Latest news with #Kosminsky
New Statesman
26-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Peter Kosminsky: We need a BBC that is brave
Photo by Bailey-Cooper/Alamy One could be forgiven for thinking that British television is at the strongest it has ever been. More than 12 million of us tuned in to watch the Gavin and Stacey finale. Mr Bates vs The Post Office sparked a wave of national anger and forced the government into action after years of journalist trying to raise awareness of the Horizon Post Office scandal. Baby Reindeer, Adolescence and Toxic Town have all been enormous successes on both sides of the Atlantic. But those at the very top of the industry are worried. 'We're in dire straits,' Peter Kosminsky, one of the UK's most highly respect TV professionals and the man behind the BBC's Wolf Hall, told the New Statesman podcast. While we are able to watch a variety of high-quality programming, dramas that are 'peculiarly British' are under threat of extinction. The likes of Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and Apple TV will not make them. 'The streamers say they're speaking to an international audience, and they make programmes that are of interest to an international audience,' Kosminsky explained. 'What they actually mean is American audiences.' 'Mr Bates vs The Post Office doesn't get made' in this world, he warns Kosminsky has worked in the television industry for 45 years, and for all of the UK's major public service broadcasters. A director, writer and producer, he has won every accolade possible: multiple Baftas, Royal Television Society awards, Golden Globes along with individual recognition for what he has personally contributed to British television. His most recent triumph was the final part of Wolf Hall, broadcast in 2024. But the cost of making high end drama, documentary and comedy has soared in recent years – 'by a factor of five or six', Kosminsky says. Not because of inflation, but because the streamers have driven up the costs. 'They've arrived here, competed to use our crews and our facilities, and they have deep pockets, and they pay a lot of money.' The homegrown sector – BBC, Channel 4 and ITV – have been priced out. They can't compete. 'It's interesting talking to Patrick Spence, the producer who developed Mr Bates vs The Post Office,' Kosminsky says. 'He said he wouldn't develop it now. Why? Because there would be no prospect of it getting made. And that's really worrying.' Both Mr Bates and Wolf Hall were turned down by all the big streamers, Kosminsky told the New Statesman. Actors and executives on both took significant pay cuts to make sure they even made it to screen. Both Kosminsky and executive producer Colin Callender waived 90 per cent of their production fee. Peter Straughan who wrote the adaptation and actor Mark Rylance who played Cromwell 'also made a huge financial sacrifice'. Kosminsky dismisses those who cite the success of Adolescence or Toxic Town – both written by Jack Thorne and both snapped up by Netflix – as a challenge to his argument. 'Adolescence was a fantastic drama, and I applaud Netflix for making it. But just stop and think for a moment. What's adolescence about at root? It's about a murder carried out in a school of one pupil by another pupil. Not a problem they're unfamiliar with in America.' The same goes with Toxic Town, Kosminsky says of the drama depicting the fight by a group of Corby mothers to get justice for their children damaged by contaminated waste from the nearby steelworks. Stop again and think about the subject, Kosminsky says. 'Anyone watched Erin Brockovich recently?' Reflecting on his career, Kosminsky is someone trying to 'challenge the orthodoxy'. He wants to ask uncomfortable questions of the rich and powerful. A television maker, yes, but a public service journalist at heart. Audiences don't want to be 'harangued all the time', he says, 'but occasionally it's our job to say, hang on a minute, have you thought about it like this? And actually, are you really comfortable with this? And if not, what could we possibly do about it?' He has made powerful dramas on the Israel-Palestine conflict (The Promise), British peacekeepers who bear witness to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia (Warriors), the experience of young British Muslims post 7/7 (Britz), and the role of scientist Dr David Kelly in the run-up to the Iraq War (The Government Inspector). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Kosminsky places the blame for the British TV's current predicament firmly at the Government's door. He says they 'refuse' to help public service broadcasters make these programmes by rejecting the idea of a streamer's levy. A levy would make it compulsory for the streaming giants to pay 5 per cent of all money earned from British subscribers into a separate fund to be used to make programmes where a UK public service broadcaster is part of the commission. Similar schemes are in place in 17 European countries, including France and Germany where Netflix unsuccessfully tried to take legal action to prevent the levy being introduced. 'When I asked one of the founders of Netflix, whether they would challenge it in the court if it was brought in here in this country, he said, 'No, as long as it was a level playing field across all the streamers,'' Kosminsky said. So why is the Government saying no? 