Don’t Sell Out the Power of Sound

 My interview and copy written for HPA

George Lucas famously said that sound and music are 50 percent of the entertainment in a movie and while the exact figure might be disputed, there’s little doubt about the power of sound to tell a story.

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That belief has guided the decades-long career of Peter Kurland, a four-time Oscar-nominated sound mixer whose work has shaped some of modern cinema’s most memorable films. His journey into sound wasn’t a straight line—but once he found it, he never looked back.

Career beginnings

Although Peter Kurland had made home movies as a teenager and dabbled in theater production after leaving school, a career in movie sound didn’t occur to him until the very first project he did professionally. This was the 1983 TV movie Living Proof: The Hank Williams, Jr. Story, for which Kurland was hired as a production assistant despite, in his own words, his limited experience of film. “I’d never heard of a NAGRA (audio recorder),” he recalls.

A year later he was a boom operator on Blood Simple, the start of a four-decade (and counting…) creative partnership with Joel and Ethan Coen. Kurland has recorded and mixed sound for all their productions since O Brother, Where Art Thou?, including The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading, Hail, Caesar! and Inside Llewyn Davis, as well as the brothers’ solo directing projects The Tragedy of Macbeth, Drive-Away Dolls, and 2025 release Honey Don’t!

“I found the whole process of working on set to be fascinating. There were a lot of technical challenges which I threw myself into, but more than anything I just really liked the people I was working with. That’s what hooked me in.”

He also mixed Walk the Line, Punch-Drunk Love and many Barry Sonnenfeld films including The Addams Family and Men in Black.

The role of a sound mixer

As production sound mixer, Kurland’s job entails capturing the performances on set with a team that includes a boom operator, a utility person, and often a playback person.

“Once my work is done the sound goes to picture editorial where assistant picture editors are pulling extra lines from the recordings, doing preliminary cuts for screenings, and helping the picture editor to select the takes.

“If I do my job right the dialogue editor doesn’t have quite so much work to do, but often they do. Once their work is complete the process goes to the post-production mixers who take all of the materials that I’ve recorded plus the work the sound effects and dialogue editors have put together, before ending up on the mixing stage to create the final movie.”

The power of storytelling through sound

“Sound can convey so much in a movie that would otherwise be very tedious for an audience were it all to be laid out visually,” says Kurland, the four-time Oscar-nominated sound mixer and President of the Cinema Audio Society (CAS). “You can learn things about story or character or create a mood in sound that would not be anywhere near as effective if you simply saw them on screen.”

He has been fortunate to work with directors for whom sound is a big part of the preparation process. Since the Coens write as well as direct, they consider the sound content of the movie in their writing. “The sound or the music track or other sonic elements are in their scripts, which gives us a really good guideline for what we’re trying to do. If it’s not in the script then they’ve already played the scene in their head so when we’re on set they are very clear about which lines we need and which are going to play under a voiceover or under music. That attention to craft makes the process very efficient and allows us to be a lot more creative in what we do because we know exactly what they want.”

For example, much of the nail-biting tension in No Country for Old Men (2007) stems from what we hear of the sociopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), such as the sound of his weapon and movements in a motel room, while his prey are hiding in another room.

“If we showed you what was happening the scene would be nowhere near as compelling,” Kurland says. “In another scene the slow unscrewing of a lightbulb is equally full of tension. That was a sound effect added in post. It’s so subtle it took me several viewings to notice but without it your fear and anticipation is not the same.”

Sound designers are expert at creating sounds for something that doesn’t necessarily exist. This happens a lot in science fiction, and Lucas could have been thinking about the work of the legendary Ben Burtt (who brought the sound of the lightsaber to life) when he made his statement, but it is equally applicable in a drama.

“On No Country for Old Men, sound mixer Craig Berkey had the idea that wind would be a character in that movie,” Kurland relates. “We spent all day, every day on set trying to fight the background sound of the wind to record dialogue; because we were shooting in New Mexico, the wind was very loud. We got as clean a recording as we could and then Craig went and put wind back in everywhere! He wanted a specific wind that helped tell the story. For me that explains a lot about sound design, which is figuring out how to make the sound suit the movie and not necessarily just be what really happened on the day.”

AI and the future of sound work

However, the position of sound professionals at every level—from production and post-production mixers or re-recording mixers and foley to sound editors, technicians, and microphone boom operators—is under threat from cheaper, faster AI-driven alternatives.

