Cosgrove Hall’s Anthony Utley

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

Cosgrove Hall Films is the
Manchester-based animation studio that brought to life such beloved children’s
shows as Postman Pat, Fifi and the Flowertots and Little Robots. While the
studio specialized in high-quality animation, it mainly did work for hire. In
order to grow to the next level, the studio needed to develop its own
properties. And it needed good knowledge of what the international market wants
and what it can afford. This is exactly what Anthony Utley can provide. He took
over as managing director of the company a year ago. Coming from BBC Worldwide,
he had been involved in the financing and marketing of shows for nearly two
decades. Utley shares with TV Kids his vision for Cosgrove Hall.

TV KIDS: When
you joined Cosgrove Hall, what were your first priorities?

UTLEY: I
found that all the enthusiasm for working as a team had gone out of the studio.
Each of the individuals at Cosgrove Hall was very talented and very creative,
but there was no direction, there was no common aim. Everyone was working in
very separate structures. So in quite a short space of time I wanted to assess
what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses were.

I decided to streamline
the company—going from a creative team of six to one creative director
across the whole company, overseeing not only program content but also the look
and feel of the brand, of our website, of events we might do, and of the stand
at MIPTV and MIPCOM in Cannes. I wanted a sense of uniformity and conformity to
the brand. The new creative director is Francis Vose. That’s an awful lot to
ask of one individual, but he is doing fantastically well at it.

The other senior post I
decided to create was executive producer for the whole company, who would work
hand in hand with the creative director, and he is Chris Bowden.

I just wanted a much more
simple structure, one that was easy to communicate with. Now we have a core
team of four or five people across creativity, business affairs, finance and
development that can make decisions to take the company forward. It’s a much
more manageable group of people with a common aim. It’s all about programs,
really, and passion and creativity.

TV KIDS: What
other goals have you set for the studio?

UTLEY: For the
past several years, we’ve been a studio for hire. That is great work to have,
and our studios are very busy at the moment with lots of great shows, but I
very much want to concentrate on our own IP [intellectual properties], and run
that in tandem with the work for hire. Some of our clients have said, “Oh, you
won’t want to deal with us anymore,” and that’s not the case at all. The shows
from Entertainment Rights and Chapman and Create TV—I’m still very keen
to do that work for them because it keeps our name and brand high in profile
internationally. For many U.K. broadcasters, the fact that Cosgrove Hall is
involved as executive producer in a project is a great reassurance. They love
the fact that Cosgrove Hall is involved because they’ll get a great show. Also,
we learn a lot from work for hire and it pays the bills as well. But I want to
increase our own development and creativity.

TV KIDS: What
steps have you taken toward developing your own shows?

UTLEY: We have
a show, Roger to the Rescue,
that we had originally placed with Alliance Atlantis in Canada as a
co-production partner. But I didn’t feel it was moving in the right direction
with them. During the Licensing Show in New York in June, I removed the show
from Alliance Atlantis and we now have a deal with Nelvana, which is great.
Scott Dyer [the executive VP and general manager for kids at Nelvana’s parent
company, Corus Television] is a lovely man and has always been incredibly
enthusiastic about Cosgrove Hall. And he’s always talked very well about Roger
to the Rescue. His passion and
enthusiasm for the show won us over and we’ve now placed it with him.

The other great advantage
of working with Nelvana is they have this computer-animation software called
Toon Boom Harmony, which is excellent, and we [have it, too]. Nelvana have been
using it for a long time, and when we go into production with Roger to the
Rescue, we’ll be able to work with
them on the same software. So our animators in Manchester and their animators
in Toronto can work on it and they send it back and forth.

That’s been a very
important move for me because Cosgrove Hall was always talked about as a studio
that works across all forms of animation, but in recent years, our drawn
animation has being going out to China. We’ve been producing it from Chinese
studios. In fact, we have a show called The Likeaballs, which is on CBBC at the moment, and a studio in
Shanghai has been doing it. I very much want to bring drawn animation back to
the U.K., and hopefully we’ll work internationally with other partners who have
Toon Boom Harmony as well.

We also have RocketBoy
& Toro. It’s a co-production
with Imagestone in Korea [and] London-based Village Productions and is
distributed by Indigo Film and Television. The series been acquired by the BBC
and is about to go into production. It’s our first real success in terms of
owned IP; we own a significant share of it.

TV KIDS: With
the U.K. broadcasters commissioning fewer children’s programs, will you be
looking to finance shows outside the U.K.?

UTLEY:
Absolutely. It’s not an ideal scenario; it’s just trying to work with what’s
available. ITV wants to reduce its children’s programming from eight hours a
week to two hours. CBBC and Five are talking about doing fewer but bigger
projects. Traditionally, CBBC has commissioned about 12 children’s dramas a
year, and they are now talking about doing nine, but doing them bigger and
better. So it’s great if you are the producer that gets one of those nine
bigger and better ones, but it’s not so good if you don’t. It’s a very, very
crowded market. There are far more production companies and ideas around than
there are possibilities to exploit them. Up until now, the broadcasters have
been pulling the punches, saying this is what we’ll take and this is what we
won’t take. I don’t see how any of us can survive on that thesis. It has to
change.

So while I would much
prefer to have a U.K. broadcaster on board [when we start a project], I can’t
let them hold us back. One of the strategies is to actually fund a show outside
the U.K. and hopefully sell it back in as an acquisition to a U.K. broadcaster.
The secret is to make a great show with less money, which is what the whole
television- production industry is trying to do.

We’ve got to make better
shows for less money. This is another reason for getting the Toon Boom Harmony
software: it doesn’t take the artistry out of the animation, but it does a lot
of the fill-in work. It helps with storyboards. It’s all paperless and it’s
helping make shows for less money. If we can co-produce shows with a major
studio like Nelvana in Canada, who can bring tax credits and various other
support issues to the table, and then try and get a couple of big presales in
Europe—say Germany and France—and solve the funding issues, we can
sell them to U.K. broadcasters along with other foreign broadcasters.

TV KIDS: You
moved from BBC Worldwide, which dealt with many different programming genres,
to Cosgrove Hall. What do you enjoy about being in the kids’ business?

UTLEY: I very
much enjoy being in production, although it’s a tough industry and getting
tougher. After a couple of decades of selling and marketing programs around the
world, it’s wonderful to be involved in the creation of shows from the concept
through to the finished product. And whenever I go around the studios—Postman
Pat and Rupert Bear are in production now—there is so much magic
and passion and commitment seeing these wonderful shows evolving from nothing.

My background of
distribution, co-production, marketing, the BBC Showcase and MIPTV and MIPCOM,
has been useful to me in terms of working out what sort of shows will work
internationally and what the market’s looking for.