John Griffin

***John Griffin***Company Pictures, part of the ALL3MEDIA Group, is one of the U.K.’s largest and most prestigious independent film and television drama production companies. Their work includes hit series such as the family drama Wild At Heart and leading youth drama Skins. Both series have sold into more than 120 territories worldwide.

In the past 12 months, Company Pictures has produced some 70 hours of drama, as compared to just 20 hours less than a decade ago. John Griffin, the executive producer for series at Company Pictures, who has worked on the original long-running series Shameless and Skins, talks about current successes and upcoming projects.

WS: What has driven the increases in production at Company Pictures?
GRIFFIN: Having good, key talent at the top is a big part of it. And, George Faber and Charlie Pattinson, who run the company, both came from the BBC and have fantastic drama pedigrees, are brilliant script editors and understand how to make a script really, really fire. Another element is the company ethos, which is really to support writers and help them realize their vision. We’re not a company that specializes in dreaming up formats for dramas. We are a company that finds and works with writers who have brilliant stories they want to tell. Fundamentally, that’s what lies behind the success. And, of course, as soon as you do that, it makes you attractive to writers—so it’s a good business plan as well as being sound creatively.

WS: Skins has been quite successful, hasn’t it?
GRIFFIN: Yes, Skins in the U.K. has been channel-defining and it’s E4’s main brand. Not just because it was their first drama or their most successful drama but because it’s got a huge multiplatform presence so it’s also been groundbreaking in ***Video - Skins***the way that people view television. I think in series one, 195 people averaged watching it online. During the last series there were more than half a million every week watching it online. That’s in five years. That’s not just about the show, that’s about what’s changed in television. But, we’re at the leading edge of that. Fifty percent of our audience go on the website and look at the extra material. For most shows, it’s maybe 5 percent or 10 percent. It’s partly because we’re obviously playing to a particular age group who are incredibly savvy towards online. Skins is kind of a cutting-edge show for us in that respect.

We’ve got another channel-defining show, which is Shameless on Channel 4. I worked on that for the first five years, when we used to make eight, and then 16 hours a year. We make 22 hours of that now and we’ve just had another 22 hours commissioned. That’s the series’ ninth year and they’re currently filming the hundredth episode. So, that’s been a huge success for Channel 4 and us.

WS: It’s unusual to get a 22-episode order in the U.K., isn’t it?
GRIFFIN: It is in the U.K. Not many shows get that. It’s a challenge delivering [22 episodes] because we don’t have the history of the kind of setup that they have in the States to [produce that type of volume]. But, four years ago, we built a whole lot for the show. We built the exteriors and the interior sets in a brand new warehouse up in Manchester near where we used to film on location, all with the view of, “We can turn this into a show that can produce large quantity.” So we can double-bank very easily. Once you’ve got everything on-site, with all the streets you need and all the interiors, you can then start getting clever. You can’t do that when you’re running all over Manchester trying to film here, there and everywhere. We still go out, but much less than we used to have to.

WS: What upcoming projects can you tell us about?
GRIFFIN: Well, look out for Beaver Falls, which is our new E4 comedy drama, which is about three English lads who blag their way into American summer camp as teachers without any skills whatsoever, except those of pulling girls, which is why they go. ALL3MEDIA International is launching the show at MIPCOM. I won’t say anything about the title, which may not translate outside the U.K. very well, but we know what it means. [Laughs] I read the first script, which was the funniest script I’ve read in years. And, I’ve seen bits of it and it seems to be living up to the script.

The other show of ours to look out for at the moment, which broadcast last year on BBC One, is The Silence. It’s a really extraordinary and original piece. It’s a crime thriller, except at the center of it is a deaf girl who sees a crime, but if anyone else saw it, they wouldn’t be able to do anything because they wouldn’t understand what was happening. But she did because from a long distance, she lip-read. So, she sees something that you and I cannot see. And she knows something has happened and she has a vital clue to a crime. It’s great; it’s a really brilliant idea. You visit her world of deafness really, really cleverly inside the drama. You go into her point of view, where the world is silent, and she’s a girl who’s struggling with her hearing aid and tears it out. You go into that world with her and, inside of all that, it’s a really good, well-told British crime drama.

To watch a clip of Skins, please click here.