“I have strong but mixed views on AI,” says Kurland, who also works with IATSE to protect the interests of its members, which include sound professionals. “Doing something faster and more efficiently sounds good on the surface but not if that means eliminating jobs. The work of people who give so much care and dedication to how they clean or replace dialogue can now be replicated by a machine that has no inherent sense whatsoever about what the feeling of that scene is.”

“On the other hand, I understand that there are certain kinds of dialogue that can’t be saved through judicious sound editing but can miraculously be recovered through AI because software can be trained to recognize the human voice or to remove things that aren’t the human voice.

“The technology can be incredibly fast. I’ve seen examples where an AI can be fed the script text and replace it with a vocal performance that sounds just like your actor in seconds. Plus, it’s a clean recording from the start with no need for post. AI can even learn the timbre and phrasing of somebody’s voice to the extent that there’s no need for ADR.

“The critical question for me is whether the output contains the human nuances that it would have had from recording the actor’s performance. If we automate the dubbing into English of a foreign language movie, do we risk losing the lived performance of the actor? At its extreme, AI can make people sound artificial since all the emotion and character is lost.”

The bottom line for Kurland is that a single-purpose AI that can help sound professionals do their work better and which can preserve performance in a non-destructive way are tools to be embraced.

“However, if we are simply using AI for speed or to reduce crew and therefore purely to save cost, then we are going to lose something major in the process.”

Meeting uncertain times

With the whole industry convulsing from the twin shocks of COVID and the 2023 strikes amid general economic downturn, the impact of lower budgets and of productions shifting overseas are additional issues that weigh on Kurland’s mind.

“It’s certainly a challenging time, and since CAS represents sound professionals internationally, we take a holistic view of the situation,” he says.

“The current debate about domestic production versus foreign production is a painful one because it is not a zero-sum game. People in the U.S. are not losing their jobs as a direct result of people in other countries gaining those jobs. Actually what’s happened is the overall level of production everywhere has reduced and the budgets for all productions have shrunk regardless of where they are made.”

He says job insecurity is a real concern, especially for freelance personnel. The situation is forcing some people to leave the industry or to retire earlier than they had originally planned.

“That said, there are still many people working and there’s still a lot of content being made. Tennessee, where I live, has never been busier with shows and the reason is because of the robust tax incentive here.”

Productions are increasingly relocating to where they can access the best financial package, and that becomes a problem if a certain city, state or territory has an established crew base then work moves away because another state or city offers a more attractive rate.

“In Atlanta, for instance, there are several thousand people dependent on projects coming into the state to shoot and when those productions don’t land it becomes a real problem for them to pay their bills and make a living. Productions seem less interested now in who the local crew are or even what the locations are like and instead prioritize anything that squeezes the most dollars from a government.”

Educating the next generation

As President of CAS, Kurland is able to evangelize the greater understanding and appreciation of motion picture sound. “That involves a lot of education,” he says. “We hold social events like film screenings with Q&As, family-friendly events, membership meetings, and educational meetings on topics of interest to our industry – including on the impact of AI. We co-produce The Sounding Board and we’re proud of the CAS Awards, which honor truly inspiring work.”

He continues, “To me there’s nothing more enjoyable than what I’ve been doing in sound for more than 40 years. I’m always proud of the work that I do and of the crews that I do it with. There’s really no replacement for the experience of helping to create a lasting record of a story or a legacy work of art. You don’t get too many chances to do that in life. So, if you really love the work I would certainly encourage young people to pursue their dream – just don’t go into it expecting a big paycheck.”

FlightStory: Forget the creator economy, this is the era of the creator founder

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When individuals can build multi-million pound business empires from chatting to people online it is high time to call it what it is or get left in the dust, says Georgie Holt, CEO, FlightStory Studio

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YouTube stars aren’t just lapping around the edges of the television business they are the media industry, according to Georgie Holt, CEO, FlightStory Studio. In fact, if you are still thinking in terms of ‘YouTuber’ or even ‘Creator Economy’ then you’re showing just how out of touch you are.

“We are way beyond the Creator Economy,” Holt says. “We are in the era of the Creator Founder who are building audiences, ideas, principals and persona on their own terms outside the realms of traditional media.”

One such Creator Founder is Steven Bartlett whose podcast ‘Diary of a CEO’ featuring interviews with experts and personalities like Richard Branson, Boris Johnson and neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart and is produced by FlightStory. Bartlett is a co-founder and investor in the company which was only launched 18 months ago by Holt and Christiana Brenton, former executives of Swedish podcast platform Acast.

