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 ...

Animation industry needs a break

This post first appeared in Broadcast Magazine (subscription required)

We’re a bit suspicious of ‘government support’ in the UK; it smacks of retreat – Dunkirk and all that. The Brits prefer a stiff upper lip, a ‘keep calm and carry on’ approach as our ocean liners slip beneath the frozen waters.

There’s a time for the phlegmatic approach but there’s also a time to dress up as Bob The Builder and run across Westminster Green screaming “somebody do something” at the top of our voices. This is one of those times for the UK TV animation industry.

Put simply, an industry that was until recently all-conquering is now in crisis. Subsidies and government support for the animation industries of Ireland, Canada, France, Benelux, much of South-East Europe, Australia, Germany and Singapore, to name but a few, have distorted the market for kids’ animation in particular and put the UK at a huge disadvantage.

Chorion, Chapman, Coolabi, HIT and E-One are all in the process of refinancing or changing hands, and mostly not through choice. Bob The Builder, Chuggington and Octonauts, for example, are produced overseas, and even we at Aardman are having to consider the idea of producing a stop-frame series overseas to access soft money and make the show affordable to produce.

Ideas conceived in this country are being driven into the arms of our subsidised overseas competitors for production services. “So what?” I hear people say. “Join the rest of us manufacturing in China/India – it’s the new economic reality.” The problem is we are outsourcing our kids’ cultural heritage. Our overseas competitors aren’t just manufacturing our shows, they are learning how to create them for themselves,  and soon they won’t need us to give them the raw creative materials.

Beleaguered UK broadcasters will be able to buy all the rights they want in British-looking shows at a fraction of the cost of the ‘real thing’ – but the shows may not be as good, and certainly won’t be as culturally relevant.

Animation UK’s report, Securing the Future of UK Animation, paints a very clear but bleak picture of the industry, but also makes a compelling case for government support for the UK TV animation industry, and comes down in favour of the tax credit model that has been so successfully attracting inward investment into the British film industry.

Amid the chaos of the Irish economic meltdown, section 481 tax relief for Irish producers has been protected because it works and is profitable for the Irish exchequer, as would be a tax credit for the Treasury.

Tax credits work better than subsidies because they don’t create an environment in which unrealistic projects get financed; they don’t favour experts in form-filling. They favour people who get their shows financed and produced, and therefore endorsed by the commercial market rather than supported by the subsidised one.

So unless we want Bob or Peppa or Fireman Sam driving on the right side of the road all of a sudden, we need urgent and decisive, remedial action to level the playing field for the UK animation industry. Our natural instinct to ‘keep calm and carry on’ just won’t work at this time. We need to get noisy.

➤ Miles Bullough is head of broadcast at Aardman Animations. Animation UK’s report, Securing the Future of UK Animation, is available to download from www.animationuk.org/report.php

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.