UK spend on high-end TV hits record £1.55bn for the first nine months

Latest BFI figures also show rise in inward investment spend from features to £1.36bn

By Chris Evans 11 Nov 2019

UK spend on high-end TV hits record £1.55bn for the first nine months

Total UK spend on high-end television programmes (HETV) doubled from £755m to a record £1.55bn year-on-year for the first nine months of 2019, according to British Film Institute statistics.

An impressive 101 high-end TV programmes started principal photography in the first nine months of this year, of which 63 were inward investment and co-productions with a total UK spend of £1.22bn.

Domestic high-end TV spend rose 30% to £331m from 38 productions, compared with £253m from 35 productions the previous year.

HETV productions that started principal photography during the third quarter include the fourth series of The Crown, Sky’s sci-fi drama Intergalactic, and the BBC adaptation of David Nicholl’s best-selling novel Us.

There was also a rise in inward investment features UK spend from £1.2bn to £1.36bn, which represented 89% of the total UK film production budgets. There were 56 domestic features accounting for £135m of the total UK production spend.

Some of the more high-profile  film productions that started principal photography in the third quarter of this year, include Disney’s live action prequel Cruella starring Emma Stone and Emma Thompson; the biopic Louis Wain directed by Will Sharpe and starring Claire Foy and Benedict Cumberbatch; After Love, the Joanna Scanlan starring drama; and Pixie, directed by Barnaby Thompson and starring Olivia Cooke and Alex Baldwin, which filmed in Northern Ireland.

However, in the rolling 12 month period October 2018 to September 2019, total spend on film production in the UK was actually marginally down to £1.8bn, from £1.86bn (after additional tracking information) the previous year. And the number of features that started principal photography in that period was down to 175, the lowest figure in the reported time series (although this is likely to be revised upwards, according to the BFI).

For more details go to… https://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-film-high-end-tv-production-uk-q1-q3-2019.pdf

Homepage image: Olivia Colman in The Crown. Source: Netflix

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