Earlier this year Diary of a CEO reached the milestone of one billion streams globally making it Europe’s most popular podcast and the second biggest in the world behind Joe Rogan’s.  It is the fastest growing podcast on YouTube.

Holt says, “Steven will probably do around $30 million in revenue this year on the podcast alone. He just turned down a $100 million deal in order to keep rolling on his own. It’s been an extraordinary success that was built out of naivety and an absolute obsession with data, experimentation and failure and with commitment to the one percent.”

FlightStory uses Bartlett’s success as a template for its own business model. Holt describes the company mission as the search for influential IP around which they can energise global fandom.

“When we say ‘IP’ many people think of big media formats but what we think is the next frontier of IP is human influence. We are now in the era of human creative IP.”

She elaborates, “Creator IP is when the influence, the ideas, persona and principals are born out of an individual versus out of a committee.”

The opportunities for creators to speak to audiences and build followers on their own terms has become almost infinite, she says. “You no longer have to go to a big corporation to get an idea commissioned. You don’t have to endlessly pitch your formats and concepts in the hope that someone might sign you and might invest in you.”

The greatest example of this she says is MrBeast who has amassed 500 million followers across social media. “He's one of the most influential people in the world right now because he's been so exceptional at scaling his audience. He's now building out products and ventures way beyond the media environment.”

MrBeast’s chocolate candy brand Feastables was recently valued at $5 billion alone.

It’s one thing being a good presenter or a good broadcaster but you also need to think like a business person as you're doing it. “This is not a salaried role that you turn up to present. You have to be willing to build. You have to be thinking about every single aspect of the business.”

This is what she means by Founder.

“What we’ve been calling the Creator Economy has changed. The name ‘influencers’ has a negative connotation now. That’s one reason why we're really in the era of the Creator Founder.

“There are influencers doing a great job making content and making good money out of it but a Creator Founder is building out products, e-commerce, events and ventures because they know who they're talking to and they're using the power of decentralized media to build incredible businesses.”

She likens FlightStory to a record label which will foster the growth of Creator Founders. “We sign artists who we think can change the world and do so with a very decentralized media approach. We are not building on someone else's land. We're building our own audiences on every possible platform we can find.”

Continuing to categorise Creators as YouTubers or TikTok stars shows the extent to which the media establishment either doesn’t understand what is happening or is complacent about it.

“If you categorise creators by their platform you ignore the fact that what they have done is scaled global audiences,” she says.

The ability to scale the reach of an IP is vastly superior to anything conventional media has offered to producers before. The tools to analyse performance data and tweak the content to maximise engagement are now in the hands of creators.

“You can understand which viewers are watching and when, how long they watch for, where in the show they disappeared, at what point they returned, where you had the biggest engagement, were they paying attention to what was being said. No broadcaster or streamer is giving that information out. Now you get all of it.”

Obsession with data

FlightStory adopts a rigorously data driven approach to sourcing Creators it partners with and guests for their shows as well as road testing every podcast before it is published.

“Our obsession is with killing the guesswork,” she says. “Creator entrepreneurs either build audience because they’re just really good at something or they’re very passionate about something and want to share that passion or they build out of pain. They feel that there has to be a different way because the prevailing approach is painful. That's how we are building. The better way is experimentation and an obsession with data.

It has a tool called ‘Guest Radar’ which scours thousands of YouTube and social channels to find people to invite on its own shows. “For a show to have consistent 10,000 to 20,000 views you can see that they've overperformed. That not only helps identify guests but to identify creators. These are people who have something important to say and they know how to say it. It’s a subject that the world is interested in and also where we can see how to build an ecosystem around that creator whether that events, products or e-commerce.”

FlightStory even has a print publishing division. Among guests of Bartlett’s podcast to be signed to their own shows by Holt are Davina McCall and dating expert Paul C. Brunson.

Instead of testing pilots of shows with test screenings in front of audiences or from surveys - an approach Holt describes as “inefficient and human biased” - FlightStory filters every second of every episode before release by streaming to closed groups and tracking their every reaction.

“We use eye tracking software to understand if they've looked away or when they stop watching. They can interact with the content. We can see how their attention span moves with the episode. With this data we understand exactly where the audience has fallen away this. What bit they found funny. If the average amount of time spent on the episode is 20 minutes but we need 30 minutes then what can we move around in the edit to make it more compelling? There's no need to guess.”