'Because they fear that it would be perceived by the current administration in America as a tariff.' This misses a fundamental point, he stressed. The streamers can get some of the levy back if they partner with UK broadcasters on productions. 'So, it's not a tariff,' Kosminsky insists: no other tariff allows you to get some of your money back. 'And the British government has failed to make that argument… I think the truth is that… the British government currently is disappointingly craven,' Kosminsky said in a damning rebuke. 'There's a proud 100-year tradition of public service broadcasting in this country. Stand up for it. Defend it. Don't just say, 'Yes, Donald; you're not very happy. Allow us to bow down and lick your boots.' It's pathetic. It's embarrassing.' On 22 July, the Guardian reported that Kosminsky had written to the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, accusing her of trying to 'bully' the BBC over its Gaza coverage. In recent weeks, Nandy has levelled intense criticism the corporation, refusing to say she has confidence in the leadership of its director general, Tim Davie, and asking why no one has lost their job over the broadcast of a documentary about Gaza, narrated by the 13-year-old son of a Hamas official. The letter reminded Nandy that past attempts by government to place political pressure on the BBC had ended badly. 'There's a dreadfully dishonourable tradition of this,' he told the New Statesman. (He cited both the suicide of David Kelly shortly after being revealed as the source for a BBC's reporting on the dodgy dossier behind the Iraq war, and the Thatcher government's attempt to pull a 1985 BBC documentary on Northern Ireland.) 'I think you have to be very careful as a government when you hold the purse strings of what is supposed to be an impartial broadcaster whose job is to speak truth to power in a democracy,' Kosminsky said. 'When you call for sackings and by implication the sacking of the chief executive of the BBC, I think that is deeply troubling… It feels like you're placing financial pressure on the organisation. You're saying, 'Do what I'm asking you to do and otherwise you won't get the money that we all know you want.'' Was the Culture Secretary really 'bullying' the BBC, or was she simply saying to its upper echelons, on behalf of the nation, 'get your house in order; we've had enough'? Davie's tenure has been plagued with difficulties. Soon into his role it emerged that the BBC religion editor Martin Bashir had misled Princess Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, to secure a Panorama interview with her 25 years earlier. Davie bears no responsibility whatsoever for the original misdemeanour. A host of scandals followed: the failure to tackle multiple and ongoing complaints against former MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace; bullying allegations levelled at senior staff; serious criminality on the part of former news anchor Huw Edwards. Others involved editorial failures, including the live broadcasting of an anti-Semitic rant by Bob Vylan at this year's Glastonbury and the broadcasting of a Gaza documentary linked to Hamas. Does Nandy speak for the public when she says the corporation has 'a problem of leadership'? A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport told the Guardian that license fee payers rightly expect 'serious failures' to be acted upon so that they don't happen again. 'The BBC is operationally and editorially independent of government, and we will always defend this principle. However, there is an important distinction between being independent and being accountable.' If something has gone wrong, Kosminsky counters, it is for Ofcom or the BBC Board to hold the corporation to account. It is not the job of government. 'What I'm worried about is the chilling effect of this. You can see [it] in other Gaza programmes that the BBC has backed away from in recent years,' Kosminsky says, referring to the BBC's decision not to broadcast Gaza: Doctors under Attack, leaving it instead to Channel 4. Programmes like these, he says, are 'just too hot to handle because they're nervous of what the reaction will be in certain quarters. We need a BBC that is brave enough to not care about ruffling a few feathers.' Few would disagree with that final sentiment. But there are many in the industry, both inside the BBC and out, who see a wider problem. That perhaps the exodus of senior, long-standing editorial staff over the past five years has left the corporation depleted. There is a lack of diversity of thought, and years of both editorial and life experience have been lost, providing a vacuum at times in sound editorial judgement. 'Just because I'm saying the government should lay off the BBC and let [the board] and Ofcom do their job, it doesn't mean I'm saying I would personally endorse everything that's going on at the BBC. The two are not linked,' Kosminsky explained. While having the 'highest respect' for Tim Davie 'as a person', for example, Kosminsky expressed his 'surprise' that 'a man with no journalistic or editorial experience in his past' should have been made the BBC's editor-in-chief. 