TV thriller Broadchurch was an extraordinary hit. Perhaps most surprising was the fact that it was on ITV, not always seen as the home of edgy entertainment. But that's changing
There was something out of the ordinary about Broadchurch, the TV murder mystery that kept nearly 10 million viewers guessing until the killer of 11-year-old Danny Latimer was revealed this week. The work almost entirely of a single writer – unusual for an eight-part drama – it featured only one murder (the average episode of Midsomer Murders has four).
Most surprising of all, perhaps, was that Broadchurch was on ITV, not necessarily a channel known to viewers as the home of edgy (or edge-of-your-seat) thrills. At the risk of hyperbole, ITV claims it is the most tweeted-about TV drama ever, with a reported 260,000 tweets from 137,000 people – making it, to use a pre-Twitter phrase, genuine watercooler television.
ITV's director of television, Peter Fincham, who has overseen a creative resurgence since his arrival five years ago, bridles slightly at the suggestion that it was not traditional ITV fare.
"ITV is a mainstream broadcaster, but if there's an implication that mainstream means bland, I would reject that absolutely. If you really want to broaden your audience then going for something that's a bit soggy in the middle won't do. You have got to be bold, go out on a limb, and people will come with you."
There are more surprises to come. On Monday the Broadchurch slot will be filled by two new sitcoms, not a genre you usually associate with ITV. One of them, Vicious, boasts the combined star power of Sir Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi as a bickering couple in what may be the UK's first mainstream gay comedy.
"If it feels like a risk, then good," says Fincham. "It's an enormously warm comedy, with characters who, deep down, love each other, and I hope the audience will.
"When you are doing well – ITV has had a pretty good year on a wide range of fronts – that is the time to up your level of risk, not to pull back. No risk, no reward."
ITV, as he suggests, is on a roll, an upward curve that can be traced back to Downton Abbey, the Julian Fellowes drama that Fincham commissioned during the depths of the advertising slump in 2009, when his channel barely had two pennies to rub together. Back then only the BBC did costume drama and, like Broadchurch, it helped redefine people's perceptions of ITV. It launched in 2010 within a couple of weeks of another ITV show, "structured reality" series The Only Way Is Essex on digital channel ITV2.
"It was an interesting and slightly defining moment," recalls Fincham. "In both cases, it gave each channel probably its noisiest hit in years."
Downton Abbey was followed by the likes of Appropriate Adult, Mr Selfridge, and Fincham's latest commission is a four-part drama, The Great Fire of London, written by ITV News' political editor (and novelist) Tom Bradby. It will tell the story of the 1666 inferno over four consecutive days and from multiple perspectives, from King Charles II to baker Thomas Farriner.
Broadchurch will also return, although it remains to be seen whether its two biggest stars – Olivia Colman and David Tennant – will be back, its writer, Chris Chibnall, is promising a "very different story". "I don't think it's going to start with another body on the beach," is all Fincham will offer.
Fincham would not be at ITV at all were it not for the royal scandal that beset the BBC in 2007, when a badly edited press trailer for a royal documentary appeared to show the Queen storming out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz. Fincham, then the controller of BBC1, carried the can for the so-called "Crowngate" scandal, quitting the corporation after two and a half years and taking charge of its commercial rival a few months later.
When he joined ITV, it was still labouring under the shadow of reality flops such as Celebrity Wrestling and Celebrity Love Island. It was about to get worse as Lehman Brothers collapsed, a global financial crisis unfolded and ITV plunged into the red. Fincham wielded the axe, ditching long-running shows such as The Bill and Taggart.
Radio Times editor Ben Preston says: "There was a time before Peter Fincham got his feet under the table when ITV had slipped out of the repertoire of many people's viewing, but it is forcing its way back on to the menu."
ITV is riding high on Saturday nights with the return of Simon Cowell's Britain's Got Talent, currently lording it over BBC1's The Voice, following in the footsteps of a rejuvenated Saturday Night Takeaway, essentially an updated Noel's House Party fronted by Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly.
Fincham also made a mark with celebrity diving show Splash!, featuring Tom Daley, winning an audience of more than six million viewers despite a sceptical critical reaction. Fincham says the press "looked down their noses at it. I hate television snobbery of any sort."
Former BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessey, now executive chair of independent production company Boom Pictures, attributes ITV's success to "knowing what its audience is and not being afraid to take risks. Splash! was a big, bold commission, and when they work you reap great rewards".