When a pod is a show

There's still some puzzlement in the media about the podcast phenomenon, perhaps because the term itself is no longer fit for a format that has shifted from audio to video.

“A few years ago a podcast was media personalities like Ricky Gervais mucking around with their mates on radio,” Holt says. “Now it can be absolutely anything. It is whatever the audience thinks it is and wherever you go to meet them.

“We don't even say podcast, we say ‘show’ and it is disrupting television with an impact that is little understood by those not working in this space.”

She says 30% of people who watch FlightStory podcasts do so on their TV. That means around 1.6m people watch Diary of a CEO in their living room.

She says FlightStory doesn’t present its topics as news but does use fact checkers to provide on-screen references for the audience to learn more.

“The debate format is one of the most interesting if it's done in a respectful way. If people shout over each other, it puts people off and makes them scared to contribute to the debate. We have to give people space to share a new idea, even if it's different, or controversial, even if it goes against the earned wisdom that we've had for decades. How many times has that earned wisdom been challenged and a better situation has emerged?”

A conversation between two or more people remain foundational principles of the podcast/show but the quality of production matters too.  “We invest in that as much we invest in the data and streaming systems that we build behind the scenes,” Holt says.

“I'm not saying you need to always do video. There are beautiful ‘audio first’ and sound-scaping formats which immerse a listener but there are also ways that video can amplify the audio experience.”

AI will scale podcasts exponentially

At FlightStory the next big leap is AI generated content. Holt explains, “We used to believe that in order to make a successful or credible show you had to have the key creator present. That is not the case anymore. We are rapid testing and rapid iterating AI podcasts. We are now building entirely AI generated scripts, visuals and voices.”

This includes an AI generated voice version of Bartlett which is “pitch perfect in AI” she claims. “AI is the next frontier and it is happening now.”

Story Flight is running an in-house experiment over 60 days tasked to disrupt every single team and every single division. “We're presenting back all the different ways that we think we can do that with AI. If your senior leadership team is not talking about AI in a very forward-thinking way and is avoiding the topic, then that is showing vulnerability.”

Failure is a huge part of our company

FlightStory has an entire department dedicated to failure. “We have a head of failure and experimentation and a team of six people ranging from data analysts to failure leads. Their entire objective is to get our team to fail more because one of the things I’ve learned is that you learn nothing with success, absolutely nothing. With success, you’re ego thinks you're good at something, and that prevents you from being disruptive. We run between 20 to 30 experiments a week across every single department to try and uptick that rate of failure, because when you fail you get a valuable databank. It is feedback that you can use to adapt and iterate much faster than anybody else.”

Holt hires people into the company who aren’t afraid to fail.

“People have been culturally conditioned that failure is not something to be embraced because it means that your status becomes vulnerable. We need to kill the ego in order to iterate much faster.”

She also talks of “killing the romance” by which she means the nostalgia or sentiment for what has been and what has worked before.

“If there is romance or ego in broadcaster boardrooms or senior exec meetings at TV production companies then you're not going to innovate.

“It’s something that I've had to coach myself to avoid. The first thing is to recognise that failure is good. Now move on, get the data, adjust and pivot again.”

Behind the scenes: Sinners

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Shooting large format IMAX and designing a surreal montage resonated with the film's themes of spiritual ancestry and musical legacy

The genre-fluid film Sinners switches in and out of supernatural and vampire elements as well as comedy, eroticism, romance, noir and, most of all, music. Writer-director Ryan Coogler has called it his ‘love letter’ to everything that he enjoyed about going to the movies, especially watching films with an audience.

Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, whose father was born in New Orleans and whose great-great-grandmother was from Mississippi, found she could directly relate to some of the subject matter. “There were so many profound themes in the film to explore that I’d never read in a script before such as religion, racial segregation, vampire lore and the legacy of music,” she says.

The standout scene is a hallucinatory dance that transcends its 1930s setting by birthing rock‘n’roll, electric guitar and hip hop from Southern blues. Dubbed the ‘Surreal Montage’, Durald Arkapaw designed the shot in three parts with hidden transitions because the IMAX film cameras they were using would spool through 1000ft of film in little more than two minutes.

