Who would pay for the BBC’s current crop of lame dramas?

When Lindsay Salt, the BBC’s relatively new director of drama, set out her stall at the start of last year, she cast herself as an adventurous executive who would commission exciting TV shows.

“I worry that risk-taking is becoming a dirty word… And that, in less than a decade, the industry might be moving from ‘peak TV’ to ‘peak caution’,” Salt, who had been in post for about 18 months, told a gathering of producers and the press. “But not the BBC.”

Take one look at the BBC’s drama highlights for 2026 and the extent to which the corporation is fulfilling her promise will be questioned.

Its biggest shows include a belated sequel to The Night Manager, based on characters created by the late John le Carré; a fourth series of financial thriller Industry, which it co-produces with the American network HBO; a third instalment of Vigil, a police procedural now so far removed from its original Scottish submarine setting that Suranne Jones’s character has to be sent to the Arctic; another Agatha Christie tale; and an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. There will be yet more of the seemingly endless Call the Midwife(plus a prequel series), Death in Paradise and Silent Witness. The Split, Abi Morgan’s hit divorce drama, has a new spin-off in the form of the imaginatively titled The Split Up. Filming for a new series of Line of Duty, which “ended” in 2021, starts in the new year. On and on it goes.

There are, of course, going to be things we have not seen on screen before. James Graham has adapted his hit West End football play, Dear England, for TV, while Sheridan Smith has teamed up with The Responder writer Tony Schumacher for a crime thriller. BBC bosses will be hoping Richard Gadd can replicate the magic of Baby Reindeer with his new family drama, Half Man. Next year also sees filming begin for Michaela Coel’s first new series since the superlative I May Destroy You.

How risky is any of this? By my estimate, no more than 10 of the dramas the BBC is set to broadcast next year can be described as being truly original (that is, not based on a novel or play, or a sequel, prequel or spin-off of an existing show).

Like so many other parts of the entertainment industry, such as films and publishing, there is a tendency to go for the already-established rather than the truly original. Intellectual property (IP) is king. Will the BBC’s 2026 output be remembered as fondly as, say, that from 1986? That year, Michael Gambon starred in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Andrew Davies dramatised a university medical department in the uniquely strange A Very Peculiar Practice, and high-class single drama was best represented by Hotel du Lac, based on the novel by Anita Brookner.

With the corporation now in talks with ministers over the renewal of its Royal Charter, which runs for a further two years, questions over who the BBC is for are more pressing than ever.

One of the proposals is for the BBC’s services to be split in two. Its core services – such as news, current affairs and children’s TV – would remain universally available, but entertainment, drama and sport would require a “top-up” paid subscription. If the BBC was not just competing with ITV and Channel 4 for eyeballs but also Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV for paying subscribers, how would it fare?

Unlike the big American streamers, the BBC is producing less and less new drama each year. Ofcom, the independent media regulator, audits the corporation each year and in November laid bare the scale of this retrenchment: “This year has seen a fall in the number of new series (in terms of number of titles and hours of programming); it is also down in the longer term (from 2017).”

The BBC has characterised this as being a deliberate strategy. Part of the reason for the fall in new productions, according to its own “Delivering our Mission and Public Purposes” report, is that in order to “deliver high-impact content that provides value for audiences, we commission fewer single dramas and documentaries than we did previously”.

Dig deeper into the little-read report, which was published in July, and this rationale is put in a starker light. “Some of our best-performing programmes with audiences from lower socio-economic groups are returning series. In 2024/25, all the top 10 BBC programmes (by average audience) for C2DE audiences were returning series. As such, returning series are an important part of how we serve audiences from lower socio-economic backgrounds.” The shows named as being among the most popular for people from lower socio-economic groups were Call the Midwife, Mrs Brown’s Boys and Homes Under the Hammer. Does this mean that the BBC, so conscious of being characterised as elitist, feels forced to offer less highbrow drama?

A BBC spokesman says: “We must keep pace with changing viewing habits and respond to what audiences want. We know that all audiences love their favourite returning shows, but as the largest commissioner of programmes in the UK across an unrivalled range of drama, we always balance that with new shows that take risks, surprise audiences and back home-grown storytelling and talent. We want to continue commissioning this mix of drama, which is only possible if we have long-term, sustainable funding for the BBC.”

