BIZ
AFTER THE VOTE
BY MANORI RAVINDRAN
Following the results of the UK’s historic vote to leave the European Union, realscreen spoke with several members of the factual and doc industry to assess what Brexit might mean to them, and the industry at large.
In
the months since the British public voted to exit the European Union, the ‘conscious uncoupling’ of the UK and Europe leaves more questions than answers for the media sector. The results of the June 23 referendum saw a 51.9% victory for the ‘Leave’ camp, with 17,410,742 voting in favor of exiting, and 48.1%, or about 16,141,241, voting to remain. The weeks following the vote saw an overhaul of government, with Theresa May succeeding David Cameron as prime minister, as well as a cut in interest rates from 0.5% to 0.25%. The broadcast industry, too, is beginning to take cautionary measures, with the UK’s Creative Industries Council and Creative Industries Federation establishing working groups to assess challenges and opportunities around Brexit. As the UK begins both the slow march towards triggering Article 50 – the formal withdrawal agreement for leaving the EU – and its trade negotiations with Europe, realscreen gathered a group of factual and doc players to discuss the road ahead. The early August roundtable included Kate Beal, CEO of Mandela, My Dad and Me indie Woodcut Media; Laura Marshall, MD of River Monsters producer Icon Films; Ben Barrett, co-MD at copro and financing company Drive; and Paul Pauwels, director of the European Documentary Network. Georgia Brown, executive VP of global content, scripted and non-scripted, and global drama for FremantleMedia International, was interviewed separately. The following was edited for length and clarity.
“British programs will always be regarded highly across the world, so on that basis, we will be okay.” How has Brexit affected your work now and what are your immediate concerns for the future? Kate Beal: From a production point of view, we have an [immediate] impact because we’re filming internationally, so obviously that has an effect on our program budget for everything from flights to car hire, to food and location fees. That’s had an immediate negative impact on our productions; however, some of the money we receive comes from abroad so that currency fluctuation has worked in our favor in other areas. We’re not too sure if it is a good or a bad thing yet, and we’re not really going to say either way, but the immediate impact has been an obvious financial one. Laura Marshall: We’ve already felt the impact of Brexit on the increasing expenditure in filming overseas and the way we have to manage that. We have a lot of our productions come from the U.S. so we’ve been able to mitigate some of those expense issues by a better exchange rate for dollars. But it is a real issue for us. Most of our
[programs] are overseas and prices have gone up. Budgets aren’t going to go up, so we have to consider what that means for a big ambitious project where your costs have gone up by 10%. As I said, Beal because we have a lot of our deals in dollars, we are not feeling a general negative impact – it’s just one that we have to consider. In the future, there are concerns. We’ve always put together coproductions and that’s going to be a little trickier. We use a lot of university resources for our shows – whether it’s knowledge, or particular research. A lot of that research is funded by money that comes to Europe, and that money could possibly disappear. I think it may well have an impact on the way universities share their new information, and how they can share it and the quality of the research that comes out of it. And for a specialist factual business like us, that’s a concern.
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2016-09-22 2:45 PM