Mr Bates vs Post Office drama lost £1m, ITV boss says

This show was fantastic, I sailed the seas to watch it, and was amazed at just how corrupt and far reaching this scandal is. I was equally amazed that, while I thought it should spur public sentiment, immediately after it airing in the UK, there was uproar all the way up the government to the PM, which seems to have gotten forward movement on compensation. The fact that so many postmasters lost their shops, their savings, and were imprisoned, on such a massive scale, with no one to stand up for them, against a faceless wall of government, and bureaucracy in this day and age is breathtaking. I cannot understand how this could have been allowed to happen past the first instances and revelations that the system was inherently flawed and insecure. So many ruined lives. Insane.

I think his point was more the state of broadcast television at the moment. There has been a major advertising slump in UK TV - for example channel 4 is in dire straits, cutting 17% of their workforce, stopping commissioning an holding lots of shows back from broadcast as an accounting ploy to not pay production companies until the next financial year.

ITV on paper are doing much better but to find their biggest hit of the year actually lost money says alot about the state of UK broadcast TV. The first run advertising and the UK streaming catch up money (or fragments of subscriptions to ITVX) haven't made the show profitable.

Shows now need to be saleable abroad to make money and a show like this just doesn't sell enough to make profit.

Its bad news because it means ITV and others are less incentivised to make these types of shows and instead retreat back to cheaper shows (reality and quizzes), and stuff that will sell abroad. Stuff that sells abroad is not necessarily bad but it does push to more generic types of TV over culturally important or unique shows that would only appeal here.

There isn't really a solution to this in the commercial sector. Advertising might bounce back but probably not as that money is now directed at the Internet and social media, not TV.

The BBC could be a champion for this type of stuff but it's doing badly too as the license fee has not kept up with inflation for years, so it's having to make very deep cuts to keep as much of its many commitments going as possible.

Meanwhile American streamers including Netflix are gobbling up the market and UK broadcasters can't compete with the shear scale of their operations.

Personally I think the funding for the BBC needs to go up substantially, and maybe slices of new money even become available for any broadcaster to apply for to ensure culturally important shows can be funded. The commercially viable stuff will always have funding but the more niche and UK specific stuff needs to be protected and probably subsidised to maintain a cultural voice and support diversity in the output of our creative industries.

I'm sure it'll bring in some awards too.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

ITV made a loss of about £1m on its agenda-setting drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, despite it being the UK's most-watched TV show of the year so far, the broadcaster has revealed.The four-part drama, which aired in January, showed the human toll on hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly prosecuted for false accounting and theft due to faulty software.It sparked an outcry and led to plans for new legislation to clear their names.The series has been watched by 13.5 million people to date.But Kevin Lygo, ITV's managing director of media and entertainment, said: "Mr Bates has made a loss of something like £1m and we can't continually do this.

"Broadcasters are facing big financial pressures, and often rely on overseas channels or streamers buying the rights to show a programme to help recoup its budget.Last month, ITV said 12 foreign broadcasters had bought the Mr Bates drama.

But Mr Lygo said it wasn't sufficiently appealing to foreign viewers to break even.

"Another challenge for mainstream broadcasters is "getting enough audiences to turn up on the night" to watch a show, he said.Five or six years ago, a programme like Mr Bates would have been expected to attract a live audience around six or seven million.

The first episode of Mr Bates was watched by four million on the night, which is as "good as you get" now, he said.It went on to gather steam and viewers.

ITV followed the ratings success by announcing in February a drama about what it calls the "biggest health scandal" in British history, the contaminated blood scandal.

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"If you're in Lithuania, four hours on the British Post Office? Not really, thank you very much."

British AF

ITV seem to be so mismanaged. I know money is tight in TV these days but they should at least be breaking even on their big shows.

In my opinion they only occasionally have good shows like this and the rest is a bit crap. Plus ITV X (or whatever it’s called this month) is the worst streaming service app I have ever tried to use.