Wowser! Tax Credits are Go!

OK, OK, so not a go just yet. Today's budget announcement heralded, in fact, another year's work ahead of us before the Tax Credit will be fully introduced in April 2013. We were worried that it was going to take two years by which time a whole bunch more companies would have gone to the wall. A year is near enough for most to be able to hunker down and wait for the cavalry to arrive.

I have learnt so much about so many things by being part of the team pushing the Tax Credit agenda. Time for a list:

1)  Try not to launch a high profile media campaign during Movember. If you've never grown a moustache in your life it's not a good time to try, when you are on TV every other day. The worst thing though was the Spectator interview I did in Movember but which wasn't published until February. The reporter quite fairly called me on my stupid tache but failed to mention that he had talked to me three months before .... the Spectator didn't want anyone to think that it took them three months to get their act together.


2) This is tricky but try to make a statement that suggests a controversial headline but which doesn't go the whole way so that when sections of the media publish the controversial headline you can deny it but still get the media coverage. In our case the story that Aardman was to quit the UK which appeared on the BBC website and spread like wildfire, was a not very subtle distortion of a statement that I made that we would be outsourcing some of our work overseas if we didn't get a tax credit. Beautiful. I was able to deny the story while still getting it in front of everyone's face. I had plausible deniability.

I was surprised (but grateful) that it was the BBC website that took this approach to the story but they do have 'form' in this regard having been the source of the story that Aardman's studio had burnt down in 2005 when in fact it was a storage facility.

3)  While people like me blab away to the media, behind the scenes someone has to be doing some very hard work. Most of it was done by the indefatigable Oli Hyatt of Blue Zoo, without him the campaign would never have happened or succeeded. Aardman may have been the trump card but Oli played a difficult hand with great skill. Respect is due.

4)  Radio 4 has amazing reach and influence. The campaign took off in the media after the interview I gave to The World This Weekend on Radio 4. It was a great interview by Shaun Ley and most of the rest of the media coverage at that time ran on from that interview, or a strange version of it.

5) The press agencies sent under-qualified people to interview me; cameramen with a couple of questions emailed to them on their phones. The decline in quality of the news provided by agencies (as described in brilliant detail in Nick Davies' Flat Earth News) is a great worry - so many news organisations rely on agencies for their stories.

6) The FT is ace, they reported the story in depth and accurately, another good way of getting your story in front of the Treasury, for example.

7) Sky News appeared to be a serious news organisation committed to getting the story right, I had not expected this when they asked for an interview.

8)  Don't watch your TV interviews back especially if, like me, you are not a 'natural'. I hate seeing and hearing myself on TV or Radio but the job had to be done. By not watching any of it back I didn't get self conscious and worry about how I was coming across. People said I was OK, I chose to believe them without checking for myself.

9)  Journalists short of ideas and background information will often default to the adversarial approach .... using attack as the best form of covering up their lack of preparedness or skill.

10) There is just a tiny, tiny chance that the Chancellor gave UK animation producers a tax credit just so that he could make the Wallace and Gromit gag about the labour front bench.

11) There is no 11, I just think lists of 10 are lazy.

Update: 23rd March 2012

12) I feel the need to add another item to my list as I have been reminded, very good-naturedly, that the media hullaballoo actually began in our august trade mag, Broadcast. Back in October I gave a rushed interview to a reporter who, in my view, didn't report the substance of what I had said and instead cherry-picked a quote to prove a point she had to make about the film tax credit. I complained to the editor who was sympathetic. She offered me an opinion piece in the mag and made it clear that Broadcast was going to be a suporter of the campaign, which it really has been. I wrote the piece and it's one of the things that got Radio 4 (see item 4) interested. Again, it's not always a disaster being misquoted ...

Catching The Next Wave

This post first appeared on mipblog

I am very interested to see where the next big wave of creative talent is going to come from. Very interested. Where is the next Charlie Parsons (creator of Club X, The Word, Survivor (and therefore all of modern reality television)) going to emerge from? Or the next wave of animation talent such as graduated from the UK’s NFTS in the 80’s like Nick Park, Alison Snowden and David Fine, Mark Baker, Tony Collingwood (who between them created or co-created Wallace & Gromit, Ricky Sprocket, Peppa Pig, The Secret Show)..

