveyard’ timeslot unlikely to garner a large audience. In television
terms, it was a low priority. When it appeared on the BBC iPlayer,
though, Under the Mud was categorized as a ‘film’, and listed along-
side other films broadcast on the BBC that week. Similarly, when it was
broadcast again at 2am in February 2012, it appeared listed alongside
an eclectic mix of films, such as American indie movies Frozen River and
The Assassination of Richard Nixon, South Korean drama Treeless Moun-
tain, World War II dramas The War Lover and East of Sudan, and Disney
musicals That Darn Cat! and Summer Magic. Not only was the potential
audience for the film exponentially increased, but the content achieved
a prominent place in the iPlayer listings.
This, broadly, had two effects. First, the appearance of the film on the
iPlayer offered it a second space for public consumption, one uncon-
strained by the broadcast schedule, making it available to a much wider
audience. Offering the film alongside other BBC iPlayer content strongly
implies credibility: though it is a low-budget independent comedy, it is
of sufficient quality to stand up to the BBC’s institutional standards.
Second, and crucially, though, by listing Under the Mud alongside other
films in the database, its status as a film is underlined. It may have
the tone, aesthetics and production values of television – indicated in
comparisons with Shameless – but, according to the BBC iPlayer, it is a
film, and thus must be treated with the respect customarily afforded a
film (over and above television, as we have discovered in the Introduc-
tion). The iPlayer’s categorization of this particular content as ‘film’ is
a move of extraordinary legitimizing power; more so, perhaps, than its
late-night appearance on BBC television.
The logic of the iPlayer’s convergence is that, despite clearly separat-
ing film and television content through careful labelling, the interface
and viewer experience, ultimately, must be the same. One of the pri-
mary claims of digital media is that the same object can be perfectly
reproduced thousands of times with no decay or corruption of the
reproduction. What digital media cannot claim to ‘reproduce’ is the sit-
uational experience of, for example, cinema or television. Film is film
on the BBC iPlayer, but remediated through the small domestic screens
of both the original television broadcast and the computer. We are
returned, once again, to the dichotomy between on the one hand the
compromise in exhibition experience that inevitably results from reduc-
ing in scale a large-screen film onto a smaller television, or the window
of a PC interface, and on the other, the increase in access wrought by the
BBC’s alternative distribution method. The offer of the film experience
at the user’s leisure and on the user’s terms can be seen as compen-
sating for a deficiency in size and scale. As we have seen with Under
the Mud, such access can be a boon for low-budget, non-mainstream or
more obscure cinema, as it offers an opportunity for it to be seen. In the

following case study, I explore another iteration on the BBC website of
this impulse to offer wider access to film culture, in the shape of the
short-film distribution site, the BBC Film Network.
Showcasing new British filmmaking on the

BBC Film Network
The BBC Film Network, a sub-site that aimed, according to its tagline,
to ‘showcase new British filmmaking’, operated between January 2005
and February 2012. Although (after November 2009) it used the same
embeddable Flash media player as the BBC iPlayer, it did not remediate
material made by the BBC itself. The content that could be found there
was not necessarily made by professional filmmakers; the Film Network
was instead a dedicated space for up-and-coming producers, directors
and writers, and thus contained an eclectic mix of semi-professional to
high-quality amateur filmmaking in a range of genres. The site oper-
ated with the express purpose of providing a well-maintained online
space for short films made by new British talent to help them find an
audience. It is worth remembering that, in 2005, there was very little
video streaming available online, and the subsequent dominator of this
market, YouTube, had not yet been founded. The Film Network was
therefore both genuinely innovatory and something of a gamble, assum-
ing that the capability of Web 2.0 applications to allow online streaming
would result in a widened audience for short film. The undercurrent for
the following discussion of the site’s aesthetics, functions and branding
is the idea of the relationship between the public service broadcaster and
online communities of audiovisual production and distribution.
The Network originated during a period in which the BBC was both
expanding its online presence and increasing support for arts and cul-
ture. It was the result of collaboration between executive producer
Gerard O’Malley and digital content producer Matt Walton, who worked
in the ‘Interactive Drama and Entertainment’ department. In 2005, the
team initiated a six-month trial, and brokered a partnership with the UK
Film Council to provide content for the site, in the shape of its publicly
funded short films. An early strategy document illuminated three areas
in which the BBC could utilize their online services for the benefit of
British film culture:
There is an opportunity for bbc.co.uk to support film making in the

UK in three crucial ways. The first of these is by showcasing films;
the second is by helping to connect and profile new and emerging

filmmaking talent, and lastly the Film Network can act as a magnet
to anyone who might want to translate their joy of watching films
into making them.15
The first two of these, ‘showcasing films’ and ‘connect and profile’, are
explicitly connected to functions that have become the bedrock of the
Internet – online distribution and networking.
The third offer, to ‘translate the joy of films into making them’, is
both a little more abstract and somewhat misleading given the ini-
tial dependence of the Network on the work of filmmakers who were
already on their way, having been supported by public organizations
like the UKFC. The idea really translated to the site in two ways. The
first was a ‘features’ section, which showed behind-the-scenes video
from films in production (often those funded by BBC Films). The aim
here was implicitly educational; as site moderator James Rocarols (who
joined Film Network in 2008 and was later its senior editor) put it, ‘they
expanded to think “let’s try and demystify the film industry a little bit”
and educate around the film industry’.16 More explicitly educational
was the addition of a ‘filmmaking guide’, a relatively comprehensive
primer for uninitiated filmmakers, giving not only technical and stylis-
tic tips on good filmmaking practice, but also suggestions for how to
achieve funding, how to find a distributor for your film and how to
enter film festivals. The idea of translating people’s enjoyment of films
into filmmaking suggests that the Film Network had broadly educa-
tional responsibilities. While this may on the surface seem to be an
attempt to encourage amateur filmmaking, the detail and content of
the filmmaking guides (in addition, as we’ll see, to the quality of the
films on the site) suggests that the opposite is true, and that the site
is targeted at ‘serious’ filmmakers looking for an entry point into the
industry. Indeed, as Rocarols stated, ‘the remit was always about help-
ing cultivate a culture of filmmaking in this new world of the UKFC and
funding opportunities’.
As the Network left its prototype phase (in late 2005), the UKFC
became less involved, and the Network expanded its partnerships over
time to include a number of film festivals and screen agents/distributors,
from which some of the film content on the site was licensed. Most
importantly, though, in addition to publicly supported films of the
UKFC and other finance bodies, any filmmaker was free to submit her
film to the site for consideration by the editorial team. This does not
mean, however, that there was no discrimination about which films
could be shown on the site, as is the case with competitor distribution

sites like YouTube. The opposite is, in fact, the case: the films on the
site are of high quality in terms of visual definition and production val-
ues. To maintain this, the BBC Film Network was carefully moderated.
Rocarols noted the ambivalent requirements of quality and equality for
the site, arguing that the selection process was
always a tightrope between . . . making it accessible to everyone, and

gi[ving] the feeling that you could submit a film through the website
and if it was good quality it would go up – which it would. But also,
at the same time, the website has to have the best content on there
to get the audience, because audience is always the key thing.
The somewhat disjointed objectives of the site – but ultimate focus

on the ‘audience’ – betray its origins in a public service broadcaster.
While the overall aim to encourage newcomers to the industry is a
worthy one, it sits uncomfortably with the BBC brand value of high
quality and professional standards. This may also have been, on a more
institutional level, one of the reasons why the Film Network was not
entirely a successful project: it sat awkwardly in the corporate structure
of the BBC, moving between the online or interactive divisions, drama,
comedy and film departments. But on a more psychological level, the
idea of inviting newcomers, sometimes with no formal training, into
the ‘closed shop’ of the BBC, with its well-established training policies
(and sometimes byzantine corporate structure), appealed more to some
than to others. Rocarols noted that emerging online technologies, like
those that underpinned the Film Network, provided an opportunity for
the BBC to ‘mine’ talent, in a manner that went largely unrecognized
within the wider corporation.
A more usual conceptualization of the use by the ‘public’ of online
technologies to produce and distribute audiovisual work is that of user
generated content (UGC). The feel and look of UGC is usually thought
of as amateur – rough edges, poor production values and low costs:
clearly this is not the case for the content shown on the Film Network.
Greater consumer access to ever higher-definition cameras, and more
sophisticated editing and special effects programming software, blurs
the line between user and producer, which Martin Lister et al. view as
one of the key changes wrought by digital media:
The rigid distinction between professional and amateur technologies

defined by engineering quality and cost has now broken down into
an almost infinite continuum from the video captured on mobile

phone to the high-definition camera commanding six figure prices.17
They use the portmanteau noun ‘prosumer’ to account for the hybrid
identity of Internet users. As a public service broadcaster, the BBC
has an ambivalent relationship with Internet ‘prosumers’ and UGC.
On the one hand, there exists common ground between the philo-
sophical justification behind PSBs and the possibilities afforded by the
Internet: democratization, access to knowledge and information, and
wide availability. On the other, broadcasting institutions clearly have
a vested interest in maintaining the distinction between professional
and amateur media producers, since its erosion threatens their claims to
superiority in the field. For PSBs, this is vital, since the maintenance of
high-quality services in media content provision is a key legitimation
for the expenditure of public money on media services.
In their investigation into the BBC newsroom’s use of UGC, or ‘audi-
ence material’, Claire Wardle and Andrew Williams found that editors
were sceptical about UGC, focusing particularly on the problem of
maintaining editorial standards and quality. They argue that traditional
journalistic values – truth, accuracy, high standards and an editorial
line – still take precedence over the democratizing benefits of working
with user-generated material. They argue that ‘it would take a signif-
icant psychological shift for BBC journalists to embrace “networked
journalism” ’ and
[f]or the BBC to truly embrace participatory journalism, and to

think about collaborating regularly with the audience, will require
resources and training, but more fundamentally journalists would
have to significantly change the way they perceive their role.18
For journalistic media output as Wardle and Williams see it, the BBC is
in a unique position to become a pioneer in participatory journalism.
The reconceptualization of the role of the journalist would, in part, see
them becoming adjudicator and aggregator of audience material as well
as generating their own stories. The BBC Film Network replicated this
process in the field of audiovisual art, by moderating the content freely
supplied to them by non- or semi-professional filmmakers.
The films shown on the Network had to conform to certain submis-
sion criteria. The first demands that the film be made in the UK or by
a UK director, which highlights the national specificity or, under a dif-
ferent perspective, the parochialism of the site. The films also had to
be made in the previous five years: the Network stated that its focus
is to showcase new filmmaking talent. The Network prioritized short
films because they were deemed to hold the viewer’s attention better
and because the technological capabilities for high-definition stream-
ing work better for shorter content. Finally, the Network required that
the user be responsible for rights clearances, a legal requirement to help
provide indemnity for the corporation in cases of intellectual property
theft. The Film Network guidelines also suggested that filmmakers with
an eye to the festival circuit should complete this before submission,
safeguarding them against rejection from festivals that specify that the
film must not have been screened in the UK before. The pre-supposition
that films would be suitable for festival submission shows once again
that the site aimed to exhibit the work of aspiring media professionals,
not amateurs.
Because it was an institutionally moderated site, though, there were
clearly additional ‘hidden’ acceptance criteria in the shape of particular
features in films that would attract the moderators. These were, first, pro-
duction quality – achieving a high technical standard was a given. Next
was a ‘new and original idea’, something that moved outside the usual
generic categories for British short filmmaking of social realist genre
(ironically, the kind of film most likely to attract funding from the UK
Film Council!). Rocarols summarized this thus: ‘we wanted the website
to focus on new British filmmaking, new ideas, new ways of looking at
old storytelling, new ways of using digital tools and technologies to tell
stories in short ways that will appeal to audiences in an online format’.
The length of the films, then – under 20 minutes for preference – became
an important feature in the selection process. Interestingly, a factor that
might be expected to affect decision-making, ‘compliance’, an industry
expression that means ensuring content is suitable for broadcast, was
largely absent from considerations. For Rocarols, too much focus on
compliance would reduce the credibility of the site as a hub for aspir-
ing filmmakers. In other words, distancing the site from the restrictions
associated with television was an important means of appealing to its
target audience of film enthusiasts and producers.
The site offered three key benefits to its aspirant filmmaker user. First,
as is suggested in its title, the site was a Network. When a Film Net-
work profile was registered, users were offered space for up to three links
to their own website or blog, a space to describe ambitions, projects in
development and influences. Users could also choose three areas of spe-
cialization from a list that includes film-based roles like director, writer
or producer as well as more general terms like ‘student’ or ‘enthusiast’.
Offering a space to discuss inspiration and personal biography exploits