'If I'd been asked my opinion of the appointment – and I knew Tim well as head of BBC Worldwide – I would have said, 'No, I'm not sure that is quite right.' He's a great bloke, fantastic asset to the organisation, but I don't think he has enough editorial experience. I think the governors got that wrong.' For Kosminsky, the failure of the government to address the impossibility for UK public service broadcasters to compete with the streamers and its recent criticism of the BBC are inextricably linked. 'It seems to be the tentpole of our foreign policy is to butter up the Americans and unfortunately our domestic broadcasting is going to be the casualty,' he said. 'Lisa Nandy has had virtually nothing to say about all the problems that broadcasting is facing in this country… The only time she's popped her head above the parapet is to start calling for sackings at the BBC.' While this 'may get lot of sort of nods from certain quarters' – the US – 'it's extremely dangerous'. Kosminsky believes we have a government 'too susceptible to pressure from outside' and unwilling to stand up for and defend our national institutions. Instead, it is 'prepared to grovel to outside forces for reasons of limited financial and political gain'. And, Kosminsky believes, this attitude comes from the top. 'We have seen the way our Prime Minister behaves around Donald Trump… Actively fanning the ego of this man in the way he has been is really quite an unpleasant thing to observe and it filters down through everything. Anything that might upset Donald Trump and therefore by extension anything that might upset Israel is stamped on. And dear old Lisa Nandy, in my opinion, is part of this government. Keir Starmer is her boss and she's performing her role.' We are in a delicate place. When broadcasters can no longer make programmes that hold truth to power, 'that's just a little bit of our freedom of speech gone', Peter Kosminsky argues. And while future governments might be relieved about that, 'our democracy is the worse for it'. Perhaps a streamers levy is not the answer, but the government does not seem to be coming up with any solutions of its own. If it does not intervene, we will 'end up with a situation where the editorial decisions about everything we watch here in the UK on our television, are made half a world away in California,' Kosminsky warns. 'I regret that.' Hannah's full conversation with Peter Kosminsky is available as a New Statesman podcast. [Further reading: The BBC is afraid] Related
Evening Standard
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
‘Ridiculous' for Channel 4 to start making in-house TV shows, says Sony
Mr Kosminsky told the BBC Two current affairs programme Newsnight that Adolescence, which explores themes such as incel culture and bullying and has been a global hit for Netflix, is a 'fantastic programme', but the streaming giant would not make the show if it was not successful outside the UK.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Skyrocketing costs nearly sunk 'Wolf Hall.' So key players took a pay cut to save it
A second season of 'Wolf Hall' was inevitable. The first, based on Hilary Mantel's award-winning novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' arrived in 2015, before the third and final book existed, but producer Colin Callender optioned Mantel's entire trilogy from the outset. What wasn't inevitable was the wait. 'I always knew that we would come back to it at some point,' Callender says of 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,' which premiered on 'Masterpiece' on PBS in March. 'Although I never imagined it was going to take 10 years.' 'Part of it was that Hilary took a long time to write it,' adds director and producer Peter Kosminsky. 'The first two novels were phenomenal successes. She became a celebrity almost overnight. But it was also a difficult book to write.' Mantel sent sections of 'The Mirror & the Light' to Kosminsky as she was working. He says she was daunted by the idea of reaching the end of her story about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. Her writing was affected by the 'Wolf Hall' TV adaptation, which was nominated for eight Emmys. 'She was very open and honest that she was very influenced by the first season in writing,' Kosminsky says. 'Particularly the character of Henry.' By the time 'The Mirror & the Light' was published in 2020, returning screenwriter Peter Straughan had already adapted it. The production faced a delay due to the pandemic but was gearing up again when Mantel died unexpectedly in 2022. 'It was incredibly sad,' Kosminsky says. 'It also made me feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to bring her final novel to the screen.' 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' follows Cromwell (Mark Rylance) as he navigates the tumultuous court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) after the death of Anne Boleyn. Although none of the actors had been contracted for a second season, the hope was that the ensemble cast would reprise their original roles. There were a few obvious hurdles: Tom Holland, who played Gregory Cromwell, was now too famous, and Bernard Hill, who starred as the Duke of Norfolk, died before production (he was replaced with Timothy Spall). 