For me, today’s creative climate is starting to feel a little bit like the music scene in the early 70's – if you don’t remember it or weren’t alive then it was all ‘Yes’ and ‘Genesis’ and concept albums and epic, over-produced sound-bilge and flared trousers and stacked shoes, all of which I owned.

In 1977 I was working in a factory in Germany (another story), I went to some dive-of-a-venue to see a band called ‘The Stranglers’. A fight broke out every 10 minutes between an audience member and a band member (usually Jean-Jacques Burnel) but it was the ‘Rattus Norvegicus’ tour and it was great and it was obvious that something new and big and sensational was happening to music which would never be the same again and I want the same thing to happen in TV, like now.

As the workforce in TV decreases in size, as training budgets are cut and young people move away from watching traditional broadcast television and opt instead to consume their stories on-demand, we may be in danger of deterring new young creative talent from thinking of the television business as a career opportunity. For my generation it was impossibly glamorous, it isn’t any more.

We should expect new talent to be saying ‘no thanks’ more and more frequently to our old media overtures. They seem more likely to be giving us the finger and starting a creative revolution on digital platforms. A proper, counter-culture, rebellious, offensive and challenging creative revolution that a large part of the mainstream is going to abhor.

We all remember ‘proper’ musicians saying of the Sex Pistols ‘they can’t play, they can’t write and they sing out of tune’ and only today we were looking at the 27m YouTube views that asdfmovie has got for one of its ‘shows’ and someone (who shall remain nameless but wasn’t me) said ‘I don’t like it, they can’t animate there’s no story and ….’

Yeah, whatevs grandad.

But just as The Stranglers and even the Pistols got record deals, so we too can provide a home for the new wave of talent once they’re done with smashing the system and staking out their creative territory.

Provided we don’t just try and defend the old way of doing things and provided we can be bold and open and can embrace whatever comes out of the next big thing we can survive and prosper. We may be selling new shows shows to Netflix, Amazon and YouTube and they may not look like ‘shows’ as we currently understand the term but even anarchists ultimately need deal makers and salesmen to earn a crust.

We can still be part of the new wave, it’ll just be on slightly different creative terms.

I hope so anyway, I was listening to The Sex Pistols just the other day …

The Prime Minister and I

A somewhat surreal but interesting day yesterday (Thursday 28th July). On the Wednesday the call came through to Aardman that the ministerial visit that we had been expecting was being upgraded to a Prime Ministerial visit. It was all very hush hush but David Cameron was in town and wanted to pop into to see us. There probably aren’t many Tory voters in the Company and I know there to be a good few Tory naysayers amongst our ranks so it sent a frisson of excitement through the building when it leaked out that he was coming.

I think Aardman is on the ‘100 places to visit while in Government’ and definitely ‘while in Bristol’ - we get a very healthy flow of visitors from Whitehall and Westminster - not just because of Wallace and Gromit - also because David Sproxton, our leader, sits on several boards and committees that get involved in policy and public works.

I have no problem engaging with politicians that I haven’t voted for; as a Lib Dem supporter I have little choice of course and any chance to bend someone’s ear, especially the PM’s, about tax credits for kids TV has to be taken. And of course, blasé though I try to sound, meeting the PM brings out the 12 year old in me. ‘BLIMEY - IT’S THE PRIME MINISTER!’ is what reverberates round your head as you try and maintain an urbane and intelligent demeanor.

I have also met enough ministers now (as previously blogged here and here) to know that, by and large, they don’t get to be ministers by being idiots. Pretty much every one I have met has been bright, lively, able to turn on the charm and, to a greater or lesser extent, charismatic. Actually it would be good to meet a proper idiot just to redress the balance a bit.

And so it is with our Prime Minister. I don’t agree with the approach the Tories are taking to the recession (i.e’ ‘let’s make it worse’) but the man himself was well informed, interested, bright, funny and yes, charismatic.

Our last ministerial visit had been from Ed Vaizey - we had bent his ear about the need for tax credits for kids tv and it was very pleasing to learn that that conversation had been reported back to HQ. Cameron brought it up almost unprompted. He’s worked in TV himself at Carlton and so we were able to have a good conversation about the issues facing the industry.