Although no stranger to shooting with IMAX certified-digital cameras (she shot them for the Coogler-directed Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), Durald Arkapaw is being celebrated as the first female to shoot a feature with IMAX film cameras. These are big beasts weighing 65lb which didn’t phase her when crafting a shot that needed to appear to float over a cast of party goers and apparitions of shamans, African tribal dancers and modern DJs.

Each of the three shots are on Steadicam and shot on IMAX 15 perf film [which is 65mm running through the camera horizontally]. Each shot took around half a day to film with the movements of camera and cast carefully timed and choreographed.

In this she was aided by composer Ludwig Göransson who remixed Raphael Saadiq's track ‘I Lied To You,’ for the scene and is the DJ on set seen in the sequence. With Göransson and Coogler, Durald Arkapaw prevized the action on a soundstage in New Orleans. She lit the scene mainly from above in order to free space for camera movement.

Originally conceived as a 16mm project, it was Warner Bros. who first suggested to Coogler that he film with a larger format, and the filmmakers leapt at the chance to widen the scope of their ambition.

While the director took advice from Christopher Nolan about how IMAX would be experienced in cinemas, Durald Arkapaw connected with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who had shot Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.

She then arranged to view tests at film lab FotoKem including of The Hateful Eight, shot by DP Robert Richardson, and 2001: A Space Odyssey projected in 70mm.

In particular, they explored how Richardson had used the 2.76:1 format for Tarantino’s western and how that width might showcase the Mississippi Delta landscape of Sinners.

They decided to shoot the entire film simultaneously on Ultra Panavision 70 (2.76:1) and IMAX large-format film formats – the first time this has ever been done (therefore making Durald Arkapaw a pioneer). The 2.76:1 aspect ratio offers more width in the frame, while the IMAX aspect ratio of 1.43:1 lends the picture a taller image area.

The DP says she framed for three aspect ratios (2.76, 1.90, and 1.43) in the camera viewfinder and tended to centre-punch everything so that all the important information remained in the centre of the frame.

“Even though we’re telling a horror story, we also referenced historical photography shot on 35mm Kodachrome slide film from the U.S. Farm Security Administration collection, which added a naturalistic texture to our visual language,” she explains. In fact, Kodak created a new IMAX EktaChrome film stock just for the movie.

Durald Arkapaw previously shot indie films like Palo Alto and Teen Spirit, the documentary Beastie Boys Story and major studio projects like Loki – which earned her an nomination – and Wakanda Forever.

Twins

Another key to the story is that the audience believe that identical twins Smoke and Stack are different characters, albeit both are played by Michael B Jordan. While his performance, the costumes, make-up and hair designs do a lot of the work, director and DP approached the VFX team for solutions.

After reviewing other films made with twins (The Shining, Dead Ringers, The Social Network, Legend) and exploring what was possible technologically, the VFX team shared what they called a ‘decision matrix’ with different options.

In the simplest scenario, they could shoot Michael B. Jordan twice (once in each role, then switch to the other twin), with different levels of complexity, depending on interaction and camera movement. In more difficult shots, they could employ computer technology to recreate a digital version of Jordan’s head and put it onto a well-chosen double’s body.

Durald Arkapaw says she initially expressed concerns that the technology used to capture facial movement would interfere with his performance, due to the size of the camera rig which was also potentially cumbersome to move around. The VFX team was then tasked with developing a more user-friendly capture device and workflow for facial capture to be used for VFX data collection.

What began as a sketch on a napkin transformed into a prototype, with 10 cameras situated around a ring positioned on the shoulders of Jordan, dubbed the Halo Rig, contributing to over 1,000 visual effects shots for the movie.

“I remember the moment Michael showed up on set wearing it, with red lights blinking all over. It was like Robocop showing up in the police station for the first time,” VFX supervisor Michael Ralla says. “Eventually, everyone got used to it, Michael became comfortable shooting with it and the Halo Rig became a nimble tool for recording his facial performances in situ, on set and in the correct lighting.”

“Humans instinctively analyse countless faces daily [and can] detect subtle emotional cues and inconsistencies, making digitally created faces exceptionally challenging to convincingly replicate due to our acute sensitivity to even the smallest imperfections,” continues Ralla. “That complexity is amplified, because the IMAX screen is huge. Everything had to be believable when seen larger than life.”

Constructing the juke joint

Production designer Hannah Beachler was instructed to present a 1930s South in saturated colour. She applied red, white and blue to the greens and browns of the Louisiana backdrop into the design of the film.