the personalization of social media. The ‘influences’ section is partic-
ularly reminiscent of the space allowed on social networking sites like
Facebook or MySpace for people to express their cultural preferences.
Network users were therefore encouraged to express themselves in a
mixture of professional and informal discourses. A major site revamp
in 2009 that aimed to update the technology used by the site signifi-
cantly reduced the networking function, instead emphasizing the use
of a new media player. Foregrounding the video playing content in this
way showed that the site’s key ambitions were to provide a good-quality
online distribution platform for short film, and that the networking
function was largely an adjunct to this.
The second offer the Film Network made is that industry profession-
als would view their film; the site stated that the film would be seen
by an ‘industry panel’. In reality, this panel consisted largely of the
site’s editorial team, which by October 2010 had shrunk to include
only the immediate site editor and his executive producer. Regardless
of the actual make-up of the industry panel, the promise of website
moderation is a boon to potential filmmakers who upload to the site.
The fact of moderation means that the videos on the site are guaran-
teed to represent a certain professional standard. If a filmmaker’s video
is specially selected to a site with a quality threshold, then s/he can
legitimately argue that it has cultural or artistic merit, and can make a
good case for her/his skills as a media professional. Other online dis-
tribution platforms offer no such guarantee of quality because they do
not have a moderation process. For example, Vimeo, a popular site for
uploading semi-professional work, has guidelines that delimit certain
kinds of material (particularly material that contravenes copyright law),
but there is no quality control and weaker editorial oversight. To have
work accepted by the Film Network, then, is in itself something of an
achievement and the quality control guarantees that filmmakers’ works
are counted among other works of quality. As Rocarols noted, the cura-
tion aspect of the Film Network separated it from its content distribution
rivals.
Interlinked with this is the most important offer the Film Network
can make: branding and legitimacy. Because the BBC is a large public
institution with a reputation for editorial standards, the inclusion of
a filmmaker’s work on a site associated with the corporation can offer
them a sense of having carried the BBC brand. The BBC brand, in other
words, offers the filmmakers of the Film Network some sense of cultural
legitimation. YouTube or Vimeo as commercial sites may have strong
brand reputations as online distributors, but they do not have the larger,
more established overall media brand of an institution like the BBC.
Filmmakers are offered a special, privileged place to distribute their work
in the Film Network, a place that purposely creates an aura of legitimacy
around its products through moderation and brand association. Indeed,
Rocarols noted that in user feedback the notion of the BBC ‘stamp of
approval’ was consistently mentioned as a positive attribute of the site.
Because the BBC’s branding is being used in this way, the shorts had to
be of sufficient quality to stand up to critical scrutiny. As James Rocarols
noted of the selection process for films on the site, ‘[we] wanted them to
be professional, or technically up to a higher standard . . . they had to be
credible’. The BBC’s positions as cultural arbiter and cultural mediator
combine.
The look of the network is crucial in creating this aura of legitimacy.
The 2009 revamp of the site included a redesign, which changed it from
a basic (or, as Rocarols, put it ‘funkier and fresher’) graphic interface to
a more aesthetically sophisticated one (See Figure 6.1). The intention
was to give the site a more serious, professional look. Its aesthetic both
separates it out from other websites which perform a similar function,
like YouTube and Vimeo, and connects it stylistically to the rest of the
BBC website.
The colour scheme of the website is dark blues and greys, punctuated
by white and yellow lettering, the yellow indicating a hyperlink. This
dark colouring underlines its gravity and seriousness, in comparison to
the predominantly red, blue and white YouTube and blue and green
Figure 6.1 Film Network homepage on 17 July 2006 (l) and 27 May 2010 (r)
Vimeo. The Film Network’s banner graphic of white smoky light falling
from the top recollects a darkened film theatre, indicating the hypnotic
allure of the cinema. The sophisticated, contemporary graphic design
of the site indicates its seriousness of purpose – as a place for art to be
gathered and exhibited.
The banner highlights the association with BBC Films, as the com-
pany’s logo is placed in its top right-hand corner. This may have been
somewhat misleading; though BBC Film Network was reconfigured as a
‘sister site’ to BBC Films, there was little formal collaboration between
the two departments. The graphic connection to the BBC, however, goes
further: since the Network uses the same embeddable media player as
the iPlayer, the interface for Film Network is the same as that of the
BBC’s own work. The BBC logo is also superimposed over playing videos
in the top left-hand corner, as in content played on the BBC iPlayer.
Rocarols noted that there was ‘more than a subconscious desire’ to make
the new site look more like the iPlayer. This is partly because of the pos-
itive associations with that site, and partly to win greater favour within
the BBC’s corporate structure, an aesthetic strategy that ultimately did
not bear fruit. Content on the Film Network carries the BBC’s branding
explicitly, as well as implicitly. This might be read as a generous exten-
sion of the BBC’s powerful institutional brand out into the world of
semi-professional filmmaking. Lending the videos of nascent media pro-
fessionals, the same interface as the professionally created work of the
BBC invites the viewer to compare their work. As we have seen, though,
the credentials of the film must be such that the brand is not damaged:
in other words, the films must bear the scrutiny of media profession-
als in the moderation process. This means that the Film Network had
free access to interesting short films, and was able to ‘rebrand’ these as
BBC product. The process thus comes full circle: the filmmaker gets the
kudos associated with being distributed by the BBC, and the BBC gets
many hours’ worth of free material for their website. Whether this is a
fair trade was for the individual user to judge.
The BBC Film Network highlighted the ambivalent relationship
between an established media brand like the BBC and a burgeon-
ing generation of media ‘prosumers’. It represented an important
logic of 21st-century convergence: that broadcasters will have to con-
ceive of themselves not just as providers – producers, distributors and
exhibitors – of self-made content but also as aggregators and curators of
the content produced by others. Despite stated aims to improve British
film culture and to reach out to nascent filmmakers, though, the Net-
work really redistributed work which already had the potential to be
distributed through traditional means. Moreover, the site was limited by

rights issues to showing only work that was British in origin. The arena
of online distribution is global, as, increasingly, is the film industry, and
the nationally bounded content may thus have appeared excessively
parochial, particularly when showcased alongside only other British
material. To truly help aspiring filmmakers, access to global, rather than
national, audiences is key.
The BBC Film Network was, in some ways, a contradictory service. It
aimed to consolidate relationships with pre-existent filmmaking bodies
like the UK Film Council, established festivals and regional film bod-
ies, and independent short-film distributors, an objective that co-existed
awkwardly with a democratizing reach into the world of online dis-
tribution and semi-professional ‘prosumers’. Perhaps because of some
of these contradictions, the Film Network was never truly embraced
within the BBC. It was, arguably, a victim of being slightly ahead of
its time both technologically and strategically, though it could equally
be said that, since the objectives of the network are now largely fulfilled
in the (international) private sector, in the shape of Vimeo, YouTube
and other social networking sites, there is no serious justification for the
spending of public money on such a scheme. After the 2010 licence fee
freeze, the BBC made a series of drastic cuts to its services under the aus-
pices of a strategy called ‘Delivering Quality First’ (See Chapter 7). The
Film Network, with declining user and viewer numbers, was an obvi-
ous candidate for downsizing, and was closed to new submissions in
February 2012. The Film Network’s fate demonstrates how challenged
the BBC is by stepping away from its core remit of broadcasting, and
what happens when its activities, in the eyes of competitors and within
the corporation, reach the limits of legitimacy.
Conclusion
On 13 February 2011, the BBC’s HD digital channel broadcast a selection

of film shorts, in a programme presented in partnership with the BBC
Film Network. Site moderator James Rocarols suggested a shortlist of
films to the HD channel editors, who then selected the films. The films
shown in this programme were all available to view individually on the
Film Network site, and the programme as a whole was available to view
on the BBC iPlayer for one week. The films were thus incorporated into
all the BBC’s platforms, presented as (high-definition) television, and
digital media content. This exemplifies the logic of digital convergence:
these film ‘bits’ were repurposed, repackaged and remediated across the
full range of the BBC’s digital outlets. However, despite the fact that
these short-form narratives were mediated through these digital plat-
forms, they were presented and promoted explicitly and specifically as
‘films’. The remediation of this content did not entail its loss of medium
specificity. This is because the remediating institution employed presen-
tational strategies to distinguish this content as film, separating it from
the other digital ‘bits’ that it also remediates.
Digital convergence has been characterized as a process by which
unique mediums’ specificities and individualities erode under the pres-
sure of remediation. Because ‘bits are bits’, there is little point in
conceiving of individual media as special, or as possessing a cultural
value or aura unique to itself. The way in which film – however defined –
is remediated by BBC platforms does not conform to this characteri-
zation. The ‘film-ness’ of this content is, in fact, highlighted; a virtue
is made of its separate identity from the remaining ‘bits’ remediated
through the site. The BBC’s institutional identity as cultural gatekeeper
and guarantor of quality places it in a powerful position to present
judgements of this kind – bestowing upon its ‘bits’ the BBC ‘stamp of
approval’. Working against the logic of convergence, BBC online is able
to remediate film content without necessarily denuding it of its specific
cultural identity. Indeed, as this chapter has uncovered, rather the oppo-
site is the case: film content is given a space and identity of its own, over
and above the ‘other’ content on the BBC website. This is the new ‘logic
of convergence’: for film and television remediated through the same
interface, discursive separation counteracts the capacity of new media
applications to neutralize material distinctions via abbreviated versions
of the divergence tactics – presentation, content labelling, institutional
curation and moderation.
7
Conclusion: Convergence
and Divergence Now
As specially branded departments within public service broadcasters,

BBC Films and Film4 are impelled to periodic self-promotion, designed
to increase public awareness of their activities. In 2011 both the BBC and
Channel 4 broadcast promotional videos, which, like the 2008 exam-
ple with which I began this book, comprised clips from various recent
BBC and Film4 productions, interspersed with intertitles outlining the
mission statements of the film arms. These were, for BBC Films ‘Mak-
ing British Films Happen’, and, for Channel 4/Film4, ‘We don’t just
show great films, we make them too’. Between the slogans of the two
public service broadcasters’ film arms lies the story that this book has
told: of television institutions making films and of television institu-
tions offering a place for them to be shown. However ‘making British
films happen’ has a double meaning when it comes to the relationship
between PSBs and film culture. It is not just that the PSBs provide the
funds for filmmakers to make films, though this is an important, indeed
crucial, feature of the relationship. The book has argued that, through
presentational modes and patterns of discourse, the PSBs play an impor-
tant role in making the idea of a (British) film happen. In other words,
the PSBs present their film texts in a specific way which leads to the
judgement of them as cinema as opposed to as television. This is done
by emphasizing cinema as a model and a discourse when certain texts
are presented through the various platforms at the disposal of the PSBs.
Whether through the computer, television or cinema screen, the ways in
which films are presented to an audience through paratextual means dif-
fer from the ways in which television programmes are presented. In an
age where media’s ontological security has been profoundly unseated
by new technologies and their attendant new cultural modes, PSBs still
make clear the distinction between ‘film’ content and other content
180
Conclusion: Convergence and Divergence Now 181
remediated through their platforms. Energy and effort are invested to

maintain the separation of film and television.
The separation of the media, at least as publicly circulated ideas, seems
to work against the increasing convergence between them at aesthetic,
technological and industrial levels. It is undeniable that the relationship
between film and television in Britain has developed into a powerful
symbiosis over the past three decades. This book has shown that this
is more complex and nuanced than previous accounts have implied.
Where the PSBs do figure in accounts of British film culture, television
is more often than not characterized as film’s rival, or, in the case of
television institutions, as additional public sources for film funding, and
little more. The relationship between television and film in Britain is
often characterized as an unequal partnership, with the money and the
power on television’s side. This book has uncovered some compelling
reasons to suppose that this is not the whole picture, and that film has
discursive power, prestige and respectability that television cannot hope
to attain. Film has a cultural cachet, both in the critical mainstream and
in scholarly discourse, to which television can and does aspire. The book
has shown that, in various ways, the PSBs’ work in film has affirmed an
ongoing hierarchy between the two media.
In discussing this evaluative hierarchy between film and television,
I do not wish to imply that I believe there to be any essential cul-
tural value of one over the other. I have not tended to propose discrete
stylistic or aesthetic examples of the distinction between cinema and
television fictions. This is not because I do not believe they exist: there
are clearly aesthetic and stylistic tendencies which, for various histori-
cal reasons, have been associated with each medium. However, I would
argue that distinctions between the media forms are produced discur-
sively and through presentation. This book has thus invested much of its
analytical energy in discussing the paratextual: promotional campaigns,
ephemera, interstitial material and critical reviews. Arguments about the
specificity of film as a medium have frequently neglected the part that
the spaces and discourse around a text might play in its classification.
This is especially important in the current climate of growing media con-
vergence. There is a strong sense, among the rhetoric of new media, that
there are no essential differences between different media forms – that
‘bits are bits’. However, this book has argued that while the constituent
parts of film and television texts may be materially identical, the ways
in which they are presented are not. Material convergence is met with
rhetorical divergence, the desire to separate and detach film from tele-
vision as experiences, content and cultural ideas. This makes the role of
external forces, particularly institutions, crucial to the understanding of

what a moving-image text is, and how it is to be received.
The book has not only explored the ways in which PSBs have worked
to separate and distinguish film and television. It has also discussed,
in various ways, the application of the institutional ‘brand’ to film
products, and a concomitant influence on the critical discourse that sur-
rounds them. The institutional image of BBC Films and Film4 endows
particular films with a kind of cultural legitimacy in their promotion and
reception. Low-budget niche films can exploit the machinery of the PSB
to gain greater visibility in a volatile market for independent British cin-
ema. For higher-budget, more mainstream titles, the influence of the PSB
is perhaps more noticeable during the development process, where their
support can help attract other forms of finance. However, involvement
in high-profile, high-prestige films lends PSB filmmaking operations the
important facet of industrial credibility.
The issue of credibility is very important, because it is the crucial bal-
ance that the PSBs have to strike. When FilmFour became involved in
high-risk commercial films that were judged to be of low quality, and
were judged artistic failures, the company suffered significant brand
damage. FilmFour became, for a time, synonymous with hubris, overex-
tension and commercial folly. However, the Film4 brand remains a
meaningful one, despite significant changes to the content and char-
acter of both the filmmaking arm and the digital television channel.
Film4 offers a kind of film associated with quality and independence,
with being slightly off-kilter. The fact that this has been made to
apply to both the digital television channel and the filmmaking out-
fit demonstrates the power and importance of brand association. There
is a circular relationship between institutional image and cinematic
evaluation. I have demonstrated some of the ways in which the insti-
tutional image of the PSBs can be reflected upon film products, whether
those produced by broadcast institutions’ film arms, or those distributed
through their multi-media platforms. However, I also contend that the
involvement of PSBs with cinema enhances this institutional reputa-
tion, and confirms the position of PSBs as cultural authorities as well as
cultural producers.
It is by no means certain, given the budget cuts to the BBC, the closure
of the UK Film Council, and the precariousness of television advertis-
ing in a competitive digital multi-channel age, that the relationship
between film and television will continue in the same form it takes
now. Moreover, the rapid proliferation of new digital screens – from
mobile phones, to mobile computing devices (such as the iPad), to

digital cameras with built-in projectors – means that viewing film and
television texts will continue to change as a social and cultural prac-
tice. However, throughout this book I have taken great care to stress the
continuities that reside among the major changes.
Convergence and divergence now
This book has traced a complex recent history. Because it has been writ-
ten in a period close to the events it analyses, concrete conclusions are
difficult to suggest. Indeed, in the three-year period between the core
research for this book and its writing, there have been some significant
changes in the film and television industries. I will now summarize some
of these in relation to the history this book has outlined and its key
themes, and make a brief case study of a film that exemplifies some of
them, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013).
Cuts and bruises: Public service broadcasting since 2010

