London (Telephost) - Television programmes have been switching channels for years – from Men Behaving Badly to Big Brother, University Challenge to The Voice. Yet none have met with quite such an outcry as the poaching of The Great British Bake Off from the BBC.
After all, it’s not every day that the UK’s favourite TV show switches channels. GBBO’s maker, Love Productions, has been pilloried in parts of the press, especially since it did the Channel 4 deal without securing the show’s current presenters, Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, or judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood.
The company turned down an offer of £15m a year from the corporation – and higher bids from ITV and Netflix – to take the hit baking show to Channel 4 for around £25m a year.
However, beyond the brouhaha about whether Love Productions was right to take a hit that had been nurtured by the BBC to a rival, does the headline-grabbing move also signal a shift in the balance of power between broadcasters and producers?
New terms of trade introduced more than a decade ago, which allowed producers to hold on to more of the intellectual property rights to their programmes and gain a greater share of revenues from overseas sales and merchandising, helped tilt the balance away from broadcasters. This has also been a factor in the UK production sector’s growth, with revenues up from £2.2bn annually seven years ago to £3bn.
The other key change in the sector has been consolidation of ownership, with many of the more successful UK independent producers bought by bigger companies or merging to create so-called “super-indies” – providing access to international distribution networks, more investment to develop ideas, and, in theory, more muscle in dealings with broadcasters.
Love Productions, founded by husband and wife Richard McKerrow and Anna Beattie in 2004, is now 70% owned by Sky