Principal photography began in spring 2024 in New Orleans. The majority of the film is staged at a make-shift nightclub called the juke joint, supposed to be a large corrugated metal aging sawmill that the filmmakers actually constructed in a former golf course in the Louisiana city of Braithwaite. Once a luxury destination, the course was destroyed by floods during hurricane Katrina and has since become uninhabitable with overgrown foliage, infested with alligators and snakes.

Since the juke joint exterior had to appear dilapidated the carpenters and scenic artists transformed freshly cut trees to look weathered and worn by torching, sanding, staining, painting and chemically distressing the wood.

On the final day of principal photography of the whole movie the crew lit the roof for backplates of fire later augmented by VFX for the Surreal Montage sequence.

The production also built more than a dozen small businesses in the small town of Donaldsonville, to create the film’s vision of Clarksdale, circa 1932, including grocery stores, a gas station, cinema, barber shop and hotel.

In the film’s production notes Coogler says that his earliest memories of movies were “while sitting in a darkened room, full of strangers, and being absolutely terrified by something that was happening on the screen. That feeling of being with others, the unison, the horror and delight made me feel like home. That’s where it began for me.

“The first story we probably told around a fire was a horror story. It’s the communal experience—and this movie was made to be seen with a crowd of people you don’t know.”

Neglect of working class comes home to roost in British TV

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A cross-industry initiative aims to reset the TV industry’s class imbalance by 2030 but is there any chance it will succeed?

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If television was ever the opiate of the masses then the drugs are no longer working. The industry has progressed from the days of being monopolised by a Oxbridge educated (white, male) elite but according to a new report, TV’s class imbalance remains a significant ethical and commercial barrier.

Being working class is TV’s last taboo which the report ‘Let’s Talk About Class’ aims to tackle. It argues that social mobility is needed to deliver fairer representation of those from a less privileged background both on screen and behind it.

“We’re talking about the need to be class confident as leaders and organisations to challenge the status quo – it is hard to get into the industry if you’re from a working class background,” said Emma Morris, Executive Editor of Morning Live and The One Show, BBC Studios, speaking at an event unveiling the report’s key findings at MediaCity.

The initiative was set up a year ago by The TV Foundation, the charitable arm of the Edinburgh TV Festival, following James Graham’s MacTaggart lecture where he called for more opportunities for working-class people in the industry.

The Sherwood screenwriter cited research from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre suggesting only 8% of people currently working in television are from a working-class background.  The national average of people who identify as working class is 49%.

Graham also referred to class as “everyone’s least favourite diversity and representation category” and said more attention should be paid to social mobility.

The new report, due to launch in full at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August, found that a quarter of people in senior managerial positions in UK TV were privately educated. That figure is three times higher than the UK’s general population (1 in 13).

Perhaps controversially, the authors are using educational background to help segment people by class.

“The biggest difficulty is measuring class,” said Amber Haque, presenter and documentary maker and one of 24 TV professionals on an Impact Unit contributing to the report. “We don’t even have data on how many working class people work in film and TV.”

A contributing factor, she says, is that people are nervous of talking about where they are from. She said that being working class and northern was more of a barrier in discussions with TV executives than her mixed South Asian heritage.

“It’s like an invisible marker for some people. We came up with the term, ‘class confidence’ to create a space where people can feel confident to talk about themselves.”

Haque was in the audience for Graham’s speech. “When I looked around that room the irony was not lost on me that there is a huge disconnect in our industry between [those in TV] and our audience.”

“As one of the younger members on the working group I was seeing people I really respect and admire in reduced to tears because for the first time they were able to share the burden of this final taboo.

“When people don't feel they can turn up to work as who they are, that has a huge effect on their experience in the industry and also what we're putting out into the world for the people that we're meant to serve.”

Participants at the event in Salford ranged from network commissioners and senior editors to indie production bosses. All agreed that class and related lower economic backgrounds remained a barrier to entry.

Money on the table

One of the most significant findings in the report is an acknowledgment that the working class is TV's largest potential audience but that this is not reflected on screen. Having a representative TV workforce could have commercial benefits, besides being an ethical consideration.

“It isn't enough to put a camera in a [working class] place and expect that to resonate,” said Haque. “We don’t want people to see working class TV as a risk but as an exciting potential.”

Ofcom analysis has also showed that those it considers to be working-class watch more television than any other group, but that these rates are declining with many moving to digital content.