In April 2010, in the dying throes of a Labour government that would
soon be replaced by a coalition between the Conservative party and
the Liberal Democrats, the UK Parliament passed the Digital Economy
Act, which provided, among other things, new legislation for regional
and commercial television, and for Channel 4. The fact that new tele-
vision legislation was contained within a much wider bracket of the
‘digital economy’ indicated the extent to which media convergence had
become a fact of public life. For the first time, the ‘making of high qual-
ity films intended to be shown to the general public at the cinema in the
United Kingdom’ became a formal part of Channel 4’s remit.1 The offi-
cial recognition of Channel 4’s role in the film industry was ostensibly
welcomed, with an increase of 20 per cent in Film4’s budget in May 2010
(rising to £15m per year in October) and new chief executive, David
Abraham, stating that ‘under my watch, investment in British film will
continue to sit at the heart of Channel 4’s public service mission’.2 This
attitude was typical of the new administration of Channel 4, which
sought to distance itself from the previous attempts of Chief Executive
and Board to argue the case for public subvention for the channel. Under
Abraham, the channel has attempted to become more self-sufficient
and commercially robust, but has suffered a great deal from the loss
of the annual windfall provided by Big Brother (Channel 4, 2000–2010;
Channel 5, 2011–), and has run at a deficit since 2011. The ability of
the channel to commit significant funds to the film industry given the
terminal decline in television advertising revenue is unclear, regardless
of the fact that it is now enshrined in the channel’s legal remit.
Broadcasting and, as we will see, the film industry were not immune to
public funding cuts brought in by the coalition government and ratio-
nalized by the need to bring budgets under control after the financial
crisis of 2008. The BBC had been preparing itself for reduced bud-
gets since 2009, through a strategy initiated by Director General Mark
Thompson called ‘Putting Quality First’. This focused mainly on ‘effi-
ciency savings’ such as staff and building costs, but also set out core
principles of a ‘distinctive BBC quality’, including ‘high editorial stan-
dards, creative and editorial ambition, range and depth, and UK-focused
content’, as well as areas of output, later called ‘editorial priorities’, such
as journalism, children’s programming and UK drama and comedy to
be protected.3 After the announcement in October that the licence fee
would be frozen at £145.50 per year for the remainder of the charter
period, effectively a significant cut in the broadcaster’s budget, the strat-
egy took on extra urgency and mutated into ‘Delivering Quality First’
(DQF). As discussed in the Introduction, ‘quality’ has been a primary
means of distinguishing and justifying the public service broadcaster
since the 1980s, and the idea that it should be the BBC’s first priority in
straitened times conforms to this tradition.
The DQF proposals included a number of concrete programming areas
where real-terms cuts would be made, including acquisitions of series
and films. Film on television, according to DQF, is a luxury that the BBC
can no longer afford, though there are no specific plans to make cuts to
BBC Films. However, in December 2010, the BBC Trust issued a warning
that the film arm must increase the television ratings for transmissions
of BBC Films, arguing that public awareness of the film production arm
was low. The support of BBC Films was welcomed by the film industry,
and the brand association with the broadcaster could help lift films from
development into production by attracting co-producers. However, the
‘value for money’ – an increasingly important turn of phrase for corpo-
rate management – for the BBC would be restricted if awareness of their
involvement in the high-prestige industry remained low. It is possible to
read the broadcast of the kinds of promotional video discussed briefly at
the beginning of this chapter as a response to these directives.
If ‘quality’ is one of the core brand values of the BBC, then so too
is ‘trust’. In the DQF proposals, for example, the editorial priority of
‘the best journalism in the world’ states that ‘the standards, breadth
and timeliness of its news output form the bedrock of the trust placed
in the Corporation, as well as the single-best exemplar of the values it

lives by’.4 Ironically, failures in its flagship television journalism pro-
gramme Newsnight in the wake of a scandal involving former BBC
broadcaster Jimmy Savile initiated a raft of controversies that rocked the
corporation during 2012, leading to the resignation of the new Director
General, George Entwistle, after only 54 days in post in November. The
BBC emerged from a series of allegations of corporate bullying, sexual
intimidation, journalistic corruption and executive overpayment with
its reputation severely bruised. The brand value was tarnished to the
extent that, in a November 2012 survey, the average score for the state-
ment ‘I trust the BBC’ was only 6 out of a possible 10.5 Any assault
on the credibility of the BBC, or on public trust in the institution, will
damage the brand, as well as its ability to confer value on its products.
As this book has argued, this is a central component in the relationship
between PSBs and their film products. With its financial basis and inde-
pendence under consistent threat, and negotiations for the new charter
period starting in 2017 beginning under a cloud, the future of the BBC
is by no means clear. The corporation will be challenged not only by
a funding shortfall, but also withering political support and the grad-
ual reduction in scale and influence of broadcasting under competition
with other digital media forms. Whether the BBC will continue to invest
in another ‘old’ media form is uncertain, particularly given changes in
the film industry that have once again changed the focus of the kinds
of films prioritized for public support.
‘Dynamic and entrepreneurial’: Government intervention in the

film industry since 2010
The unexpected closure of the UK Film Council (UKFC) as part of the
government’s funding cuts in July 2010 sent shockwaves through the
film industry. Major hits like Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008),
Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008) and the Harry Potter series had ren-
dered British film surprisingly buoyant, and, though the UKFC was
a controversial body, it was generally considered to be successful in
championing British film and redressing some of the market’s iniqui-
ties. It was announced in late November that the BFI would take over
from the UKFC in dispensing funds from the National Lottery to British
filmmakers. The idea of a merger between the two agencies had been
mooted as early as August 2009, but had been contested on the grounds
that an institution with the ethos and traditions of the BFI would strug-
gle with the more profit-oriented goals that the UKFC had been set.
The BFI is, after all, a charity aimed at enhancing the reputation and
education of film in the UK, and has the same kind of public structure
(if not stature) as the BBC. Its own Production Board, which had offered
small funds to art films since the 1970s, had been replaced by the Arts
Councils, then the Film Council in the 1990s, and it was considered
ill-equipped to work with the higher budgets and ambitions associated
with the UKFC.
In Prime Minister’s question time on 17 November 2010, David
Cameron stated that he wanted to encourage the industry to make
‘more films that people want to watch’, effectively endorsing a com-
mercially focused industry that he would later describe as ‘dynamic and
entrepreneurial’. The UKFC had already been set up with these goals
in mind, and the use of public funds to support populist ‘commercial’
cinema has always been contested, as Chapter 3 shows. Cameron was
answering a question about the recently opened Leavesden studios of
Warner Bros, the Hollywood studio behind the Harry Potter series of
films. This was seen as a vote of confidence for the British film indus-
try, which made over £1 billion in 2012 as part of the UK’s ‘creative
economy’. Of course, attracting overseas finance and production to the
UK is a prospect different from sustaining a film industry that makes
‘British’ films, and it appeared that much of the government’s focus
in terms of the film industry would be on the former. In November
2011, for example, the tax relief for film produced in the UK that
had been a particular attraction for foreign investment was extended.
However, in terms of supporting British filmmaking, the government
wanted commercial ambition to become the central criterion in funding
decisions.
With these aims in mind, the Department for Culture, Media and
Sport set up the Film Policy Review Board, chaired by Chris Smith, one
of the key architects of the UKFC. After wide consultation, their rec-
ommendations were published in the document ‘A Future for British
film . . . It Starts with the Audience’ in January 2012. Suggestions for
how to build a more sustainable industry included greater collaboration
between distributors and producers, support for skills development and
funding successful production companies to help them grow beyond
one feature. The report also endorsed a greater sense of responsibil-
ity for broadcasters, especially Sky and ITV, to support British film.
Responses to these recommendations were mixed, but it was generally
agreed that they mediated well between the traditional cultural aims of
public funding for film and the desire to create a more commercially
focused industry.
The BFI began its own consultation in May 2012, publishing its find-
ings in the report ‘Film Forever’ in November. This outlined three main
areas of focus: ensuring better film education and access to film for audi-
ences; building a sustainable production industry, and better training
and skills development; and continuing archiving, preservation and film
heritage. The first and third of these areas relate most clearly to the BFI’s
traditional roles. Encumbering the BFI with the responsibility to sup-
port the film production industry, especially when it is assumed that
this means primarily supporting audience-friendly ‘commercial’ films
as opposed to the slightly more arcane fare that is its usual tenor, is
likely to alter the spirit and character of that institution. Like the pub-
lic service broadcasters, it will be expected to be more commercially
minded and market-oriented in its approach, and will have to negotiate
between its public service role and the demands of value-for-money that
are now attached to public funding.6 However, endowing the BFI with
these responsibilities may unintentionally produce a new convergence
between British film and television: both industries will be overseen by
publicly funded bodies with longstanding traditions of public service
but a new, slightly more commercialized outlook.
Recent projects supported by the PSB filmmaking arms demonstrate,
to a certain extent, these new ambitions for the film industry. For exam-
ple, as Chapter 3 explored, one strategy for making a more sustainable
model of film production is to co-produce with foreign investors. This
has meant that a number of films with American themes, stories and
characters (but with British personnel at the helm) have been funded
by the PSBs such as BBC Films’ We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne
Ramsay, 2011) and My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011), and
Film4’s 127 Hours (Danny Boyle, 2010) and Seven Psychopaths (Martin
McDonagh, 2012). It is arguable that, as well as attracting greater financ-
ing, the American stars in these productions make them easier to market
to a British audience accustomed to seeing Hollywood productions. In
any case, these films are more ‘international’ than they are straightfor-
wardly ‘British’ (or ‘American’). Another means for attaining a pre-sold
audience for films is to adapt classic literature, a long-term strategy for
the BBC which supported Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011), but more
unusual for Film4, which nevertheless co-produced Wuthering Heights
(Andrea Arnold, 2010). In order for British film to compete on the mar-
ket, it seems, they must either internationalize, or market themselves
as distinctively ‘British’ in knowable, sellable ways. The main excep-
tions to this – the popular hits The Inbetweeners (Ben Palmer, 2011) for
Film4 and Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Declan Lowney, 2013) for BBC
Films – are television sitcom spin-offs, in another longstanding tradition
of British popular cinema. Alongside this support for ‘international’ or
‘popular’ cinema, PSBs continue in traditional roles, particularly in sup-
porting critically successful filmmakers like Steve McQueen, Sally Potter
and Michael Winterbottom and in encouraging new talent through
schemes discussed in Chapter 4. Rather than a break with the estab-
lished pattern, most British movies are still made through a combination
of investments – some from the BFI, some from the broadcasters, some
from private equity, some from US studios. Though much noise was
made over the overall ‘change’ in policy direction for public investment
in British film production in 2010, there are more continuities in cur-
rent practice than there are changes. The real shifts lie in changes in
audience expectation of distribution and access.
The inexorable rise of VOD

