Post Production Supervisor, Chloe Dean (The Grand Tour, Clarkson’s Farm, Long Way Up) argues that more needs to be done to sustain the screen industry workforce if the UK hopes to remain a global powerhouse
The paradox at the heart of British television – By Chloe Dean
November 2025. New York City. The 53rd International Emmy Awards. Sixty-four nominees from a record twenty-six countries gathered in a hotel ballroom to find out who made the best television across the globe that year. The answer, as it has been for several years running, is the same small island that also brought the world queueing, passive aggression and an inexplicable attachment to baked beans.
Seven awards. Best Drama. Best Comedy. Best Actress. Best TV Movie. Spain came second with two. Every other nation won one each.
Baby Reindeer swept the Primetime Emmys. The Traitors became so beloved that commissioning a fourth series felt less like a creative decision and more like a legal obligation.
British television is not just in the game. It is setting the terms of it.
The same year, two thousand industry workers were asked a simple question: how are you doing?
The answers were devastating. Seventy-four percent were considering leaving the industry. Forty-three percent had already taken firm steps to do so. One in five had experienced sustained unemployment, having worked fewer than three months in the previous year, facing an average gap between jobs of seven months.
These were not people who couldn’t hack it. These were the people who made the programmes that won the awards.
How Did We Get Here?
Follow the money. It tells the most honest story.
UK production spend reached £6.8 billion in 2025. The numbers suggest an industry in rude health. They tell only part of the story.
Inward investment money from US studios and streamers choosing to film in the UK accounted for 85% of that spend. Domestic productions accounted for just 17% of high-end television. The House of Commons Culture Committee has warned this imbalance puts the healthy functioning of the entire industry at risk. They are right. Not because international productions are unwelcome they’re not, and the jobs and infrastructure they bring are real and significant. But inward investment does not build a domestic ecosystem, develop the next generation of talent, or commission the work that keeps a broad workforce employed. And without conditions attached to the tax relief that attracts it, too much of that money leaves with the production. The infrastructure stays but the money doesn’t.
The UK’s Audio Visual Expenditure Credit offers 34% tax relief with no meaningful requirement to employ British crew. A production can claim significant public subsidy, fly in an international crew and leave the domestic freelance workforce with nothing more than a vague feeling that something has gone wrong.
Compare this to Ireland, where production spend grew 26% in 2025 to a record €544 million. Ireland’s Section 481 relief requires productions to employ local crew and meet domestic workforce conditions. The relief is tied explicitly to benefiting Irish workers. The results speak for themselves.
When the UK government was asked whether it would attach similar conditions to its own relief, it declined. Certification requirements, it said, might restrict innovation.
The editors sitting at home after seven months without work may have their own thoughts about what exactly is being restricted.
So What Went Wrong?
British broadcasters are under sustained pressure. Linear advertising is declining. Streaming has plateaued 70% of UK households had a subscription in early 2026, barely two points more than in 2022. With costs rising by as much as 33% in recent years, the era of everyone getting a streaming subscription has become the era of everyone wondering whether to cancel theirs.
The result is a commissioning culture that has become structurally risk averse. Fewer new formats. Fewer development budgets. Fewer bets on the unknown quantity that could become the next phenomenon because the next phenomenon is expensive to discover and cheap to miss.
Consider The Traitors. Not a new concept the format had existed in various forms for years without breaking through. What made it work was execution: the casting, the craft, the editorial instinct that turned a familiar premise into something people could not stop talking about. It went viral. It was recommissioned, and recommissioned again, while the development budgets that might have found the next one were cut elsewhere.
This is the commissioning barbell. At one end, event television so enormous it becomes a national conversation. At the other end, silence. What has disappeared is the middle the well-crafted factual series that historically sustained the industry and the careers within it. The shows that built the editors, the supervisors, the researchers and the directors who went on to make the award winning work. You cannot have one without the other.
But is the audience still there for it? The data suggests the answer is complicated. General factual had the largest viewing decline of any genre. Linear fell by eight hours per person per year. BVoD picked up only two. Many audiences have simply moved on drawn to the vast ocean of lower-budget content on YouTube and social platforms, where informative does not have to mean expensive.
Audiences have not stopped loving factual. They have stopped tolerating adequate factual.
This is not an argument for commissioning less. It is an argument for commissioning better.
Where Is This Going?
Look at what the manufacturers are building. It tells you everything.
The resolution race has largely run its course. What manufacturers are investing in now is panel technology, picture quality and AI screens with deeper blacks, wider dynamic range and processing that actively enhances what they display in real time.
Every significant shift in consumption has been preceded by hardware. Widescreen changed how programmes were composed. HD changed what was acceptable on screen. File-based delivery changed how post production was organised. Each time, the industry adapted or fell behind.
The screens consumers are buying demand exceptional content because mediocre content on a panel that actively processes every frame looks exactly like what it is. And that viewing experience lives most fully on streaming platforms, not on linear channels still transmitting in HD.
The next transition is not about resolution. It is about understanding that the screen in someone’s living room is now an active participant in how your content looks. Post production will need to evolve to meet it. The people who understand that shift early will be the ones who survive it. But first, they must still be here.
Is There A Way Through?
British television is winning because of talent.
The editors who find the story in three hundred hours of footage. The post teams who deliver the impossible on impossible deadlines. The researchers, directors and sound designers who have spent careers developing craft that cannot be replicated by a system, a subsidy or an algorithm however confident the algorithm might feel about it.
That talent is still here. Stretched and anxious and weighing its options, but here. And that matters more than any statistic in this piece.
So what would actually help?
Attach domestic workforce conditions to the tax relief that public money funds. Not a prohibition on international productions a requirement that British crew benefit from the investment British taxpayers are helping to fund. Ireland does it. Canada does it. The UK can too, if it decides to.
Commission with ambition rather than managed risk. The audiences for exceptional British factual have not disappeared. They are simply no longer willing to give their time to content that does not earn it. Adolescence and Clarkson’s Farm and Baby Reindeer are not accidents. They are proof of what this industry can do when it backs itself.
And convene the conversation between government, broadcasters, streamers, production companies and the workforce itself about what a sustainable domestic television ecosystem looks like. The Freelance Champion announcement was a start. It needs to be substantially more than that.
None of this is new. All of it has been proposed before. The reason it hasn’t happened is that the current system serves some parts of this industry rather well. Just not its workforce.
The talent that wins our Emmys is the same talent that is currently sitting at home wondering whether this industry still has a place for them.
The answer should be obvious.
The Ending
The industry that made Happy Valley and Baby Reindeer and Clarkson’s Farm and Adolescence did not do it by accident. It did it because decades of investment in craft produced a workforce that knows how to make extraordinary television and keeps making it even when the industry is not making it easy.
At the 53rd International Emmys the UK won seven times. Spain won twice. Everyone else won once.
That does not happen by accident.
But talent is not self-replenishing. It is built over years by people who chose this industry and stayed long enough to become genuinely exceptional at it. Right now, 43% of those people have already taken firm steps to leave.
An industry that wins seven International Emmys in a single night but cannot sustain the people who made them is not a success story.
It is a warning.
Chloe Dean is a Post Production Supervisor with over twenty years experience in British factual television. She writes Behind The Edit, a weekly newsletter about the realities of working in television at chloebehindtheedit.substack.com
Jon Creamer
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