The report says: “Attracting and retaining talent from a range of backgrounds leads to success: workplaces that value diversity of thought and experience are more likely to lead to innovation; and companies that understand their culture and help everyone feel valued have higher staff retention.”

Tesco’s not telly

Working class tends to mean people from less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds and when the traditional routes into the TV industry are poorly paid (if at all) this exacerbates the class gap.

“It feels mildly exploitative,” said Iain MacLeod, Executive Producer, Continuing Drama, ITV. “It’s certainly a barrier to entry for a lot of people that don’t come from a more financially secure background. The report clearly shows we are a long way from improving the situation. The way to get people through the door is to pay people properly.”

Longevity and stability of employment is seen as important and the same applies to training and work placements. Instead, the gig economy of many starter jobs in TV is deterring many candidates from sustaining their dream.

“When I started in the industry you'd be invited to work for nothing for three months,” said MacLeod. “I don't understand how that works if you have no kind of money in your hinterland.”

The BBC’s Interim Editor of Unscripted Commissioning, Michael Jochnowitz agreed that rates for first time jobs had barely changed in two decades. “That's something that needs to change. With inflation, I've no idea how young people today are going to survive.

“If you're offered an apprenticeship at Greg's where you're paid well, you're get a year long contract and it seems like a really fun place to work versus coming into telly [then you take the job at Greg’s].

Pam Cavannagh, CEO, Purple Productions urged everyone to think about offering longer term contracts for entry-level jobs, but admitted that's not always easy. “It's also about having people in your leadership team who understands how to talk to people from different classes. There was a time when everyone in telly was a bit ‘lovey’ and ‘darling’.”

Morris said she could understand why there was an exodus of freelancers and even more senior pros from the industry, “The length of contract is a really big issue but it’s not easy to fix. People are going to work for Tesco’s rather than come into telly now.”

Mental health exodus

Even freelancers like Haque with shows on their C.V are commission dependent. With less work around, job insecurity is causing many of her peers to question their future in the business.

“When you don't have a partner or your family to fall back on when a commission inevitably falls away, people leave,” she said. “They put so much into [the job] but when the tough times come the industry is not there for them. They say TV doesn't love them anymore.”

The Film and TV Charity found 35% of industry workers describing their mental health as ​‘poor’ or ​‘very poor’, a marked increase from 24% in 2022. Shockingly, the prevalence of suicidal thoughts is also alarmingly high with 30% experiencing such thoughts over the past 12 months. 

The deterioration in the mental health of industry workers is linked to feeling an acute sense of precarity in their roles, with only 12% of those surveyed feeling that the industry is a mentally healthy place to work, and 64% having considered leaving altogether over the past 12 months due to concerns about their mental health.

Samantha McMillon, COO, Quay Street Productions said that she mentored a young person last year and spent most of the time trying to convince them not to leave the industry.

“Even though she is so talented she wasn't getting the jobs that she wanted to do. So many people are having the most difficult time that Tesco seems much more appealing.

Self-sustaining Corrie

Manchester is home to Coronation Street, arguably the UK’s major success when it comes to depicting working class on screen. ITV Studios makes 600 episodes a year and employs a largely permanent crew, 43% of whom are from a working class background, according to Mcleod.

“Historically, there was the ‘people like us’ problem in TV where the old school tie network would hire people that resemble them. Well, it’s kind of going on now except the people doing that are from a working-class background – in the soaps at least. There's a kind of self-sustaining improvement going on where we don't see quite the same rate of attrition.”

He noted that when Corrie first launched in 1960 it was considered avant-garde simply because it dared to put working-class voices on television.

“By the nature of where it's shot, the makeup of the editorial and production teams and the cast themselves, it has stayed quite true to that working class DNA,” he said.

“It really helps if a large proportion of the people making the hiring decisions in your company are from that background themselves.”

Metropolitan bias

While the BBC and other PSBs have made strides in devolving production to the nations and regions there remains a geographical and cultural divide where most network gatekeepers live within the M25.

“Commissioners would benefit from having a more sustained connection with the local community on a more regular basis rather than traveling up from London standing on stage, doing some shopping and pissing off back to London – which used to happen,” said the BBC’s Manchester born Jochnowitz. “There should be more of a regular informal dialogue with indies outside the capital. There are not enough network commissioners living out of London.”

Not coincidentally, the Edinburgh TV Festival chose to hold this event at the centre of the Northern Powerhouse.

