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Jack Thorne, the feted British writer behind His Dark Materials and the upcoming Netflix series Toxic Town, has bemoaned the UK scripted funding crisis.
In an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live’s Must Watch show, Thorne said there is a “real problem” financing British stories — and it’s beginning to bite in the development room.
“The type of shows that I love, not necessarily that I’ve written, are under threat and new writers that want to write this sort of thing are being discouraged from it by the state of the market,” he said.
As Deadline detailed in a long read on the crisis earlier this month, a confluence of issues is preventing local stories from getting the funding required to go into production. As many as 15 greenlit shows are stuck in limbo.
U.S. studios and streamers have pulled back on co-productions with UK broadcasters; distributors are stumping up lower advances; funding cuts and ad market woes have squeezed the BBC and ITV’s income; and all the while, the drumbeat of chronic inflation continues to keep the cost of production prohibitively high.
Thorne explained: “What happened — and it’s happened during the lifetime of my career — is we became incredibly, incredibly dependent on international finance and co-pros. And as a result of that it becomes very difficult to make a show with just the British license fee, and so we’ve now got to reshape and remake.”
Others who have spoken out about the issue include Peter Kosminsky, the BAFTA-winning director, who revealed that Mark Rylance had to take a pay cut to get Season 2 of Wolf Hall made. Kosminsky thinks “insidious self-censorship” is already taking root among writers that will prevent British shows from even being conceived, let alone produced.
Thorne was appearing on Must Watch to promote Toxic Town, which tells the story of one of the UK’s biggest environmental scandals: the Corby poisonings. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the rates of upper limb defects in babies born in Corby were found to be three times higher than those of children born in the surrounding area, and the series follows three mothers’ fight for justice. It stars Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood, Doctor Who actress Jodie Whittaker, and Robert Carlyle.
