British viewers have long been accustomed to watching international TV alongside our home-grown favourites. From the days of I Love Lucy through Magnum to Friends and The Wire, US shows have found a home in British living rooms. In recent years our appetite for sub-titled dramas has seen us embrace television from Denmark, Germany, Israel and beyond.
But have you ever wondered about the reverse effect: who is watching Britain’s favourite TV programmes beyond these shores?
The answer is that almost every country in the world enjoys some British TV shows, where they play on a great variety of free-to-air, pay and digital outlets. To give a sense of this reach, look no further than the list of British drama’s international sales recently drawn up by industry publication Broadcast. Last year’s three top-rating UK dramas - Call The Midwife, Doctor Foster and Death in Paradise - have so far been sold to 213, 49 and 237 territories respectively. A further seven of the top 30 titles have sold to over 200 markets: Broadchurch, Silent Witness, Downton Abbey, Doctor Who, New Tricks, Luther and Midsomer Murders.
BBC natural history is also world-renowned. Landmark series such as Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, Life and Africa regularly reach global audiences estimated above half a billion. Japanese cities Yokohama and Osaka even offer immersive visitor attractions based on BBC natural history content, created by SEGA in partnership with our own BBC Earth. And last year’s three-part live television event, Big Blue Live (a co-production between the BBC and PBS in the USA), saw millions on both sides of the Atlantic tune in to witness one of the greatest marine migrations on earth, starring humpback and blue whales, sea lions, dolphins, sea otters and great white sharks.
In fact, international TV sales are a real British success story. The UK is the second largest exporter of TV in the world, only behind the USA. And in formats we are number one. The total value of this international revenue to the UK TV industry is £1.2bn a year for viewers. Much of this money finds its way back onto the screen, whether it comes through co-production funding, normally agreed ahead of production, or from ‘secondary’ sales revenue further down the line.
Outside of the Hollywood studios, the BBC has in its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, the largest TV sales house in the world. And today we open the doors for our 40th annual Showcase event in Liverpool: welcoming over 700 TV buyers who have travelled here, at their own expense, from as far afield as Australasia and Africa, to sample from 6,000 hours of new and upcoming British programmes. For the next three days we will immerse them in a celebration of British television, including over one hundred actors, writers and producers who join us to promote a range of shows and projects of which they are rightly so proud.
The universal nature of BBC content means the shows we represent are wonderfully wide-ranging in their style and subject matter. What our shows do have in common is their ‘Britishness’: a by-word for quality and individuality.
A look at this year’s Showcase slate more than demonstrates this, from BBC Production’s Planet Earth II, Top Gear, Brian Cox’s Forces of Nature, Doctor Who, Father Brown, Luther, Silent Witness and many more available to international buyers. We also work with several hundred independent production companies, investing in and marketing projects commissioned for the BBC - such as Sherlock, Call The Midwife and SS-GB - and for other broadcasters, like Scott & Bailey, The Collection and Maigret. This all adds up to a valuable income stream for the BBC and the wider industry; TV sales helped contribute to a total of £226.5m returned by BBC Worldwide, largely through programme investment and dividends, to the BBC last year, with £113.1m paid to independent production companies.
So whether you’re sitting down to watch Happy Valley’s Calder Valley, travelling the Peloponnese peninsula in Greece with Simon Reeve, following One Child’s journey to Guangzhou or witnessing Earth’s Greatest Spectacles in the Okavango, save a thought for Liverpool too. Because the deals struck there this week mean that viewers in Luxembourg, Lithuania and Lesotho will soon be sharing what’s on your screen - delivering a wider audience for British TV overseas, and more investment coming back into the hits of tomorrow.