Just 12 months prior to the beginning of the administration proceedings
of two of the UK’s biggest retailers of physical film and television enter-
tainment, Blockbuster Video and HMV, in January 2012, the US VOD
behemoth Netflix launched in the UK market. Although correlation and
causation are, of course, different things, it is difficult not to look on this
moment as prophetic, and, for the UK film industry, which had devel-
oped an unhealthy dependence upon DVD sell-through for profits, a
particularly dangerous development. Netflix, a subscription service that
allows unlimited streaming of a huge library of film and television con-
tent, had shelved plans to move into Europe six years earlier, with the
power of BSkyB over rights to content in the UK being a key drawback.
By the time it entered the UK market, there was already competition
from online retailer Amazon’s LoveFilm streaming and DVD rental ser-
vice, which had 1.6 million subscribers in the UK, YouTube, which had
launched online movie rental services in October 2011, Tesco-owned
BlinkBox and Film4’s own VOD platform Film4OD (see Chapter 5).
However, it was immensely successful, reaching 1.5 million subscribers
by August 2013.
The VOD platform is a hallmark of contemporary convergence, with
film and television products housed together in large catalogues of
moving-image media, remediated through Netflix’s online streaming
player. The experience of film and television here is, as with the iPlayer,
inseparable. This led Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey to tell the audience
for the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2013
that ‘audiences are no longer making distinctions between television
and other media, so let’s throw the labels out’.7 It seemed that the end-
point for the ‘logic of convergence’ had finally arrived, and that there
would increasingly be no use for traditional media institutions nor for
media distinctions. And yet, like iPlayer (as discussed in Chapter 6),
Netflix and other streaming services still do distinguish between film
and television, in their cataloguing, data labelling and structure. The
ability to watch film and television in new ways, with greater user
control, has not undone the rhetorical separation of the media.
The expansive film libraries of such VOD services, and the general
explosion in accessibility of film online through legal and illegal means,
have inevitably had a major impact on the value of film on televi-
sion. With film products easily accessible and cheaply available both
on DVD and on streaming services, they no longer have the ability to
be television ‘events’ as discussed in Chapter 2. The idea of empowering
audiences to ‘binge’-watch television, rather than wait for broadcast, or
to wait for only a few months after a film’s theatrical release to stream it
‘free’, fundamentally dismantles previous funding structures associated
with these industries. Advertising revenues for broadcasters are in inex-
orable decline, as are live broadcast viewing figures (though these have
been more robust in the UK than elsewhere). The iPlayer and other pub-
lic service broadcasters’ online VOD services have shown they possess
the versatility and the ability to adapt to these changes, but it will be
increasingly important for PSBs to utilize arguments about the ability
to maintain a quality and range of product when revenues for moving-
image media are increasingly unstable. The best argument for the licence
fee in future years may be that it offers a sustainable form of finance to
produce new and original moving-image content in an environment
where there is little financial incentive to do so; after all, Netflix’s busi-
ness model is primarily predicated on acquiring the licences to stream
content from other media producers.
It is also clear that broadcasting and filmmaking institutions will need
to plan more carefully to exploit new models of distribution. This is
the thinking behind the BFI’s ‘New Models’ awards for distribution, and
the creation of Film4.0 in July 2011. This is a digital-specific initiative
headed by Anna Higgs, which has the intention of both exploiting the
capacity of web-based marketing, distribution and interactive tools, and
using this as a way of nurturing new talent. Film4.0 opened with a com-
petition called ‘Scenestealers’. Presented as a celebration of 30 years of
Channel 4’s support for film, amateur filmmakers were encouraged to
re-make particular scenes from a selection of Channel 4 films. The scenes
were judged by an industry panel, and the winner’s film was to be shown
on the Film4 Channel in November 2012, alongside the prize of a devel-

opment deal with Film4, mentorship from Higgs and £5000 to develop
an original micro-budget short film. Scenestealers cleverly took aspects
of Film4’s remit – to nurture new talent, to encourage experimentation
and innovation – but combined them with a savvy understanding of
the aspiring filmmaker of today, a ‘prosumer’ who is digitally compe-
tent, and already producing work like this: imaginative reworkings of
popular cinema.
A Field in England: An experimental release

Film4.0 was also responsible for the release of a film that potentially
indicates where the convergence between web-based distribution and
film culture will be taken in future, if not broadly then certainly in
the low-budget sector. This was Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, a
psychedelic historical film set entirely in the titular field in the midst of
the English Civil War. The budget for this film, fully funded by Film4.0,
was less than half the usual cost of an hour’s peak-time television drama,
as Wheatley drily pointed out in interview:
this film has already been successful. They have got an hour and a
half on the channel for £300 grand and drama costs £650 grand an
hour. Anything else is all gravy on top of that.8
Wheatley is using the logic and language of television economics, rather

than those associated with the film industry, to justify the spending of
a PSB film arm’s money on the film. His attitude speaks to an impor-
tant logic of contemporary convergence: that the material is ‘content’
for a platform as much as it is a film. This may partly be explained by
the fact that he began his career working both in television, directing
drama, comedy and commercials, and in digital media, producing ‘viral’
videos for a media company called Tomboy. This is perhaps indicative
of the changing employment patterns in British moving-image media;
rather than the previous standard of movement between theatre, film
and television (as with David Rose’s career), it is now more likely for
professionals to forge a career between television, new media and film.
The project was designed from the outset to work within the con-
straints of its budget. It is set in a single location, with no interior scenes,
no special effects, no star performers and little requirement for sophisti-
cated camera, lighting or sound equipment. As with other micro-budget
filmmakers (as discussed in Chapter 4), a virtue was made of the small
budget, and creative solutions to aesthetic problems were sought. For
example, Wheatley and cinematographer Laurie Rose invented a new

lens by taping together cheap, mass-produced lenses from children’s
toys and the dust cap of their digital camera to create a wide-angle
lens that is highly blurred, but becomes sharp when zoomed in on
detail. This cheaply made visual effect adds to the oneiric quality of
the film, supporting the mystical themes and characters it portrays.
Working within the reality of low budgets, constraints are given creative
solutions.
On 5 July 2013, the film was released across multiple platforms: not
only did it open across 17 screens in the Picturehouse cinema chain
(a large number for a micro-budget British film with limited commer-
cial appeal), but it was also released across VOD platforms like iTunes
and Film4OD, and on DVD and Blu-ray simultaneously. As Anna Higgs,
the film’s executive producer, explained, the idea was not only to pro-
vide as wide access for ‘as many different people as possible to see it in
as many different ways as possible’, but also to ‘create enough buzz to
allow the film to break through and build a life of its own’.9 The inno-
vative release was in itself a key component of the marketing for the
film. However, the ‘bespoke’ release strategy for the film also entailed
each platform bringing its own different experience: viewers who chose
the cinema could see a live Q&A session with Wheatley and the actors,
and the DVD and Blu-Ray had various ‘extras’. Because its release was
part funded by the BFI Distribution Fund’s New Models scheme, and
Film4 funded it, its experimental release is proposed as an innovation, a
form of research and development for (publicly funded) low-budget and
‘special interest’ films in the future. This strategy was not, in itself new;
indeed, a number of the micro-budget films discussed in Chapter 4 had
simultaneous multi-platform releases that incorporated pay-television,
VOD and DVD. It is a new reality for the low-budget film sector that the
best chance at financial return is to blanket release in this way so as to
rationalize spending on marketing. The crucial difference, in the case of
A Field, was that it was transmitted on free-to-air television at the same
time as all the other platforms. It is the use of television as an addi-
tional platform that is considered revolutionary, but, as Higgs argues,
it is part of the wider strategy for cross-platform marketing: ‘We’re in
a joint venture, and if one platform gets a bounce then that benefits
us all.’10
Because viewers had the option to see the film for free, the usual
assumption has been that it would adversely affect sales in other areas.
The producers argued that this was not the case, as in its opening week-
end A Field generated a healthy if underwhelming site average box office
of £1259, sales of around 1500 on DVD and Blu-ray, and more than
1000 downloads on VOD. Combined television ratings for the film on
Film4, Film4+1 and timeshifting were around 357,000, a small increase
on the channel’s usual slot average. These figures demonstrate the resid-
ual power and value of television in a multi-platform environment; a
television screening of a low-budget film gives it far greater access to
larger audiences than any other platform. Furthermore, the support of a
national PSB, in creating marketing buzz, in offering a wide platform for
the film, and by endowing it with the Film4 brand which confers upon
it a quality above other independent films, gave it a much greater impact
than it would otherwise have had. The case of A Field in England, despite
its modest commercial returns, argues for the continued and contem-
porary relevance of television for the (low-budget) film industry, and of
‘film’ material for the PSBs.
Despite fundamental changes in the media ecology, the relationship

between television and film, particularly in terms of its cultural hier-
archy, remains more or less the same as it has been since the 1980s.
Cinema is still understood as a cultural form which has its own modes
of representation, its own ‘aura’, its own specific cultural role to play.
Public service television, similarly, is still understood as a valuable
democratizing form, and retains its ability, despite the fragmentation
of audiences, to address the British public as a heterogeneous whole.
Most importantly for the argument of this book, though, television and
film texts have maintained a sense of individual identity, regardless of
the fact that the media are aesthetically, technologically and industrially
convergent. I have argued for the role that PSBs and their film texts have
played in the rhetorical divergence of film and television. In keeping
separate notions of cinema and television through their various plat-
forms of remediation, the PSBs keep alive a sense that the mediums are
different, and must be related to differently.
A consequence of this, intentional or not, is to confirm a cultural hier-
archy of film over television, where one is respectable and the other
is not, where one is culturally valued and the other can be cultur-
ally embarrassing, and where one has the status of art, and the other
has not. Where film is concerned, television is a platform, a delivery
technology, rather than a valuable cultural form to be borrowed from
or emulated. The book has charted, at various points, the disavowal
of television, whether by defining single drama texts as ‘cinema’, by
the film industry’s desire to create ‘a bigger picture’ through emulating
Hollywood style and practices, or by an individual director’s anxiety that
her low-budget digital film will ‘look like television’. It is difficult not to
view this attitude as biting the hand that feeds. Furthermore, for insti-
tutions which are legitimized in and through the idea that broadcasting
is a special, exceptional cultural form, and that it must be safeguarded
by public bodies from the worst excesses of commercial poor quality,
the disavowal of broadcast television is, to a degree, politically suspect.
The investment that PSBs make in a valued cultural form like cinema
is good for their institutional image: film is prestigious, and the institu-
tions’ involvement with film offers credit and enhances their credibility
as important cultural forces. However, their primary concern, and in
the case of the BBC the medium which justifies its publicly collected
income, is television.
The influence of digital technologies and the concomitant shift in atti-
tudes to media use should not be underestimated. In an environment in
which the public have access to a wide range of sources of entertain-
ment and information, PSBs must continue to justify their importance,
and legitimate their source of income. However, at a further level of
abstraction, PSBs must also demonstrate that the traditional kinds of
media that they were brought into being to regulate are still of sufficient
value to the culture to maintain their status as institutions. Ultimately,
then, the work that is put into distinguishing film and television as
media – through presentation, through separate industrial processes,
through the application of distinct discourses to each medium – is simul-
taneously the work of confirming the ongoing relevance of traditional
conceptualizations of media. For proponents of public service broad-
casting, and for scholars of film and television, this work is vital and
valuable, because it confirms that our subject media are special, are dif-
ferent and are separate. The rhetoric and reality of convergence may
continue to grow in strength, but as long as it is met with resistant dis-
courses of divergence, there will remain powerful continuities with the
past among the changes.
Notes
Introduction: The Contexts of Convergence

