Are we going to run out of TV?

When Covid-19 hit the UK earlier this year, TV was one of the industries most in the viral firing line. 

How on earth do you make a sector in which the whole production model is predicated on gathering large numbers of people in small spaces Covid secure?  

With difficulty, is the answer. The fast-moving, largely freelance nature of life for TV or film crews could be tailor-made for spreading the coronavirus (as anybody who has ever heard gossip at Pinewood will tell you). Options were at first limited. From prestige megashows such as Succession and The Handmaid’s Tale having to delay their next season start dates to EastEnders and Coronation Street going on their longest hiatuses ever, few were spared. 

Yes, television of course works far in advance and as such there was plenty of stuff in the locker — or just being finished — that was ready or almost ready to roll. But now? Six months on, much of that content has been aired while our appetite for new shows, particularly when we’re all locked up indoors for weeks on end, remains as fervent as ever. So how are TV-makers coping with the task of ensuring we’ll not be forced to — yikes — actually talk to our families over Christmas?  

Charlotte Surtees is the producer of Sky One’s Stephen Graham and Daniel Mays-starring Code 404. The show’s second season, due in the new year, was the second British-scripted TV production to get back in front of the cameras last summer. ‘We joked that it would have been easier to shoot during the actual apocalypse,’ Surtees now says (over Zoom, of course). ‘At least that we’d have been able to see. With Covid, there was no playbook in the spring and we had to pretty quickly get used to the ideas of bubbles, contact tracing and so on. It really felt like the whole industry was on the line.’

It’s a sentiment echoed by Adrian Wootton, who as chief executive of the British Film Commission headed efforts to arrive at a set of guidelines that would ensure TV and film shoots could be safe while still productive. ‘It was pretty clear that if we were going to get back to work, it wasn’t going to be the same as before’, he says. ‘It’s going to take longer, there’ll be more pre-planning and we’ll all have to get used to social bubbles and the costs of regularly testing key talent on both sides of the camera.’

As wonderful as last week’s vaccine tidings were, Covid is not going anywhere anytime soon. And given that most people agree it’s better to have TV and film industries in the UK than not to have them (180,000 people work in production alone), the challenge has been to find ways to work alongside the virus. This includes an industry-wide programme of reconsidering what can be delivered realistically under what we’re obliged to call the new normal. Whether it’s reduced episode counts, reallocating resources or simply making episodes shorter, the pandemic has prompted an adjustment of horizons.

However, it’s not all making do and mending: you might notice a new role in between the gaffer and the best boy in the credits for new shows. ‘In Covid supervisors, we created a whole new profession in a matter of weeks,’ says Wootton. Usually sporting a snazzy, purple hi-vis vest, the Covid supervisor is in charge of minimising a shoot’s pandemic-related risks. From ensuring that talent and crews’ temperatures are taken regularly to doling out necessary PPE and enforcing movement flows, it’s a role crucial to getting anything out the door. It might not sound like the most glamorous gig but it’s one of the few jobs created this year — and it’s only one of a plethora of ways the industry has found to innovate its way through the crisis.

Danny Sanz is vice-president of production at The ATS Team, which creates the various international versions of Ninja Warrior. The company has faced different challenges than, say, a Sky comedy. For one, the making of its kind of shows, with elaborate constructions and franchises shared between countries, had taken international travel as a given. ‘We’ve been getting used to the various quarantines around the world,’ Sanz says. ‘In Israel the team had balconies, and the weather was gorgeous. In Australia, it was this institutional set-up where you couldn’t even open your window, which was a bit less fun.’ There has also been the various flavours of border restrictions to factor in, with some tighter than others — the biggest difficulty was getting people between Europe and the US over the summer. ‘There are 200 countries in the world, which means you have 200 Covid policies to think about. That and the sudden loss of the supply chain from China, which we have been reliant on for all our materials. But once you work out how to manage things like social bubbles for this or that production, it comes down to how resourceful and flexible we can be, and one way or another, we’ve got there.’  

If working out how to convince people to not see their grandparents while they’re shooting is one thing, what of the content of the show being shot? It’s all but inevitable that we’ll get a blockbuster medical drama about the battle against Covid-19, whether set in a hospital or in vaccine research labs. But what about series in which a pandemic plot line might not fit in tonally with the wider piece?