Getting Back to Production in the U.K.

Pact’s John McVay, Remarkable’s Susan King, Top Gear executive producer Clare Pizey and ITV’s John Whiston weighed in on the logistics of resuming production in the U.K. following the COVID-19 shutdown in a webinar organized by the Royal Television Society (RTS).

Pact, which represents the interests of U.K. producers, has been working closely with the broadcast sector in the U.K. to devise a set of production guidelines that had to be approved by various government agencies. “The government was broadly sympathetic, given they see that bringing in new content that maybe reflects the experience of the pandemic and changes in our society going forward would be a good thing,” said McVay, the chief executive of Pact. “But clearly you still have to satisfy Health and Safety Executive, Public Health England” requirements as they relate to social distancing, PPE and creating a safe working environment.

“The broadcaster guidance is high level, and it’s up to each production to work out how they comply with that,” McVay added. “The broadcaster will look to you to develop your health and safety requirements, your risk assessments, your mitigations.”

The guidance will continue to be updated, McVay noted.

Whiston, managing director of continuing drama at ITV, spoke about getting shows like Emmerdale and Coronation Street back into production. “We’re observing the two-meter rule at all times—we have people wielding sticks that are two-meters long! We’re having to use different camera angles to make that seem not quite as it is.”

Teams are also being kept together, he said. “In the past, a filming unit would move [around]—some shots in that studio, then move out onto a lot, then move back into that studio. We’ve changed all that. For the time being, one filming unit stays in a couple of studios; they don’t go anywhere but those studios. The only people who move around are the actors. We have crime tape up and no one can go into the actors’ sets.”

Simplicity is crucial when it comes to scripts, Whiston noted. “We’ve gone from 21 scenes down to perhaps 16 or 17, we’ve made the scenes slightly longer but not as complex, we’ve taken out more actors, especially on domestic sets, which are quite small, where it’s hard to get more than two or three people in there.”

There are no children on set, Whiston added. “Children come with tutors and chaperones…. We’re having to say to everyone who isn’t filming, just stay away!”

Storylines have required adapting, Whiston noted; for example, the team had to rule out going out on location to shoot a court case. “We will do a court case, but we will build our own court.”

Props need to be sanitized continually and there are no paper scripts on set. “The biggest issue,” Whiston said, “is sex. When we’re implying that people are getting up to no good, a lot has to be done with smoldering eyes!”

Alex Farber, the deputy editor of Broadcast, who was moderating the panel, then shifted the conversation to Top Gear, which is moving to BBC One this year. “Sometimes when you’re forced into a constraint, it makes you think in a different way,” said Pizey, one of the show’s exec producers. “One of the films we’re doing is a direct result of having to be more creative. We have to work in a new way. We’re looking at doing something with a certain type of car, where in order to get around a social-distancing problem we’re looking at, can we put somebody on top of the car rather than inside the car? We would have never done it if it hadn’t been for this.”

The actual filming of the episodes hasn’t changed too much, Pizey said, noting that the logistics of getting crews to locations and hotel accommodations have been more challenging. The inability to travel to iconic international locations hasn’t hurt the show, Pizey said. “Top Gear is working because of the relationship between the three of them,” she explained, referencing hosts Paddy McGuinness, Freddie Flintoff and Chris Harris. “We’ve done a film in Bolton that I would argue is the funniest one we’ve ever made…. What I have done is taken the flight money and added one particular film which has a massive sense of scale. You don’t need to go abroad to get people talking about the show. But I still want to go!”

King is the head of production at Endemol Shine UK’s Remarkable Television, overseeing such shows as Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, which remained on air during lockdown. “It’s three hours of live television every Sunday morning, 52 weeks a year. It was imperative that we worked quickly to make sure we could keep it on air.” The show filmed remotely from the host’s homes for about eight weeks before returning to the studio. “What we learned from being on-air remotely was what the key elements of the show were that we knew we needed to keep going. The show is very dependent on the chats throughout the morning. We’ve always had guests stay on in the studio across the whole morning. There were always groups of people in the studio. We’ve had to reduce the crew, reduce the guests, but still have some people in the studio,” beginning with hosts Tim Lovejoy and Simon Rimmer. “We’ve structured it so we have guests coming in individually at the moment, so we haven’t got too many people at once.”

COVID-19-related requirements are seeing production costs rise by 10 percent to 30 percent, Pact’s McVay said.

“For the soaps, we’re probably at the lower end of the 10 to 30 percent,” ITV’s Whiston said. “One thing I would say to everybody starting up, the biggest issue was fear.” The guidelines have provided some reassurance, he said. “The other bit of reassurance we did is we had ITV’s unofficial doctor do Zoom calls with all our crews and casts, for them to ask any questions they wanted.”

As for cost efficiencies, “We’ve gained some from the simplicity of what we’re doing, and we’ve lost some from the nature of what we’re having to do.”