1. N. Carroll (1996) Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), p. 1.
2. A.D. Lotz (2007) ‘If It’s Not TV, What Is It?’ in S. Banet-Weiser, C. Chris and
A. Freitas (eds) Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (New York and
London: New York University Press), p. 100.
3. V. Porter (1983) ‘The Context of Creativity: Ealing Studios and Hammer
Films’ in J. Curran and V. Porter (eds) British Cinema History (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson), p. 180.
4. J. Caughie (1986) ‘Broadcasting and Cinema 1: Converging Histories’ in
C. Barr (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI)
pp. 189–205.
5. J. Hill (2010) ‘Revisiting British Film Studies’, Journal of British Cinema and
Television, 7:2, p. 299.
6. Ibid., p. 300.
7. Ibid.
8. A. Lovell (1972) ‘The Unknown Cinema of Britain’, Cinema Journal, 11:2,
pp. 1–8; J. Petley (1986) ‘The Lost Continent’ in Charles Barr (ed.) All Our
Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI), pp. 98–119.
9. Hill, ‘Revisiting’, p. 308.
10. J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds) (2000) British Cinema: Past and Present
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge). Higson’s more recent Film England
contains a more detailed analysis of the presence and influence of FilmFour
and the BBC in ‘culturally English’ filmmaking of the past two decades, see
A. Higson (2011) Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s
(London and New York: I.B. Tauris).
11. R. Murphy (ed.) (1997, 2002, 2007) The British Cinema Book (London: BFI).
12. J. Leggott (2009) Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror
(London: Wallflower), p. 12; R. Murphy (2000) ‘Introduction’ in Murphy
(ed.) British Cinema of the 90s (London: BFI), p. xix.
13. S. Street (2009) British National Cinema 2nd Edition (London and New York:
Routledge), p. 29.
14. J. Hill (1996) ‘British Television and Film: The Making of a Relationship’ in
J. Hill and M. McLoone (eds) Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations between
Film and Television (Luton: University of Luton Press), p. 166.
15. C. Murroni and N. Irvine (1997) ‘The Best Television in the World’, in
C. Murroni and N. Irvine (eds) Quality in Broadcasting, (London: Institute
for Public Policy Research), p. 12.
16. J. Corner, S. Harvey and K. Lury (1994) ‘Culture, Quality and Choice: The
Re-Regulation of TV 1989–1991’ in S. Hood (ed.) Behind the Screens: The
Structure of British Television in the Nineties (London: Lawrence and Wishart),
p. 17.
194
Notes 195
17. Murroni and Irvine, ‘The Best Television in the World’, pp. 1–2.
18. Corner, Harvey and Lury, ‘Culture, Quality and Choice’, p. 17.
19. Ibid., p. 12.
20. G. Mulgan (1990) ‘Television’s Holy Grail: Seven Types of Quality’ in Mulgan
(ed.) Questions of Quality (London: BFI), p. 11.
21. Peacock Report, quoted in J. McDonnell (1991) Public Service Broadcasting
(London and New York: Routledge), p. 98.
22. Broadcasting Act 1990 c42 Part 1 Chapter III Section 17 (1990).
23. P. Kerr, ‘Never Mind the Quality . . . ’ in Mulgan (ed.) Questions of Quality,
p. 43.
24. Communications Act 2003 c21. Part 3, Chapter 4, Subsection 264
(2003).
25. S. Harvey (2006) ‘Ofcom’s First Year and Neoliberalism’s Blind Spot: Attack-
ing the Culture of Production’, Screen, 47:1, pp. 99–100.
26. OFCOM (2005) Review of Public Service Broadcasting Phase Three: Competition
for Quality (London: HMSO), pp. 7–8.
27. G. Born (2003) ‘Strategy, Positioning and Projection in Digital Television:
Channel Four and the Commercialization of Public Service Broadcasting in
the UK’, Media, Culture and Society, 25:6, p. 781.
28. C. Johnson (2011) Branding Television (London: Routledge 2012), p. 81.
29. Ibid., p. 97.
30. C. Lury (2004) Brands: The Logos of the Cultural Economy (London and
New York: Routledge), p. 7.
31. J. Jacobs (2001) ‘Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies’,
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4:4, p. 433.
32. J.T. Caldwell (1995) Televisuality: Style Crisis and Authority in American Televi-
sion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), p. 12.
33. R. Nelson (2005) ‘American Quality Television Conference Review’, European
Journal of Cultural Studies, 8:1, p. 119.
34. J. Feuer (2007) ‘HBO and the Concept of Quality TV’ in J. McCabe and
K. Akass (eds) Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond
(London and New York: I.B. Tauris), p. 145.
35. J. McCabe and K. Akass, ‘Introduction: Debating Quality’ in McCabe and
Akass (eds) Quality TV, p. 8.
36. M. McLoone (1996) ‘Boxed In? The Aesthetics of Film and Television’ in
J. Hill and M. McLoone (eds) Big Picture, Small Screen, p. 81.
37. Jacobs, ‘Issues of Judgement’, p. 430.
38. R. Nelson (2007) State of Play: Contemporary ‘High-end’ Television Drama
(Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 110.
39. D.L. Jaramillo (2013) ‘Rescuing Television from the “cinematic”: The Perils
of Dismissing Television Style’ in J. Jacobs and S. Peacock (eds) Television
Aesthetics and Style (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury),
p. 73.
40. C. Brunsdon (1997) Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (London and
41. C. Brunsdon (2012) ‘It’s a Film: Medium Specificity as Textual Gesture in Red
Road and The Unloved’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9:3, p. 459.
42. Jacobs, ‘Issues of Judgement’, p. 423.
196 Notes
43. B. Mills (2013) ‘What Does It Mean to Call Television “Cinematic”?’ in Jason
Jacobs and Steven Peacock (eds) Television Aesthetics and Style, p. 64.
44. M.Z. Newman and E. Levine (2012) Legitimating Television: Media Convergence
and Cultural Status (London and New York: Routledge), p. 154.
45. A. Everett (2003) ‘Digitextuality and Click Theory: Theses on Conver-
gence Media in the Digital Age’ in A. Everett and J.T. Caldwell (eds)
New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (New York and London:
Routledge), p. 5.
46. P. Kramer (1996) ‘The Lure of the Big Picture: Film, Television and
Hollywood’ in J. Hill and M. McLoone (eds) Big Picture, Small Screen,
pp. 9–46.
47. See also, Ben Singer (1988) ‘Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home
Projecting Kinetoscope’, Film History, 2:1, pp. 37–69.
48. Kramer, ‘The Lure of the Big Picture’, p. 13.
49. McLoone, ‘Boxed In?’ p. 83.
50. H. Jenkins (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(New York and London: New York University Press), p. 2.
51. H. Jenkins (2004) ‘The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence’, International
Journal of Cultural Studies, 7: 1, p. 34.
52. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 6.
53. N. Negroponte (1995) Being Digital (London: Hodder and Stoughton), p. 71;
see also, M. McLuhan (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(London: Routledge).
54. D. Bell (2009) ‘On the Net: Navigating the World Wide Web’ in G. Creeber
and R. Martin (eds) Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media (Maidenhead:
Open University Press), p. 35.
55. Negroponte, Being Digital, pp. 48–49.
56. S. Keane (2007) CineTech: Film, Convergence and New Media (Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 30.
57. For example, P. Cherchi Usai (2001) The Death of Cinema (London: BFI);
A. Friedberg (2010) ‘The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological
Change’ in M. Furstenau (ed.) The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments
(London: Routledge); N. Nielssen (2011) ‘Lives of Cinema: Against Its Death’,
Screen, 52:3, pp. 307–326; L. Spigel and J. Olsson (eds) Television after TV:
Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
58. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 13.
59. Ibid., pp. 13–14.
60. D.N. Rodowick (2007) The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press), p. 19.
61. J.D. Bolter and R. Grusin (2009) Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press), p. 59.
62. Ibid., p. 45.
63. T. Syvertsen (2003) ‘Challenges to Public Television in the Era of
Convergence and Commercialization’, Television and New Media, 4:2,
p. 160.
64. N. James (2002) ‘Converging Targets’, Sight and Sound (December), p. 3.
65. Friedberg, ‘The End of Cinema’, p. 270.
66. J. Bennett (2011) ‘Introduction’ in J. Bennett and N. Strange (eds) Television
as Digital Media (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press), p. 1.
Notes 197
1 Film and Television Drama: The Making of a Relationship

1. J. Caughie (2007) Edge of Darkness (London: BFI), p. 24.
2. C. Barr (1996) ‘They Think It’s all Over’, in J. Hill and M. McLoone (eds)
Big Picture Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (Luton:
University of Luton Press), pp. 47–75.
3. J. Jacobs (2000) The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), p. 1.
4. Ibid., p. 45.
5. J. Caughie (2000) Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture
(Oxford: Clarendon), p. 52.
6. Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, p. 127.
7. Ibid., p. 117.
8. E. Buscombe (1991) ‘All Bark and No Bite: The Film Industry’s Response to
Television’ in J. Corner (ed.) Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural
History (London: BFI), p. 138.
9. Caughie, Television Drama, p. 43.
10. Quoted in Buscombe, ‘All Bark and No Bite’, p. 200.
11. Buscombe, ‘All Bark and No Bite’, p. 200.
12. Sources: Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (2013) (http://www.barb.
co.uk/resources/tv-facts/tv-ownership?_s=4); Film Distributors’ Association
(http://www.launchingfilms.com/research-databank/uk-cinema-admissions).
Accessed 20 September 2013.
13. M. Jackson (1980) ‘Cinema Versus Television’, Monthly Film Bulletin,
49:3, 181.
14. See M.K. MacMurragh-Kavanagh (1997) ‘The BBC and the Birth of the
“Wednesday Play”, 1962–1966: Institutional Containment versus “agita-
tional contemporaneity”’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television,
17:3, 367–381; H. Wheatley (2004) ‘Putting the Mystery back into Armchair
Theatre’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1:2, 197–210; and J.R. Cook
(2004) ‘Between Grierson and Barnum: Sydney Newman and the Develop-
ment of the Single Television Play at the BBC, 19631967’, Journal of British
Cinema and Television, 1:2, 211–225.
15. Caughie, Television Drama, p. 77.
16. See J. Hill (2007) ‘ “Creative in Its Own right”: The Langham Group and
the Search for a New Television Drama’ in L. Mulvey and J. Sexton (eds)
Experimental British Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press),
pp. 17–30.
17. T. Kennedy Martin (1964) ‘Nats Go Home: First Statement of a New Drama
for Television’, Encore 48, 21–33.
18. L. Cooke (2003) British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI),
p. 74.
19. Ibid., p. 58.
20. J. Hill (2007) ‘A New Drama for Television?: Diary of a Young Man’ in Mulvey
and Sexton (eds) Experimental British Television, p. 64.
21. P. Newland (2010) ‘Introduction: Don’t Look Now’ in Newland (ed.) Don’t
Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s (Bristol: Intellect), p. 14. This collec-
tion, alongside S. Harper and J. Smith (eds) (2012) British Film Culture in the
1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)
198 Notes
and R. Shail (ed) (2008) Seventies British Cinema (London: BFI), constitutes
the bulk of the critical reappraisal.
22. D. Rolinson (2010) ‘The Last Studio System: A Case for British Television
Films’ in Newland (ed.) Don’t Look Now, p. 165.
23. See M. Shivas (1996) ‘Little Big Screen’ in Christopher Williams (ed.) Cin-
ema: The Beginnings and the Future (London: University of Westminster Press),
p. 185.
24. See D. Hobson (2008) Channel 4: The Early Years and the Isaacs Legacy
(London: BFI); M. Brown (2007) A Licence to Be Different: The Story of Chan-
nel 4 (London: BFI); S. Lambert (1982) Channel 4: Television with a Difference?
(London: BFI); S. Blanchard and D. Morley (1982) What’s this Channel Four?
An Alternative Report (London: Comedia); S. Harvey, ‘Channel 4 Television:
From Annan to Grade’ in S. Hood (ed.) Behind the Screens (London: Lawrence
and Wishart), pp. 102–132.
25. Quoted in Hobson, Channel 4: The Early Years, pp. 11–12.
26. J. Isaacs (1989) Storm Over 4: A Personal Account (London: Wiedenfeld and
Nicholson), p. 145.
27. P. Ansorge (1997) From Liverpool to Los Angeles: On Writing for Theatre, Film
and Television (London: Faber and Faber), p. 97.
28. P. Ansorge (1983) ‘Drama Production at BBC Birmingham’ in J. Pilling and
K. Canham (eds), The Screen on the Tube: Filmed TV Drama (Norwich: Cinema
City), p. 27.
29. L. Cooke (2007) ‘English Regions Drama: Second City Firsts’ in H. Wheatley
(ed.), Re-Viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography
(London and New York: I.B. Tauris), p. 84.
30. A. Plater (2003) ‘Learning the Facts of Life: Forty Years as a TV Dramatist’,
New Theatre Quarterly 19:3, 207.
31. Correspondence between Rose and Susan Herbert of Davis-Poynter
publishers. On file at BBC Written Archives Centre. File M24/8/1
Penda’s Fen.
32. J. Rayner (1990) ‘Screen Saviour or Sinner?’, The Guardian, 15 March, 26.
33. N. Kent (1987) ‘Commissioning Editor: David Rose Interviewed’, Sight and
Sound, 56:4, 261.
34. Ibid., p. 262.
35. Ansorge, Liverpool to Los Angeles, p. 99.
36. H. Rothschild (2008) ‘Labour of Love’ in Rosie Boycott and Meredith
Etherington-Smith (eds), 25 × 4: Channel 4 at 25 (London: Cultureshock
Media), pp. 394–395.
37. S. Day-Lewis (1998) Talk of Drama: Views of the Television Dramatist Now and
Then (Luton: University of Luton Press), p. 7.
38. See C. Gardener and J. Wyver (1983) ‘The Single Play: From Reithian
Reverence to Cost Accounting and Censorship’, Screen 24:4–5, 12–19.
40. M. Coveney (1996) The World According to Mike Leigh (London: Harper
Collins), p. 100; A. Raphael (2008) Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh (London: Faber
and Faber), pp. 75–76.
42. Mike Leigh in Raphael Mike Leigh, p. 78.
43. Ibid., p. 79.
Notes 199
44. D. Hare (1982) ‘Ah! Mischief: The Role of Public Broadcasting’ in F. Pike
(ed.) Ah! Mischief: The Writer and Television (London: Faber and Faber),
pp. 47–48.
45. R. Boon (2007), ‘Hare on Film: An Interview’ in R. Boon (ed.) The Cambridge
Companion to David Hare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 172.
46. Mike Leigh Audio Commentary, DVD, Mike Leigh at the BBC (BBC World-
wide/2 Entertain, ASIN B001UHNXOC).
47. Hare, ‘Ah! Mischief’, p. 47.
48. D. Hare (1978) Licking Hitler (London: Faber and Faber), p. 11.
49. Leigh, DVD Audio Commentary,
50. Archived at BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham, File R9/7/139 Audience
Research Reports Jan and Feb 1976.
51. F. Donesky (1996) David Hare: Moral and Historical Perspectives (London and
Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press), p. 55.
52. See Caughie (2000) Television Drama, pp. 88–124.
53. C. Homden (1995) The Plays of David Hare (Cambridge: University of
Cambridge Press), pp. 63–64.
54. T. Griffiths (1983) ‘Countering Consent: An Interview with John Wyver’ in
F. Pike (ed.) Ah! Mischief, p. 31.
55. M. Auty (1985) ‘But Is It Cinema?’ in M. Auty and N. Roddick (eds), British
Cinema Now (London: BFI), p. 59.
2 Television as Film, Film as Television: Broadcasting