Salt also offers a vigorous defence of the BBC’s recent track record. “Seeing new dramas such as This City is Ours, The Guest and Riot Women land so confidently with viewers this year has been a joy, and we’ll always passionately back new dramas, new talent and the best home-grown storytelling,” she says. “We look to strike a healthy balance between recommissioning much-loved returning shows while championing plenty of brand new series.”

It may be worth questioning the nous of the corporation’s commissioners, however. The most significant, and talked-about, British TV drama of 2025 was Netflix’s Adolescence, which dominated the Emmys and may well do the same at next month’s Golden Globes. It is the sort of challenging, Reithian drama for which the BBC has long been famed, but was made by an American streamer that started as a DVD-by-post service less than 30 years ago.

Jack Thorne, who created Adolescence with the actor Stephen Graham, told the BBC in March that the show could have been made by a more traditional broadcaster. “It would have been a slightly different version of it. In episode two, I wrote a fire drill that involved 300 extras. Those 300 extras had to be employed for 10 days. That is an awful lot of money. So all these things would have been difficult on a public service budget… I think we could have done it, it just would have been very different.”

While the BBC did not pass up the chance to make Adolescence, it did (before Salt’s tenure) spurn the opportunity to make Slow Horses, Rivals and All Creatures Great and Small in recent years, shows that became hits for Apple TV, Disney+ and Channel 5, respectively.

Part of the reason that the BBC rejected the chance to broadcast All Creatures Great and Small was the corporation’s fixation on diversifying its audience. Colin Callender, the driving force behind the new James Herriot adaptation, told The Telegraph in 2020: “They only wanted to do a pilot. They had concerns about whether it would speak to a younger audience and, I think, whether or not the show could emerge from the shadow of the first series.” The series drew more than five million viewers on Channel 5 and became the biggest original commission in the broadcaster’s history.

The problems are not all of the BBC’s making; there has been a general downturn in British TV production that has had an impact on all domestic broadcasters. Increased costs, a licence fee that has not risen in real terms(for the BBC) or a soft advertising market (for commercial outlets such as ITV and Channel 4), combined with challenges selling shows abroad and increasing competition from YouTube and TikTok has conspired to make it harder than ever to make high-quality programmes in the UK.

Peter Kosminsky, the acclaimed director of Wolf Hall, sounded the alarm about the perilous state of British drama production earlier this year. He said that the sequel series, The Mirror and the Light, almost did not happen because of a funding squeeze, and it required star Mark Rylance taking a pay cut to get things going. “It was only possible to begin production when the producer, the writer, the director and the leading actor all gave up a significant proportion of their fees.”

This is a real slowdown. Of the total £3.4bn spent on making high-end TV in the UK last year, British shows accounted for just £598m of the spending, according to the British Film Institute. That is a 22 per cent decrease on the previous year.

Costs are now so prohibitive for domestic broadcasters that the economics that used to underpin TV production have been totally upended. British channels are increasingly reliant on the largesse of the big streamers; Netflix alone has helped the BBC co-produce The Serpent and last year’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

“Despite the drama funding challenges that have hit the industry over the past two years, it feels really heartening to witness so many new dramas coming to fruition,” says Salt. “Dramas that we hope break new ground and land in the hearts and minds of viewers all across the UK.”

To call the mood among leading producers downbeat would be an understatement, as many reckon the BBC and its fellow broadcasters are unwilling or unable to take risks on exciting programmes. Hence a sparse Christmas offering and slate for the next year that does not exactly smack of originality.

“It’s very hard to get the more exquisitely British shows away,” says a Bafta-winning producer. “And in the end, most of us are slightly reluctantly turning our attention to shows that audiences want to watch – crime shows, thrillers, et cetera – but it reduces the range of shows that we make in this country significantly, because those are the ones most likely to sell abroad. So you end up limiting or constricting your palette of shows as a producer and a writer… We’re becoming more and more conservative in our tastes just to stay alive.”

The producer adds: “It’s not like you can’t keep making drama: it’s just it’s either cheap or it’s commercial. That’s not who we used to be as programme-makers. Dennis Potter would not be finding it quite so easy to be Dennis Potter these days. It’s sad.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]