'It was particularly complicated because we wanted to bring back as many people as we could,' Callender says of scheduling the production around cast availability. 'We knew at some point that we weren't necessarily going to get everybody back, but we did pretty damn well.' 'I was always anticipating coming back,' Lewis confirms. 'Being an actor is like being an athlete: You're the sprinter and it's the 100 meters. You're going to come on set for a brief amount of time and you're going to nail it. But there might be a lot of waiting before you get to the starter's block, all coiled and energized. I was like that for 10 long years.' Everyone had aged, but Kosminsky says 'that wasn't necessarily a bad thing' because the show covers 10 years of Cromwell's life. 'Across the series the actors age by exactly the right amount,' he notes. 'In a different world with a far larger budget and a lot more time for prosthetics and CGI, we might have been able to graduate that change.' Budget constraints were a huge challenge. Over the last decade, the proliferation of streamers has meant that public broadcasters like PBS and the BBC have to fight for crew and locations and can't match their competitors' budgets. The producers had to figure out how to tell the story in a way that felt like a continuation of Season 1 'without anywhere near enough money to do it,' as Kosminsky says. 'We cut and we cut and we cut,' he notes. 'Eventually it was either shut the show down, or the producers and the screenwriter and the leading actor essentially give back most of their fees.' So, weeks out from production, Kosminsky, Callender, Straughan and Rylance gave back significant portions of their paychecks to get 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' off the ground. 'The reality is the cost of making this second season was literally 100% more, twice the amount, that it cost to make the first,' Callender says. 'It's a challenge that informs the whole of the British television industry in the high-end drama sector.' Kosminsky reassembled his original department heads, including cinematographer Gavin Finney, production designer Pat Campbell and costume designer Joanna Eatwell. The costumes had been sent back into circulation, which meant starting from scratch. 'When we came back, we all came back from a position of experience, rather than from a starting point of zero,' Eatwell says. 'That was actually quite liberating. It meant we could enjoy the project more. And not having the costumes meant we could move on and grow because the story is so different.' Ultimately, Eatwell's team made as many of the costumes 'as the budget could stand,' including all of Henry's sumptuous ensembles. 'He has to be the center of the universe, and that's what I always tried to achieve with him,' she says. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' was shot over 84 days entirely on location in Tudor-era structures around England. The schedule was adjusted based on when the historic homes had less tourists. Some locations had been used in the first season, but others were newly accessible. Hampton Court Palace, an actual home of Henry VIII, said no to filming for 'Wolf Hall' but allowed Season 2 to use its Great Hall. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' marks the end of the road for Cromwell, whom Lewis refers to as 'the JD Vance of the time,' and for the series itself — an experience that left everyone involved proud of what they accomplished despite the financial constraints and long time gap. 'We worried that maybe there wasn't a place for this kind of show in this TV landscape,' Lewis says. 'But, happily, we've been proved wrong. That, actually, if something's good people come and find it. It's been one of the things I've enjoyed most doing. The subject matter is intrinsically interesting. The material is endlessly deep. Aesthetically, it was so pleasing to be part of. And at the center of it is the reimagining of a very well-known, very well-documented piece of history through another man's eyes.' Get the Envelope newsletter, sent three times a week during awards season, for exclusive reporting, insights and commentary. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Skyrocketing costs nearly sunk ‘Wolf Hall.' So key players took a pay cut to save it
A second season of 'Wolf Hall' was inevitable. The first, based on Hilary Mantel's award-winning novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' arrived in 2015, before the third and final book existed, but producer Colin Callender optioned Mantel's entire trilogy from the outset. What wasn't inevitable was the wait. 'I always knew that we would come back to it at some point,' Callender says of 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,' which premiered on 'Masterpiece' on PBS in March. 'Although I never imagined it was going to take 10 years.' 'Part of it was that Hilary took a long time to write it,' adds director and producer Peter Kosminsky. 'The first two novels were phenomenal successes. She became a celebrity almost overnight. But it was also a difficult book to write.' Mantel sent sections of 'The Mirror & the Light' to Kosminsky as she was working. He says she was daunted by the idea of reaching the end of her story about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. Her writing was affected by the 'Wolf Hall' TV adaptation, which was nominated for eight Emmys. 