Cinema in the 1990s
1. J. Caughie (2000) Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 182.
2. G. Genette (1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
3. J. Gray (2010) Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts
(New York and London: New York University Press), p. 7.
4. Ibid., p. 25.
5. J. Ellis (2012) ‘Interstitials: How the “Bits in Between” Define the Pro-
grammes’ in P. Grainge (ed.) Ephemeral Media: Transitory Screen Culture from
Television to YouTube (London: BFI), p. 60.
6. Except for Our Day Out, which was first broadcast as a BBC 2 ‘Play of the
Week’.
7. Ellis, ‘Interstitials’, p. 60.
8. S. Durrant (1990) ‘One More Time; There Is More to Repeats on Television
than Meets the Eye, Even for the Seventh Time Around’, The Independent
(Arts section), Friday 10 August, p. 14.
9. Anonymous (1990) ‘Today’s Highlights’, Sunday Times, 8 July, p. 16.
10. J. Isaacs (1989) Storm Over 4: A Personal Account (London: Wiedenfeld and
Nicholson), p. 123.
11. C. Lippard (ed.) (1996) By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman
(Trowbridge: Flicks Books), p. 168.
12. With some important exceptions. See L. Mulvey and J. Sexton (eds) (2007)
Experimental British Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
200 Notes
13. H. Andrews (2011) ‘On the Grey Box: Broadcasting Experimental Film and
Video on Channel 4’s The Eleventh Hour’, Visual Culture in Britain, 12:2,
pp. 203–218.
14. T. Peake (1999) Derek Jarman (London: Abacus), pp. 304–305.
15. P. Webster (1985) ‘Backers of Obscenity Bill Hopeful’, The Times, 4 Decem-
ber, p. 1.
16. Isaacs, Storm Over 4, p. 115.
17. J. Ellis (1992) Visible Fictions (London: Routledge), pp. 238–239.
18. Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 304.
19. Ibid., p. 306.
20. Ibid., pp. 511–512.
21. R. Wymer (2006) Derek Jarman (Manchester: Manchester University Press)
p. 170.
22. Quoted in P. Wollen (2000) ‘Derek Jarman’s Blue’, New Left Review, 6, p. 120.
23. M. O’Pray (1996) Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (London: BFI), p. 201.
24. Anonymous, ‘Blue’, Radio Times, 18–25 September 1993, p. 41.
25. Anonymous ‘Blue’, TV Times 18–24 September 1993, p. 23.
26. Anonymous ‘Blue’, Radio Times, p. 57.
27. Anonymous ‘Blue’, TV Times, p. 37.
28. P.J. Smith (1993) ‘Blue and the Outer Limits’, Sight and Sound, 3:10, p. 18.
29. B. LaBelle (1995) ‘The Poetics of Blue’, Coil, 1, p. 17.
30. D. Petrie (1993) Blue Press Book p. 4. (Microfiche at BFI National Library).
31. O’Pray, Derek Jarman, p. 202.
32. G. Perry (1993) ‘Critics Choice’, Sunday Times, 19 September, p. 27.
33. Petrie, Blue Press Book, p. 6.
34. C. Darke (1993) ‘Blue’, Sight and Sound, 3:10, p. 41.
35. M. Brown (1995) ‘Talk of the Trade: Big Money but Little Interest in TV
Films’, The Independent, 17 January, p. 22.
36. J. Caughie (1996) ‘The Logic of Convergence’ in Hill and McLoone (eds) Big
Picture, Small Screen (Luton: University of Luton Press) p. 220.
37. A. Blundy (1994) ‘Hyping for a Hit,’ The Guardian, 16 May, p. 16.
38. R. Combs (1995) ‘New British Cinema: A Prospect and Six Views’, Film
Comment, 31:6, p. 53.
39. A. Walker (1994) ‘A Class Act Just for the Yanks’, Evening Standard, 12 May,
p. 32.
40. J. Hill (2009) ‘British Cinema as National Cinema: Production, Audience
and Representation’ in R. Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book, 3rd Edition
(London: BFI), p. 17.
41. D. Dayan and E. Katz (1992) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History
(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press), p. 6.
42. J. Feuer (1983) ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology’ in
E. Kaplan (ed.) Regarding Television: Critical Approaches – An Anthology (Los
Angeles: American Film Institute), p. 12.
43. G. Ellis (1995) ‘The Big Picture: How Britain’s Big Screen Industry Was Saved
by the Small Screen’, Radio Times, 11–17 November, pp. 4–5.
44. The Bodyguard achieved 13.28 million viewers. Tx 11 November 1995, ITV1.
45. Anonymous, Four Weddings and a Funeral Press Book, Held at BFI Library
London.
46. Ellis, Visible Fictions, p. 30.
Notes 201
47. P. Scannell (2002) ‘Big Brother as a Television Event’, Television and New
Media, 3:3, p. 271.
48. Dayan and Katz, Media Events, p. 123.
49. H. Wheatley (2004) ‘The Limits of Television? Natural History Programming
and the Transformation of Public Service Broadcasting’, European Journal of
Cultural Studies, 7:3, p. 336.
3 Commercialism and Quality: Television Institutions

and the British Film Industry, 1998–2002
1. See J. Caterer (2008) ‘National Lottery, National Cinema: The Arts Councils
and the UK Film Industry 1995–2000’, unpublished PhD Thesis, University
of East Anglia.
2. A. Walker (2004) Icons in the Fire: The Rise and Fall of Practically Everyone in
the British Film Industry 1984–2000 (London: Orion), p. 309.
3. Channel 4 Television Corporation, Annual Report 2000, p. 28.
4. For a thorough scholarly account of this period, see G. Born (2004) Uncertain
Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Vintage).
5. Ibid., p. 473.
6. A. Crissell (2002) An Introductory History of British Broadcasting (London and
7. See H. Andrews (2008) ‘A View from the Demographic: Notes on a Confer-
ence’, Screen 49:3, pp. 324–330.
8. Quoted in J. Hill (2002) ‘Changing of the Guard’, Journal of Popular British
Cinema, 5:1 p. 55.
9. Thompson interviewed by G. Macnab (1998) ‘Managing the Mini-Boom’,
Sight and Sound, October, p. 21.
10. G. Macnab (2002) ‘That Shrinking Feeling’, Sight and Sound, October, p. 18.
11. A. Pulver (2002) ‘End of an Era’, The Guardian (Friday Review), 12 July, p. 2.
12. Channel 4 Television Corporation, Annual Report 1999, p. 31.
13. See G. Macnab (1993) J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (London and
New York: Routledge) and J. Eberts and T. Ilott (1990) My Indecision Is Final:
The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films (London: Faber and Faber).
14. Macnab, ‘Managing the Mini-Boom’, p. 20.
15. N. James (2000) ‘Small Change’ Editorial, Sight and Sound, 10:6, p. 3.
16. T. Dams (2002) ‘A Licence to Lose Money?’, Broadcast 17 May, p. 14.
17. A. Walker (2000) ‘Britain’s Split Screen’, Evening Standard, 5 October, p. 31.
18. Dams, ‘A Licence to Lose Money?’, p. 14.
19. S. Street (2002) Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the United States
(London and New York: Continuum), p. 1.
20. Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, p. 56.
21. Webster in Hill, ‘Changing of the Guard’, p. 60.
22. John Caughie compellingly makes this complaint in ‘The Logic of Con-
vergence’ in J. Hill and M. McLoone (eds) (1996) Big Picture, Small Screen:
The Relations between Film and Television (Luton: University of Luton Press),
pp. 215–223.
23. See Department of Culture, Media and Sport (1998) A Bigger Picture: A Report
of the Film Policy Review Group (London: HMSO).
202 Notes
24. Street, Transatlantic Crossings, p. 2.

26. M. Walsh (1997) ‘Fighting the American Invasion with Cricket, Roses and
Marmalade for Breakfast’, The Velvet Light Trap (Fall), p. 6.
27. N. James (2009) ‘British Cinema’s US Surrender – A View from 2001’ in
R. Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book 3rd Edition (London: BFI), p. 23.
28. J. Petley (2002) ‘From Brit-flicks to Shit-flicks: The Cost of Public Subsidy’,
Journal of Popular British Cinema, 5:1, p. 38.
29. J. Peretti (2000) ‘Shame of a Nation’, The Guardian (Friday Review Section),
26 May, p. 2.
30. J. Caterer (2008) ‘Carrying a Cultural Burden: British Film Policy and Its Prod-
ucts’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 5:1, p. 147. The film in question
is Andrew Kotting’s Gallivant (UK, 1996).
31. Ibid.
32. Petley, ‘From Brit-flicks to Shit-flicks’, p. 49.
33. Pulver, ‘End of An Era’, p. 2.
34. M. Goodridge (2001) ‘Review: Charlotte Gray’, Screen International Online,
17 December 2001, http://www.screendaily.com/charlotte-gray/407808.
article, [Accessed 13 January 2010].
35. F. Gibbons (2001) ‘Lucky Break Set to Break “curse”’, The Guardian,
15 August, p. 8.
36. Lucky Break Press Book, Archived at the BFI National Library, London.
37. N. Barber (2001) ‘Review: Lucky Break’, Independent on Sunday, 26 August,
p. 11.
38. S. Sharpe (2001) ‘Review: Lucky Break’, Time Out, 22 August, p. 85.
39. G. Macnab (2004) ‘Cinefile: Charlotte Gray’, Time Out 6 October, p. 155.
41. T. Charity (2002) ‘Review: Charlotte Gray’, Time Out, 20 February, p. 18.
42. N. Hunt (2001) ‘How Unlucky Was UK’s Lucky Break?’, Screen International
Online, 31 August, http://www.screendaily.com/how-unlucky-was-uks-lucky-
break/406741.article, [Accessed 14 January 2010].
43. D. Elley (2001) ‘Review: Lucky Break’, Variety, 20 August, p. 24.
44. M. Dinning (2001) ‘Review: Lucky Break’, Empire, 147, p. 54.
45. Macnab, ‘That Shrinking Feeling’, p. 20.
46. Ibid.
4 Digital Departures: Television Institutions and

Low-Budget Production
1. D. Petrie (2002) ‘British Low Budget Production and Digital Technology’,
Journal of Popular British Cinema, 5:1, p. 64.
2. See H. Andrews (2011) ‘On the Grey Box: Broadcasting Experimental Film
and Video on Channel 4’s The Eleventh Hour’, Visual Culture in Britain, 12:2,
pp. 203–218.
3. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Gutch are taken from an
interview with the author, conducted 5 July 2013 at Warp Films’ London
office.
4. Channel Four Television Corporation, Annual Report 1999, p. 31.
Notes 203
5. J. Hill (2002) ‘Changing of the Guard’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 5:1,
p. 61.
6. A. Pulver (1999) ‘Test Tube Babies’, The Guardian, 15 December 1999, http://
www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/dec/15/artsfeatures [Accessed 15 July 2011].
7. Michael Jackson, quoted in Hill, ‘Changing of the Guard’, p. 55.
8. Petrie, ‘British Low Budget Production’, p. 70.
9. Ibid.
10. Pulver, ‘Test Tube Babies’.
11. Ibid.
13. C. Jones and G.Jolliffe (2006) The Guerrilla Film-maker’s Handbook (London:
Continuum), p. 157.
15. N. James (2001) ‘Digital Deluge’, Sight and Sound, 11:10, p. 20.
16. Metzstein, in round table discussion, James, ‘Digital Deluge’, p. 21.
17. T. Fogg (2001) ‘Interview with Robin Gutch’, Netribution, http://www.
netribution.co.uk/features/interviews/2001/robin_gutch/1.html [Accessed 13
July 2011].
18. Warp X homepage, http://warp.net/films/warp-films-general/warpx [Accessed
13 July 2011].
19. Northern Alliance (2008) Low and Micro-budget Film Production in the UK
(London: UK Film Council), p. 18. http://industry.bfi.org.uk/media/pdf/m/s/
Low_and_Micro_Budget_Film_Production_in_the_UK-17Jun08.pdf [Accessed
14 August 2013].
20. Ibid.
21. ‘About Us’ Warp X, http://www.warpx.co.uk/about-us.asp [Accessed 12 July
2011].
22. M. Atkinson (2013) ‘Berberian Sound Studio Is a Lavish Gift to
Film Geeks’, Village Voice Film Review Blog, http://www.voicefilm.com/
2013/06/berberian_sound_studio_is_a_lavish_gift_to_film_ge.php [Accessed
14 August 2013].
23. Northern Alliance, ‘Low and Micro-Budget Film-Making in the UK’, p. 34. NB
The Skills Investment Fund (SIF) is a levy on film production in the UK. Cur-
rently payment is a condition of public funding but otherwise contribution
is not mandatory. Producers are required to contribute 0.5 per cent of their
total production budget (with a ceiling of up to £39,500) to invest into the
training and development of the professionals and companies they require
for the future. The collection of the SIF is managed by Creative Skillset and
then invested in training through the Skillset Film Skills Fund.
24. Ibid.
25. Anonymous, ‘Past Productions’, iFeatures Webpages, http://ifeatures2.com/
past-productions.html [Accessed 14 August 2013].
26. See National Audit Office (2013), ‘The BBC’s Move to Salford’, http://
downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/review_report_research/vfm/
nao_salford.pdf
27. ‘About’, iFeatures Webpages, http://ifeatures2.co.uk/about.html [Accessed
14 August 2013].
28. Microwave Website, http://microwave.filmlondon.org.uk/ [Accessed 15 July
2011].
204 Notes
29. ‘About Microwave’, Microwave Website, http://microwave.filmlondon.org.uk/

