How Tinseltown and tech combine to squeeze out British creatives

The British media stumbles into 2016 with its confidence undermined and its future still in doubt

“I feel like these worlds are so merged over the past few years,” cooed the singer and actress Jennifer Lopez as she pitched business ideas to venture capitalists in San Francisco in May (Getty)

With the passing of another year of the internet age, the great powers of Hollywood and Silicon Valley have become more closely entwined and British media is at risk of becoming a sideshow.

Disney has doubled its original $200m (£184.1m) investment in the online youth brand Vice Media (which also has money from 21st Century Fox). The House of Mouse, alongside Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency, recently sunk big money into Jaunt, a virtual reality company, while stars from Ashton Kutcher to Kim Kardashian put cash into start-ups and apps.

“I feel like these worlds are so merged over the past few years,” cooed the singer and actress Jennifer Lopez as she pitched business ideas to venture capitalists in San Francisco in May.

At the start of the millennium, before the internet’s impact had been accurately gauged and ahead of the advertising crash that came with economic downturn, British media had bounce in its stride. The BBC bowed to no one as an international news and entertainment brand. Commercial broadcasters were churning out global hit formats from ITV’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to Channel 4’s Wife Swap. Fleet Street, rumbustious and diverse, did not know what was about to hit it.

The British media stumbles into 2016 with its confidence undermined and its future still in doubt.

Jeremy Tunstall, emeritus professor of sociology at City University in London, has been monitoring media power bases for nearly 40 years. In 1977 he wrote a book, The Media Are American, based on the idea that most forms of mass communication were industrialised in the US. The theory, obvious as it seems now, was controversial at the time. In 2007, he followed up with The Media Were American, which recognised the rise of mass media in fast-growing nations such as China, India, Brazil and Russia. He argues that American media giants remain dominant in countries with populations of less than 100 million, including Britain.

“It’s probably never going to be 100 per cent American-owned but it’s following European media in being increasingly reliant on American imports.”

Professor Tunstall’s latest book, BBC and Television Genres in Jeopardy, suggests that seven areas of British television (natural history, arts, education, children’s, religion, science and current affairs), are in decline across British TV. Faced with competition from global tech giants, the BBC is challenged like never before, he says.

“It has had to defend itself its entire life but the rivals it now faces are getting bigger at an amazing speed.”

Channel 4 faces privatisation by the Government and could follow Channel 5 [bought by Viacom in 2014] in being acquired by American owners. ITV, having seen off the advertising crisis and built an impressive production portfolio in the United States, might go the same way.

John Malone’s American cable TV giant Liberty Global last year bought a stake in ITV and already owns Virgin Media. Discovery’s purchase of All3Media is one of several American acquisitions of major British independent producers. Prof Tunstall estimates that when cartoons, movies and other imported shows are included, 50 per cent of British TV is in US “ownership”.

But there is still much to be proud of. As Prof Tunstall notes, drama is thriving on British TV. The BBC’s success in the Christmas ratings was on the back of bumper audiences for period productions And Then There Were None and Dickensian, and the nostalgic sitcom Still Open All Hours. Domestic audiences love this content as much as they do bingeing whole seasons of Narcos on Netflix or Transparent on Amazon Prime. Foreign-owned broadcasters must appreciate that.

The Government has belatedly woken up to the value of BBC output overseas and found extra money for the World Service. And UK music-industry bosses, such as Universal Music chief David Joseph, have endorsed BBC Radio’s role in supporting British artists.

Yet the lingua franca of social media is not English but American English.

Combine that power with the seductive and generations-old lure of Hollywood and it’s easy to see how home-grown British content could become even more squeezed out as media evolves. Only the public can decide otherwise.