Briefly; many countries like Ireland, Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Australia, Hungary and many more provide government support in the form of tax credits and subsidy to TV producers to encourage indigenous production. The UK provides a Tax credit to the British film industry and it has been very successful in attracting inward investment and stimulating employment and growth in the film business and its infrastructure.

We need that tax credit to be extended to kids TV - the BBC is the only substantial UK commissioner of kids programmes and they have budget pressures of their own and we are all worried about supporting kids TV through advertising revenues. Production is migrating overseas at an alarming rate as producers and buyers chase costs reductions. UK producers are going to the wall and in an industry where the UK once ruled (think Bob The Builder and Teletubbies) we are now falling badly behind our subsidised international competitors.

All this we managed to get across in the brief discussions we were able to have. There was a tricky moment for me when PM declared himself a Shaun The Sheep fan (he has 3 kids right in our core Shaun The Sheep age group) and he played our Home Sheep Home browser game and if there was a moment when I nearly tore up my lifetime Libdem membership card that was it.

But just a swiftly as he arrived he was gone - I went round the building thanking the anarchists and revolutionaries for not heckling and flour bombing him and we got back down to the business of earning a crust, selling our wares moaning about politicians.

Feeling Old ...

Two reasons for posting this particular blog:

First - to celebrate our latest venture - Jellybeats is 'an online play in the social networking/musical self expression space' - or, as I like to think of it - some cute jellyfish designed in the fashion of different musical genres.

We [Aardman] have teamed up with our friends at Digital Outlook to produce and launch Jellybeats - and we have partnered with Bebo to to give the launch at bit of ... umph.

The second reason for the post is that part of the 'offering' is a Jellybeats widget. All through the planning of the site I could sense that the widget was a great idea ... without ever truly understanding what it was. Now I get to use it, right here, right now, and perhaps in doing so its mysteries will be revealed to me.



There. A widget. Now I know. Actually it's quite cool.

The press interest in Jellybeats has been fairly intense, partly because we teamed up with Bebo as a media partner in the week that they got bought by aol for $850m and partly because of the Aardman factor. After all, in one way it's just another website to add to the billions that are already out there. The hope is that it's so well done that it will stand out and flourish.

While I am really proud of the whole thing I have to confess to it making me feel very old.

For a start Bebo is for tweens and teenagers. When the idea first came up to partner with them I created a Bebo profile for myself and nosed around for about 10 minutes.

It's total anarchy; kids mucking about, showing off, sharing their barely formed thoughts, using a vocabulary that I don't understand and pushing their sexuality out there like puppies on heat. It wasn't long before I started feeling distinctly pervy - like I was spying on kids making out - I deleted my account immediately.

My daughter (11) has an account - she keeps me up to date with Bebo news and what she and all her friends are up to on there. Every now and again I make her tell me who all her Bebo friends are to check that she knows them all in the real world. For now she seems happy to oblige.

That will all change when she goes to secondary school and when my concern for her safety becomes an embarrassment.

As I hurtle towards my 50th Birthday the Jellybeats conundrum bites hard. The website asks 'Which 1 R U?'. My cursor hovers over the Acid House Jellyfish because I like my dance music and it keeps me down with the kids. But is that really 'my beat'?

Bebo is fad that will wane in popularity but will probably persist as it seems to tap into something fundamental in the way girls in particular relate to each other. House Music will always be around and will soon be looked back on fondly but it's not really my music - I didn't grow up with it, I've never been to Turnmills or Ibiza and I never will.

I'm a Jazzer - I've travelled the world to see some of the greats and it doesn't matter what new sound interrupts my listening habits - I always come back to Jazz. Dammit - I even have a a Jazz name.

My vote for the next feature on the widget will be the option to send a friend your top five tracks of the moment.

Here are my top 5 Jazz tracks (for this week anyway):

Bear Town - Polar Bear - Held on the Tips of Fingers (Babel)
Ramblin' - Ornette Coleman - Change of the Century (Atlantic)
Una Muy Bonita - Ornette Coleman - Change of the Century (Atlantic)
So What - Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (Columbia)
Devil Woman - Charles Mingus - Oh Yeah (Atlantic)

I'm 50 and proud and these tracks will still be cool in another 50 years time when I am long gone.

Jazz it is. I wonder how many other have selected Jazz on their Bebo widget? Is it legal to count that sort of thing?