smallprint/about/about_microwave_online [Accessed 15 July 2011].
30. In email to author, 14 July 2011.
31. Lindy Heymann interviewed on Kicks DVD (New Wave Films, 2010, ASIN No:
B003VKNWGA).
32. Heymann interviewed on Kicks DVD.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Liverpool Film Office (2013) ‘Made on Merseyside’, http://www.liverpoolfilm
office.tv/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/made-on-merseyside.pdf [Accessed
18 August 2013].
37. James, ‘Digital Deluge’, p. 20.
38. Petrie, ‘British Low Budget Production’, pp. 72–73.
5 ‘Great Films You Know, Great Films You Don’t’: The Birth
and Life of the FilmFour Digital Channel
1. A good summary of this complex history is provided in M. Brown (2008)
A Licence to Be Different: the Story of Channel 4 (London: BFI). A detailed anal-
ysis of the corporate changes at Channel 4 1997–2003 is provided by G. Born
(2003) ‘Strategy, positioning and projection in digital television: Channel
Four and the commercialization of public service broadcasting in the UK’,
Media, Culture and Society 25:6, pp. 773–799.
2. Broadcasters Audience Research Board, ‘Multichannel Development’, http://
www.barb.co.uk/resources/tv-facts/multi-channel-development?_s=4
[Accessed 27 July 2013].
3. Born, ‘Strategy, positioning and projection in digital television’, p. 779.
4. The cost of a Sky television package ranged from £19.99 to £30 per month,
with start-up costs of around £200 for installation. However, Sky packages
delivered up to 200 channels for the price of the subscription. The Sky
Movies package cost £8 per month.
6. C. Johnson (2011) Branding Television (London and New York: Routledge),
p 74.
7. Born, ‘Strategy, positioning and projection in digital television’, p. 779
8. S. Banet-Weiser, C. Chris and A. Freitas (2007) ‘Introduction’ in Banet-
Weiser, Chris and Freitas (eds) Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting
(New York: New York University Press), p. 9.
9. S. Armstrong (1998) ‘A shot in the arm’, Sunday Times (Magazine), 1
November, p. 33.
10. D. Gritten (1998) ‘The arts: At last – films worth watching on the box’, Daily
Telegraph, 8 October, p. 27.
12. C. Middleton (1998) ‘Filmspotting’, Radio Times, 31 October–6 November,
p. 57.
13. C. Johnson (2007) ‘Tele-branding in TV III: The network as brand and the
programme as brand’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 5:1, pp. 5–24.
Notes 205
14. In 2004, these channels were re-branded, with Sky Cinema separating into
two channels, Sky Premier becoming Sky Movies 1 and 3, and MovieMax
becoming Sky Movies 2, but the offering and scheduling remained largely
the same. A further rebranding occurred in 2007, where the channel names
referred explicitly to the types of cinema shown: Sky Movies Classics, Sky
Movies Drama, Sky Movies Family, Sky Movies Indie, Sky Movies Modern
Greats and Sky Movies Premiere.
15. J. Sconce (1995) ‘Trashing the academy: Taste, excess and an emerging pol-
itics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36:4, pp. 371–393; H. Jenkins (1993) Textual
Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London and New York:
Routledge).
16. M. Jancovich, A Lázaro Reboll, J. Stringer and A. Willis (2003) ‘Introduction’
in Jancovich, Lázaro Reboll, Stringer and Willis (eds) Defining Cult Movies:
The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University
Press), p. 1.
17. See M. Jancovich (2002) ‘Cult fictions: Cult movies, subcultural capital and
the production of cultural distinctions’, Cultural Studies, 16:2, pp. 306–322;
J. Read (2003) ‘The cult of masculinity: From fan-boys to academic bad-boys’
in Jancovich et al. (eds) Defining Cult Movies, pp. 54–70.
18. J. Hollows (2003) ‘The masculinity of cult’ in Jancovich et al. (eds) Defining
Cult Movies, p. 41.
19. Quoted in Hollows, ‘The masculinity of cult’, p. 42.
20. J. Hawkins (2008) ‘Sleaze mania, Euro-trash and high art: The place of
European art films in American low culture’ in E. Mathijs and X. Mendik
(eds) The Cult Film Reader (Maidenhead: Open University Press), pp. 119–132.
21. E. Mathijs and X. Mendik (2008) ‘Introduction’ in Mathijs and Mendik (eds)
The Cult Film Reader, p. 5.
22. J. An (2008), ‘The Killer: Cult Film and transcultural (mis)reading’ in Mathijs
and Mendik (eds) The Cult Film Reader, pp. 320–327.
23. ‘Collections’ Film4OD website, http://film4od.film4.com/Collections/ [Acce-
ssed 23 July 2013].
6 New Logics of Convergence: Film through

Online Television
1. J. Steemers (2003) ‘Public Service Broadcasting Is Not Dead Yet: Strategies
in the 21st Century’ in G. Ferrell Lowe and T. Hujanen (eds) Broadcast-
ing and Convergence: New Articulations of the Public Service Remit (Goteburg:
Nordicom), p. 123.
2. N. Negroponte (1995) Being Digital (London: Hodder and Stoughton), e.g.
p. 49. (The phrase is repeated throughout.).
3. D. Harries (2002) ‘Watching the Internet’ in Harries (ed.) The New Media Book
(London: BFI), p. 171.
4. G. Ferrell Lowe and T. Hujanen (2003) ‘Broadcasting and Convergence:
Rearticulating the Future Past’ in Lowe and Hujanen (eds) Broadcasting and
Convergence, p. 9.
5. By this time, the iPlayer had been in development for six years, had cost
more than £5 million and had been ‘launched’ three times’. The first user
206 Notes
trial had taken place for six months in late 2005, followed by a second in
2006. The final approval for the scheme from the BBC Trust was achieved
in April 2007, and the project later moved from a beta test to an ‘open
beta’, meaning that members of the public could use the application from
27 July 2007.
6. O. Gibson (2007) ‘Letting you view “any time, any place, anyhow” – BBC
Finally Unveils the iPlayer’, The Guardian, 28 June, p. 9.
7. See iPlayer Performance pack, June 2013 http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/
latestnews/2013/bbciplayerjune.html [Accessed 29 September 2013].
8. E. Weissman (2009) ‘Drama Counts: Uncovering Channel 4’s History with
Quantitative Research Methods’, New Review of Film and Television Studies,
7:2, p. 191.
9. M. Buonanno (2009) The Age of Television Experience and Theories [translated
by Jennifer Radice] (Bristol: Intellect), p. 69.
10. J. Ellis (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London and
New York: I.B. Tauris), p. 131.
11. Negroponte, Being Digital, p. 18.
12. A. Everett (2003) ‘Digitextuality and Click Theory: Theses on Convergence
Media in the Digital Age’ in A. Everett and J. T. Caldwell (eds) New Media:
Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (London and New York: Routledge),
p. 17.
13. H. Walsh (2007) ‘The Kids Stay in the Picture’, The Guardian, 23 February,
Film and Music, p. 6.
14. Under the Mud Website, http://www.underthemud.com/ [Accessed 11 July
2011].
15. BBC Strategy Document, 2005. Emailed to author by Film Network modera-
tor James Rocarols, 3 November 2010.
16. Unless otherwise stated, all material related to James Rocarols from interview
with author, conducted via telephone, 23 May 2013.
17. M. Lister, J. Dovey, S. Giddings, I. Grant and K. Kelly (2008) New Media:
A Critical Introduction 2nd Edition (London and New York: Routledge),
p. 34.
18. C. Wardle and A. Williams (2010) ‘Beyond User-Generated Content: A Pro-
duction Study Examining the Ways in Which UGC is Used at the BBC’,
Media, Culture and Society, 32:5, pp. 794–795.
7 Conclusion: Convergence and Divergence Now

1. ‘Department of Culture, Media and Sport’, Digital Economy Act 2010,
Section 22 Part (1)(b).
2. J. Deans (2010) ‘Channel 4 boosts Film4 budget by 20%’, The Guardian
(online) 5 May, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/may/05/film4-
budget-channel-4
3. BBC Trust, ‘The BBC’s Strategy: Putting Quality First’ (December
2010), http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/review_report_
research/strategic_review/final_conclusions.pdf Accessed 29 September 2013.
4. BBC Trust, ‘Delivering Quality First’ (October 2011), http://downloads.bbc.
co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/pdf/dqf_detailedproposals.pdf
Notes 207
5. BBC Annual Report 2012–2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/annualreport/2013/

overview/trust_in_the_bbc.html
6. See C. Johnson (2013) ‘From Brand Congruence to the “Virtuous Circle”:
Branding and the Commercialization of Public Service Broadcasting’, Media,
Culture and Society, 35:3, pp. 314–331.
7. Spacey, K (2013) ‘The MacTaggart Lecture: How Netflix Killed the
Watercooler Moment – and Breathed New Life into TV’, The Guardian,
23 August, p. 37.
8. Burrell, I. (2013) ‘Ben Wheatley and Film4 Go Where no British Film Has
Gone: “A Field in England” to Be Shown on TV on the Same Day as its Cin-
ema Release’, The Independent, 28 June, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/tv/news/ben-wheatley-and-film4-go-where-no-british-film-
has-gone-a-field-in-england-to-be-shown-on-tvon-the-same-day-as-its-
cinema-release-8678827.html [Accessed 29 September 2013].
9. T. Seymour (2013) ‘New Horizons – Producers Claire Jones & Anna
Higgs on the Release Strategy for “A Field In England” ’, Moviescope
online, http://www.moviescopemag.com/features/new-horizons-producers-
claire-jones-anna-higgs-on-the-release-strategy-for-a-field-in-england/
10. Seymour, ‘New Horizons’.
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Index
8 Minutes Idle (2014), 127 Film Network, 170–9

4OD, see Channel 4 iPlayer, 29, 162–9, 177–8, 188–9
4Ventures, see Channel 4 licence fee, 88, 100, 126, 165, 178,
127 Hours (2010), 187 184, 189
Media City, 127
ABC1 demographic, 13, 75, 88, 138 metrocentrism, 33, 35, 47, 54, 127
see also Channel 4; demographic online, 161–3, 179
targeting Pebble Mill, 33, 47–8, 60, 65
‘A Bigger Picture’ (Report of the Film Play for Today, 35, 44, 50, 56, 60,
Policy Review Group, 1998), 91–2 62, 65–6, 89
Abraham, David, 183 Screen One/Two, 46, 75
A Complete History of My Sexual Failures Wednesday Play, 34–5, 42–4, 56
(2008), 121–2 Worldwide, 88
A Field in England (2013), 190–3 BBC Films, 26, 28, 84–5, 89–90, 92–4,
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013), 188 96, 112, 126–30, 167, 171, 177,
amateur filmmaking, 170–5, 189 180, 182, 184, 187–8
see also user generated content Berberian Sound Studio (2013), 122–5
American cinema, see co–production; Beaufoy, Simon, 101
Hollywood BFI, 46, 94, 116, 185–8
Annan Report (1977), 45 Big Brother, 183
Another Year (2010), 158 Birmingham, 33, 47–9, 114
Ansorge, Peter, 47, 48–50 Birt, John, 86–7, 89
Armchair Cinema, 35, 44 Billy Elliot (1999), 84
Armchair Theatre, 35, 41–2 Blanchett, Cate, 103–4
Armstrong, Gillian, 101, 103 Blethyn, Brenda, 143
art cinema, 15, 26, 57, 64, 67–75 BlinkBox, 188
arthouse cinema, 94–5, 136, 142–4, see also video on demand (VOD)
156–9 Blue (1993), 70–5
Aukin, David, 49 Born, Georgina, 13, 87, 137–8, 142
Boyle, Danny, 141, 153, 185, 187
BBC branding, 6, 13–14, 26–7, 66, 127,
brand, 13–4, 88, 126, 129–30, 164, 139, 144, 155, 159, 170, 175–7
170, 172, 175–7, 182, 184 see also BBC; Channel 4;
Broadcasting House, 47 institutional reputation
commercialization, 86–8, 187 Bread and Roses (2000), 94
corporate structure, 85–7, 172, 177 British cinema studies, 2, 7–10
corporate policy, 43, 100, 183–5 British film industry, 2–3, 8–9, 27, 58,
‘Delivering Quality First’, 178, 84–107, 120, 186
183–5 commercialism, 83–107, 187
drama department, 43–4, 56, 84, 89 government policy, 4, 83, 87, 126,
English Regions Drama department, 183–6, see also Creative
35, 47–8, 60, 127 England; UK Film Council
224
Index 225
in the 1970s, 44 red triangle, 69

in the 2000s 83–4, 120, 123, remit, 12–4, 28, 45, 113, 138, 183–4
129, 171 see also Abraham, David; FilmFour;
internationalism, 92–6 Isaacs, Jeremy Rose, David;
response to television, 38–41, 90–2 Jackson, Michael
since 2010, 183, 185–8, 192 Channel 5, 163
see also Film Industry Defence Charlotte Gray (2001), 101–7
Organisation (FIDO) cinematic, 6, 9–10, 15–18, 33, 36–7,
Broadcasting Act 1980, 35 41–2, 51, 53, 56–7, 73–4, 96, 102,
Broadcasting Act 1990, 12, 74, 119, 125, 134, 182
85–6, 88 cinephilia, 143, 152–3, 158
Broadcasting Act 1996, 86, 137 Clarke, Alan, 44, 48, 61
Brother (2000), 95 convergence, 3–6, 9, 18–30, 33, 36, 56,
Buffalo Soldiers (2001), 94, 96 58–9, 85, 106, 112, 130, 134, 160,
Bunny and the Bull (2009), 122 162, 169, 177–9, 181, 183,
187–90, 193
cable and satellite television 11, 15, co–production, 27, 37, 84, 89, 92–95
28, 82, 136–9, 147 Creative England, 128
see also pay–TV cult film, 135, 150–4
Cameron, David, 186
Caravaggio (1986), 70
Dancer in the Dark (2000), 94
Carlton Greene, Hugh, 42
database, 5, 29, 144–6, 162–7
Carlyle, Robert, 141
Cattaneo, Peter, 101–2, 105 Davies, Terence, 106, 126
Caughie, John, 7, 9, 33, 37, 41, 55, Daybreak (2000), 114–16
58, 75 Death to Smoochy (2002), 96
celluloid, 21, 44, 111, 114–15, 117, ‘Delivering Quality First’, see BBC
129, 133 demographic targeting, 12–13, 75,
censorship, 55, 69–, 72, 152 88, 138
Channel 4 Department for Culture, Media and
branding, 13, 75, 89, 135, 139–40, Sport, 86, 91–2 186
143–4 Digital Departures, 126–7
commercialization, 13, 81–2, 83, Digital Economy Act 2010, 183
85–90, 136, 183 digital television, 137, 139, 143–4,
demographic targeting, 12–13, 75, 157–60, 182
88, 138 digital video (DV), 114–18, 120–1,
department for fiction, 4, 25, 35, 133–4
48–9, 70 distribution, 1–2, 26–7, 39, 41, 45–6,
E4, 86, 136–7 58, 60–1, 66–7, 72–7, 81–4, 88,
establishment, 35, 45, 48, 67–9 91–2, 95, 104, 106, 121, 123, 126,
film broadcasts, 149 131, 133, 156, 162, 164, 168–72,
Film on Four, 35, 46, 49, 61–2, 66, 175, 178, 188–90
75, 78, 81, 88, 113 divergence, 6, 18, 22, 24–5, 27, 36, 56,
4OD, 164 82, 85, 106–7, 112, 159, 167, 179,
4Ventures, 86, 136 181, 183, 192–3
funding formula, 67, 75, 85–6 Dogme, 115
Independent Film and Video Donkey Punch (2008), 122
Department, 67, 70,113 DV see digital video (DV)
logo, 63 Dyke, Greg, 87, 89
226 Index
Edinburgh Film Festival, 72, Garnett, Tony, 43, 44–