'She was very open and honest that she was very influenced by the first season in writing,' Kosminsky says. 'Particularly the character of Henry.' By the time 'The Mirror & the Light' was published in 2020, returning screenwriter Peter Straughan had already adapted it. The production faced a delay due to the pandemic but was gearing up again when Mantel died unexpectedly in 2022. 'It was incredibly sad,' Kosminsky says. 'It also made me feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to bring her final novel to the screen.' 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' follows Cromwell (Mark Rylance) as he navigates the tumultuous court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) after the death of Anne Boleyn. Although none of the actors had been contracted for a second season, the hope was that the ensemble cast would reprise their original roles. There were a few obvious hurdles: Tom Holland, who played Gregory Cromwell, was now too famous, and Bernard Hill, who starred as the Duke of Norfolk, died before production (he was replaced with Timothy Spall). 'It was particularly complicated because we wanted to bring back as many people as we could,' Callender says of scheduling the production around cast availability. 'We knew at some point that we weren't necessarily going to get everybody back, but we did pretty damn well.' 'I was always anticipating coming back,' Lewis confirms. 'Being an actor is like being an athlete: You're the sprinter and it's the 100 meters. You're going to come on set for a brief amount of time and you're going to nail it. But there might be a lot of waiting before you get to the starter's block, all coiled and energized. I was like that for 10 long years.' Everyone had aged, but Kosminsky says 'that wasn't necessarily a bad thing' because the show covers 10 years of Cromwell's life. 'Across the series the actors age by exactly the right amount,' he notes. 'In a different world with a far larger budget and a lot more time for prosthetics and CGI, we might have been able to graduate that change.' Budget constraints were a huge challenge. Over the last decade, the proliferation of streamers has meant that public broadcasters like PBS and the BBC have to fight for crew and locations and can't match their competitors' budgets. The producers had to figure out how to tell the story in a way that felt like a continuation of Season 1 'without anywhere near enough money to do it,' as Kosminsky says. 'We cut and we cut and we cut,' he notes. 'Eventually it was either shut the show down, or the producers and the screenwriter and the leading actor essentially give back most of their fees.' So, weeks out from production, Kosminsky, Callender, Straughan and Rylance gave back significant portions of their paychecks to get 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' off the ground. 'The reality is the cost of making this second season was literally 100% more, twice the amount, that it cost to make the first,' Callender says. 'It's a challenge that informs the whole of the British television industry in the high-end drama sector.' Kosminsky reassembled his original department heads, including cinematographer Gavin Finney, production designer Pat Campbell and costume designer Joanna Eatwell. The costumes had been sent back into circulation, which meant starting from scratch. 'When we came back, we all came back from a position of experience, rather than from a starting point of zero,' Eatwell says. 'That was actually quite liberating. It meant we could enjoy the project more. And not having the costumes meant we could move on and grow because the story is so different.' Ultimately, Eatwell's team made as many of the costumes 'as the budget could stand,' including all of Henry's sumptuous ensembles. 'He has to be the center of the universe, and that's what I always tried to achieve with him,' she says. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' was shot over 84 days entirely on location in Tudor-era structures around England. The schedule was adjusted based on when the historic homes had less tourists. Some locations had been used in the first season, but others were newly accessible. Hampton Court Palace, an actual home of Henry VIII, said no to filming for 'Wolf Hall' but allowed Season 2 to use its Great Hall. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' marks the end of the road for Cromwell, whom Lewis refers to as 'the JD Vance of the time,' and for the series itself — an experience that left everyone involved proud of what they accomplished despite the financial constraints and long time gap. 'We worried that maybe there wasn't a place for this kind of show in this TV landscape,' Lewis says. 'But, happily, we've been proved wrong. That, actually, if something's good people come and find it. It's been one of the things I've enjoyed most doing. The subject matter is intrinsically interesting. The material is endlessly deep. Aesthetically, it was so pleasing to be part of. And at the center of it is the reimagining of a very well-known, very well-documented piece of history through another man's eyes.'