“Everyone wants the heartland audience, which points to class as well,” said Cavanagh. “That means people need to base themselves here, live and breathe it, to better understand what the High Street is like in Oldham - because it's not the same as it is in London.”

MacLeod relayed that the senior creative team on a show set in the Northwest were once taken on a coach trip to a local shopping mall. “This is Greggs. This is the supermarket. Let's look at what the locals are eating. It was like a safari. On the shows that I work on that’s not the case anymore and I’d hope that representation on our screens is a lot more authentic because of it.”

Haque said she thought London-based commissioners and execs don't have a lived experience of being around working class people. “They don't understand the codes and the terms of how people are and that is going to affect content.”

Rick Murray of Banijay-owned Workerbee says the Manchester based indie’s of Idris Elba’s Fight School for the BBC raised eyebrows.

“If you're a London based indie you don't restrict yourself to fishing from the pond of the Metropolitan area of London, and so production companies like us need to start thinking outside the M60 just as London companies think outside the M25. That way we can bring the biggest shows here that employ everyone and we will solve this problem.”

Morris suggested BBC daytime programme Morning Live was a successful example of hiring people who identify as working class and boosting audience appeal.

“When we launched the show in London we wanted to speak to a working class audience because we recognised that they were underrepresented. But even in pitching meetings it was clear to me that what people thought our audience was passionate about was really far off the mark.”

She said she had always felt Morning Live should have a “Northern Soul” that would talk about the same topics as shoppers of Asda in Burnley. “That got so much easier to do since we relocated to MediaCity in 2022 . To me it’s no coincidence that we’ve taken our C to D audience (broadcasting speak for working class demographics) from 50% to 60% because we are in a regional hub where our production staff go back to their homes, in the place where they grew up, surrounded by telly watchers, their neighbours and families ,and so really understand the audience. It's not a guessing game.”

She added, “Working class people are not miserable bastards. They are fun. Stories don’t have to be doom and gloom.”

Powerhouse Supercharged – more than words?

Also not coincidentally, BBC Director General Tim Davie chose Salford to deliver a major speech on the future of the Corporation last week. In it he said the BBC wanted to “supercharge Salford while supporting a wider One Creative North plan – more output, more decision-making power, and more creative leadership.”

The creative industries in Salford account for nearly 20 percent of jobs in Greater Manchester or £1.3 billion of economic activity in this area, according to Darren Grice, Director of Culture, Salford City Council. “If we could turn that up by just 5% it would mean £90 million more a year for this city or £900 million over 10 years.”

He pointed to the campus of infrastructure and expertise within greater Manchester, “that can turbo boost this region across the Northwest and beyond that Tim Davey talked about.

“But it's not just about economic impact. The journey [of BBC and ITV investing in MediaCity] has shown how it can change a place through profile and pride and sense of place. This city is no longer the dirty old town of Ewan MacColl. It has reinvented itself and it's now a vibrant future facing creative city.”

Snobbery breeds Reform

The panellists at the MediaCity event criticised out of touch commissioning execs for their snobbish attitude to aspiring talent who either came from perceived poorer backgrounds, or who had been working behind a bar to make ends meet.

Broadcaster and campaigner Carol Vorderman had even linked the TV industry’s innate “snobbery” with the violence that erupted in the wake of the Southport murders.

“You cannot be an industry with the power to create the conversation and then claim nothing is your responsibility,” she said delivering the Alternative MacTaggart Lecture. “The two simply don’t add up.”

Although he made no direct mention of it, this was also on Davie’s mind in his mission statement which stressed the importance of maintaining audience trust.

“Trust in each other, trust in our institutions, trust in information and trust in the UK. The essential ingredient of a secure, cohesive society. The enabler of a creative and competitive UK.”

“I don’t want to catastrophise,” he continued, “but unless we act we will drift. Becoming weaker, less trusting, less competitive.

“The future of our cohesive, democratic society feels, for the first time in my life, at risk. This speaks to issues way beyond party politics or one event, but to longer term factors such as the online revolution and globalisation.”

Committing to send more commissioners to the regions, to educate schoolchildren on how to verify content through BBC Bitesize and encourage more creators to participate in BBC content may be too little to late to stop the BBC’s traditional audience from diverting to social media.

It would seem that the C to D masses have long since lost faith in seeing their views and values and voices on screen in an industry overwhelmingly dominated by the metropolitan elite holding to patronising Reithian ideals.