114, 123 Gutch, Robin, 112–17, 120–3
Edinburgh Television Festival, 188 Grade, Michael, 8, 85
E4, see Channel 4 Grant, Hugh, 80
The Eleventh Hour, 67
Elizabeth (1998), 101, 103
Hare, David, 35
EM Media, 120
Harry Potter series (2001–2011),
English Regions Drama, see BBC
185–6
Entwistle, George, 185
HBO, 15, 139
europuddings, 92, 95
Herbert, Mark, 120
see also co–production
Heymann, Lindy, 112, 131–3
experimental cinema, 28, 45, 60, 67,
Hill, John, 7, 8–9, 43, 77
69–70, 74, 89, 113, 115–6, 121,
153, 190–1 Hollywood, 42, 44, 76–7, 84, 91–100,
105, 111, 136, 138, 140–3, 147–9,
Festen (1998), 115 187, 192–3
Film 4 Today, 60–3, 74 Hotel Splendide (2001), 94
Film Industry Defence Organisation Hush (2008), 122
(FIDO), 40–1
Film Network, see BBC The Idiots (1998), 115
Film on Four, see Channel 4 iFeatures, 28, 112, 127–8, 130
film studies, 3, 7, 10 The Inbetweeners Movie (2011), 187
FilmFour In The Dark Half (2011), 127
Film4 (rebranded digital television Independent Film and Video
channel), 136, 148–50, Department, see Channel 4
152–60, 192 institutional reputation, 6, 28, 69,
Film4 (rebranded production arm) 81–2, 106, 126, 144, 175–6,
1–2, 28, 112, 116, 120–3, 167, 182, 185
180, 182–3, 187–8, 190 see also branding
Film 4.0, 189–90 Internet, 117, 162–3, 171, 173
Film4OD, 157–8, 164, 188, 191, see see also online
also video on demand (VOD) interstitial material, 26, 59–64, 79,
FilmFour (digital television 143–4, 152, 157–8, 181
channel), 28, 86 136–60 Invincible (2001), 94
FilmFour Lab, 28, 112–17, iPlayer, see BBC
120–3, 129
Isaacs, Jeremy, 45–6, 66, 68–9
FilmFour Ltd (production,
It’s All About Love (2001), 94, 96
distribution and sales arm), 26,
iTunes, 164, 191
83–107, 115–16, 136
see also video on demand (VOD)
Flying Blind (2012), 127
ITV, 12, 13, 34–5, 37, 39–42, 44–6, 67,
For Those in Peril (2013), 123
78, 85, 102, 163–4, 186
Fountain, Alan, 67
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994),
75–80, 82 Jackson, Michael, 41, 83, 86, 89,
Frears, Stephen, 48 112–13, 137
Freestyle (2010), 128–9 Jarman, Derek, 26, 60, 67–74
Freeview, 136, 150, 152, 155–7, 159 Jane Eyre (2011), 187
The Full Monty (1997), 91, Jenkins, Henry, 19–22, 150, 162
101–2, 104 Jump Tomorrow (2001), 114
Index 227
Kennedy Martin, Troy, 35, 42–3, Newman, Sydney, 34, 35, 41–2
51, 54 new media studies, 14, 18–24,
Kicks (2008), 112, 126, 129, 130–4 166, 181
Kötting, Andrew, 114 Northwest Vision and Media, 126
Nuts in May, 34, 50–5, 61, 63–4
Large (2001), 114
Leigh, Mike, 34, 44, 50–3, 61, 63–4, Ofcom, 12–13
81, 153, 157–8 Of Time and the City (2008), 126, 129
licence fee, see BBC online, 23, 29, 129, 161–79, 188–9
Licking Hitler, 35, 50–5, 61, 65 Optimum Releasing, 120
Little Otik (2001), 94 Our Day Out, 61, 64–5
Liverpool, 126, 130–3, 167–8
Loach, Ken, 35, 43, 94, 106, 153, 157 paratext, 5–6, 59–64, 66, 70, 73, 78,
London, 33, 43, 46, 89, 105, 112, 81–2, 164, 180–1
127–8, 140 see also interstitial material
LoveFilm, 188 Pasolini, Uberto, 101
Low Budget Film Scheme, 120, 126 pay–TV, 129, 136, 138, 144, 150,
see also Warp X 152, 154
low–budget film, 28, 66, 106, 111–34, see also cable and satellite television
162, 168–9, 182, 190–2 Pebble Mill, see BBC
see also micro–budget film Penda’s Fen, 48, 61–2, 64
Lucky Break (2001), 100–6 Play for Today, see BBC
PSB, see public service broadcasting
Mamma Mia! (2008), 185 public service broadcasting, 2, 10–14,
McGregor, Ewan, 140–1 24, 28, 44, 68, 82, 87–8, 92, 100,
Meadows, Shane, 1, 158 115, 134, 138, 154, 161, 170,
medium specificity, 2–3, 19–22, 24, 172–3, 180, 183–5, 187, 189,
30, 39, 58–9, 165, 179, 181 192–3
see also convergence; divergence
micro–budget film, 112, 121, 126–30, quality
167, 190–1 branding, 13–14, 107, 129–30,
see also low–budget film 138–9, 169, 172, 175–6, 182
microwave, 28, 112, 128–30 in evaluation of publicly subsidized
Miramax, 84, 89, 94, 95 film, 96–100
Monsters (2010), 121 in policy, 10–14, 183–5
The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), 1 ‘quality television’ 14–18
Mrs Brown (1997), 84 taste, 142–3
Müller, Robby, 118
Mum and Dad (2008), 128–9 Rank, J. Arthur, 39, 90, 93, 97
My Brother Tom (2001), 112, regional film funds, 94, 126–8, 178
117–20, 133 remediation, 5, 23–4, 29, 59, 66, 78,
My Week with Marilyn (2011), 187 164, 179, 192
Ressources Humaines (1999), 94
National Lottery, 83, 91, 98, 185 Rocarols, James, 171–2, 174–8
see also UK Film Council Rose, David, 4, 25–6, 33, 35, 46–50,
‘Nats Go Home’, see Kennedy Martin, 54, 56–7, 60–1, 65, 89, 117, 190
Troy Ross, Tessa, 106, 115
Nesbitt, James, 102 Rotheroe, Dom, 112, 117
Netflix, 188–9 Rudden, Bernard, 112, 114
228 Index
Rudkin, David, 61, 64 Thames Television, 41, 45

Russell, Willy, 48, 61, 64 Thompson, David, 84, 89
This Filthy Earth (2001), 114
Salvage (2008), 126, 129 This is England (2006), 1, 158
scheduling, 16, 29, 61, 64–5, 75, 85, Thompson, Mark, 106, 136, 184
135–6, 144–59, 163–6, 169 Trainspotting (1996), 91, 141–2
Screen One, see BBC Tyrannosaur (2011), 122
Screen Yorkshire, 120
Sebastiane (1976), 68–9 UK Film Council, 4, 27, 83–4, 91, 112,
Senator Film Produktion, 95 121–2, 126–8, 167, 170, 174, 178,
Seven Psychopaths (2012), 187 182, 185
Sexy Beast (2000), 95 Under the Mud (2006), 162, 167–9
Shifty (2008), 128–9 user generated content, 172–3
Shivas, Mark, 8 see also amateur filmmaking
Simon Magus (2001), 95
simulcast, 28, 72, 74, 137, 140, Vaughn, Johnny, 140–1, 159
143–4, 159 Very Annie–Mary (2001), 94
Sky Television, 136, 138, 159, 186, 188 videotape, 34, 36–7, 48, 50–1, 55
Sky Movies 138, 142, 150 video on demand (VOD), 133, 157,
Slumdog Millionaire (2008), 185 163–5, 188–9, 191–2
Smith, Chris, 86, 186 Vimeo, 175–8
Stoneman, Rod, 67 see also video on demand (VOD)
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, 153–4
The Straight Story (1999), 95 Walker, Alexander, 76, 84, 93, 99
Strickland, Peter, 112, 123 Warner Bros, 95, 104, 186
subscription television, 136, 138–9, Warp Films, 120, 123
147–8, 188 Warp X, 28, 112, 120–3, 126, 129
see also cable and satellite television, Watson, Emily, 141
FilmFour; Sky Television web, 136, 138, 161, 189–90
Sunshine (2001), 94 see also Internet, online
Web 2.0, 170
telecine, 34–5, 37 see also Internet, online
telerecording, 34, 37, 44–5 Webster, Paul, 88–90, 93, 95, 105, 113
television drama, 6, 9–10, 15–16, The Wednesday Play, see BBC
25–6, 33–57, 59–64, 76, 81–2, 84, Wheatley, Ben, 122, 125, 183, 190–1
88–9, 134 Whitehouse, Mary, 68
television event, 26, 60, 72–4, 75–82, Working Title, 112–13
159, 165 Wuthering Heights (2011), 187
television studies, 2–3, 14–18, 165
television studio, 34–5, 37–8, 41, YouTube, 170, 172, 175–6, 178, 188
43–4, 46, 48, 50–1, 55, 140 see also video on demand (VOD)
televisual, 10, 17–8, 38, 59–60, 73–4,
76–7, 89, 102, 130, 133–4, 164–5 Z Cars, 43, 47

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Television and British Cinema

Television and British

List of Figures and Tables vii

Introduction: The Contexts of Convergence 1

Part I Convergence/Divergence: The Relations

1 Film and Television Drama: The Making of a

2 Television as Film, Film as Television: Broadcasting

3 Commercialism and Quality: Television Institutions and

Part II Convergence and Divergence

5 ‘Great Films You Know, Great Films You Don’t’: The

6 New Logics of Convergence: Film through

7 Conclusion: Convergence and Divergence Now 180

0.1 Film4 season promotional advertisement 2

1.1 Film and television drama: Key moments 34

ASL average shot length

Title Used for In use

Film on Four Broadcast slot 1982–1998

Over a five-day period in November 2008, a short ‘season’ of five films

Figure 0.1 Film4 season promotional advertisement

advertisement relays a narrative of a ﬁlm’s progress from pre-production

The notion of medium speciﬁcity was a powerful rhetorical lever

To engage with questions of convergence, such as those explored in this

feature in the textuality, ontology or aesthetics of any given ﬁlm is an

with cinema as a factor in the intervention of the PSB in ﬁlm culture.

Unknown cinemas and lost continents: Locating

Britain offers itself as a strong case study in the relationship between

Although the cultural discourses surrounding British cinema have

The idea of uncovering or discovering ‘unknown’ cinemas, ‘lost con-

What is often noticeable about the conventional criticisms of British

If British cinema has had a reputation for being ‘uncinematic’, then it

There has by no means been a complete acceptance of ﬁlm studies as

Quality in broadcasting: Public service brands

assume that ‘good’ and ‘popular’ television are opposites, as in Christina

Initially inﬂected in the direction of a defence of established pub-

Quality in television thus started to be treated by policy makers in rather

Quality indicators . . . may be relatively straightforward in manufac-

Quality in television is a relative, subjective and ﬂexible discourse, difﬁ-

makes it more, not less, difﬁcult for broadcasters to produce high-quality

In a multichannel universe, given the need to stand out from the

In a media situation in which broadcasters’ output is now ‘content’

marketplace’; indeed, Johnson argues that the practices associated with

As an interface, the brand is a frame that organises the two-way

Brands attempt to control the judgement of the consuming public on

can be attributed to such changes in (particularly American drama)

Technological and economical innovations in television production

It seems to be taken for granted that there is such an adjective

the dominant characterisation of television in both everyday and

When one medium is allowed to be ‘serious’ and the other trivialized

that the ‘cinematic’ might be seen as a positive term when applied

Mills refers here to a range of recent television scholarship that works

in terms of its traditional technological and cultural form, in that

If television scholars contribute to the legitimation of the medium in

Bringing some of the methodological and aesthetic tensions to the

Convergence: A new media discourse?

The ongoing issue of deﬁnition, redeﬁnition and discursive construction

We have only recently reached an attenuated consensus on the dif-

study. With this battle barely in a state of ﬁeld-expanding detente, the

Convergence as a concept and a phenomenon gained much intellec-

manifestations of the discourse. He is thus careful to present his