Sky News
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News
Wolf Hall director on streaming levies: 'The government needs the guts to stand up to the bully in the White House'
The director of hit BBC period drama Wolf Hall says the government "needs to have enough guts to stand up to the bully in the White House" to protect the future of public service broadcasting. Peter Kosminsky told Sky News' Breakfast with Anna Jones that calls for a streaming levy to support British high-end TV production was urgently needed to stop the "decimation" of the UK industry. His comments follow the release of a new report from the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) committee, calling for the government to improve support measures for the UK's high-quality drama sector while safeguarding the creation of distinctly British content. Specifically, the report calls for streamers - including Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+ and Disney+, all of which are based in the US - to commit to paying 5% of their UK subscriber revenue into a cultural fund to help finance drama with a specific interest to British audiences. Kosminsky, who made the case for the levy and gave evidence to the committee in January, called global tariffs recently introduced by Donald Trump"the elephant in the room". He said he feared they would make the government reticent to introduce a streaming levy, but said it was a necessary step to "defend a hundred years of honourable tradition of public service broadcasting in this country and not see it go to the wall because [the government are] frightened of the consequences from the bully in the States". Kosminsky also noted that the streamers would be able to apply for money from the fund themselves, as long as they were in co-production with a UK public service broadcaster. Earlier this year, a White House memorandum referenced levies on US streaming services, calling them "one-sided, anti-competitive policies" that "violate American sovereignty". In response to the call for streaming levies, a Netflix spokesperson said such a move would "penalise audiences" and "diminish competitiveness". They added: "The UK is Netflix's biggest production hub outside of North America - and we want it to stay that way." The Association for Commercial Broadcasters and On-Demand Services (COBA) said such a levy "risks damaging UK growth and the global success story of the UK TV sector," and "would risk dampening streamers' existing investment in domestic content and would inevitably increase costs for businesses". COBA said it welcomed the committee's support for targeted tax breaks for domestic drama. Kosminsky also told Sky News the second series of Wolf Hall was nearly called off just six weeks before it was due to start shooting due to financial pressures, adding: "It was only because the producer, the director, writer and the leading actor all agreed to take huge cuts in their own remuneration that the show actually got made." He said that both he and the show's executive producer, Sir Colin Callender, had "worked on the show unpaid for 11 years on the basis that we would get a payment when the show went into production", calling it "a bitter blow" to see that disappear. Working in public service broadcasting for his entire career, Kosminsky said it was "absolutely heartbreaking for me and others like me to see that the industry we have been nurtured by and we care about is being decimated". While he said he was a "huge fan of the streamers", he said it was their "very deep pockets" that had "driven up the price of what we do", to the point where the traditional broadcasters can no longer afford to make high-end television. Just this week, Adolescence, created by British talent Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, became the fourth most popular English-language series in Netflix's history with 114 million views. But while some very British shows might get taken on by the streamers due to universal appeal, Kosminsky said dramas including ITV's Mr Bates Vs The Post Office and Hillsborough, and BBC drama Three Girls about the grooming of young girls by gangs in the north of England were examples of game-changing productions that could be lost in the future. He warned: "These are not dramas that the streamers would ever make, they're about free speech in this country. That's part of what we think of as a democratic society, where we can make these dramas and programmes that challenge on issues of public policy that would never be of any interest in America." The CMS report comes following an inquiry into British film and high-end television, which considered how domestic and inward investment production was being affected by the rise of streaming platforms. Chairwoman of the CMS committee, Dame Caroline Dinenage, said "there will be countless distinctly British stories that never make it to our screens" unless the government intervenes to "rebalance the playing field" between streamers and public service broadcasters (PSBs). A DCMS spokesperson said: "We acknowledge the challenges facing our brilliant film and TV industry and are working with it through our Industrial Strategy to consider what more needs to be done to unlock growth and develop the skills pipeline. We thank the committee for its report which we will respond to in due course."