ITV's fortunes are inevitably entwined with those of Cowell. But while Britain's Got Talent is back on form, The X Factor was beaten in the ratings last year by BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing. It remains one of ITV's most popular shows, but suffered in Cowell's absence as he presides over its US incarnation on Fox.
Cowell's latest ITV show, Food Glorious Food, a thinly veiled take on BBC2 hit The Great British Bake Off, in which the winner had their dish turned into a ready meal by Marks & Spencer, came to an end with just 2.4 million viewers last week, a quarter of the audience for Britain's Got Talent.
Will it be back? "I don't know yet," says Fincham. "I so wanted to go to Marks & Spencer to buy the fragrant white chicken korma. It looks absolutely delicious!"
Fincham is more certain that Cowell's two-year deal with ITV, which comes to an end this year, will be renewed. "If we don't enter into a new contract then somebody's cocked it up somewhere. The lawyers have got it wrong."
Also up for renewal is ITV's exclusive deal with Ant and Dec. "I'm not sure there's ever been a better moment in our relationship," he says. "It's a stable, supportive, long-term relationship in which we look after each others' interests."
A millionaire from the sale of the independent production company Talkback (which made I'm Alan Partridge and Da Ali G Show), Fincham has only ever had three jobs. He might by now have had another – as director general of the BBC, had he not been forced out.
He admits, with great reluctance, that he was sounded out for the director general's job last year, when it was given to the ill-fated George Entwistle, who lasted just 54 days in the job.
"I absolutely did not apply or throw my hat into the ring or put myself forward for the director general job, nor have I for any job at the BBC since the day I left in 2007," he says.
"I may have had a strange call at some point from a headhunter type, I can't remember. You never know in this business when you are being sounded out for something or if someone is working their way down a list. I have never seriously been in discussions or in the frame for any job at the BBC since the day I left."
It was ITV's revelations about Jimmy Savile, in its current affairs strand Exposure, that sparked the crisis at the BBC that precipitated Entwistle's departure. Fincham spent several months considering the evidence, watching many interviews several times over. "I can remember saying in a meeting, listen, we now need a very good reason not to do this because not to do it is to sit on this evidence," he says. "We knew it would be a big story, but did we think it would have quite the repercussions and ramifications? No."
He adds: "It became a story about the BBC. That wasn't, I would argue, our doing."
But for now, Fincham's attention is on his new Monday-night comedy slot. Vicious, an old-fashioned sitcom filmed in front of a studio audience, will be followed by another new comedy, The Job Lot, filmed on a single camera in the style of The Office.
Having worked with the likes of Steve Coogan and Sacha Baron Cohen, if anyone can put the smile back on ITV it is surely Fincham. But it will be no easy task. It is not long since one of Fincham's predecessors joked: "The biggest joke about ITV's comedy is there isn't any."
Fincham likes to compare ITV to the National Theatre, situated a stone's throw down the road on London's South Bank. "ITV is not massively different. We are putting on shows on big stages and we want the best talent.
"There is a state of mind – and maybe some time in the past, or maybe you see this outside – that says if you want to fill those seats, don't go for high quality, go for cheap pap. Nonsense. That would be the very worst way for ITV to go. There is a difference between popular and populism."
*Coming soon …*
*Vicious*
Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi play two gay men who have lived together in the same London flat for nearly 50 years, in this resolutely old-fashioned sitcom filmed in front of a studio audience. Former Rising Damp star Frances de la Tour plays their best friend, and Misfits' Iwan Rheon is their new young neighbour. It was created by playwright Mark Ravenhill and Gary Janetti, the US writer/producer whose credits include Family Guy and Will & Grace. Impeccable pedigree, but will it live up to it?
*Breathless*
Not a remake of the Jean-Luc Godard film, but a drama about gynaecologists working in 1960s London on the eve of the arrival of the pill and the legalisation of abortion. Any resemblance to Call the Midwife is presumably intentional. Co-created by one of the originators of BBC1's Casualty, it will star Jack Davenport as a brilliant and charismatic surgeon, and promises a cauldron of "lies, deceptions and guilty secrets, driven by love, ambition and sex". Nurse, the screens!
*The Americans*
A rare foray into the US market, ITV bought the rights to cold war spy thriller The Americans, starring Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as a pair of KGB spies posing as a married couple in Washington DC in 1981. ITV will show the first two series of the drama, which airs in the US on Rupert Murdoch's FX channel. ITV's last big US show, Anna Friel drama Pushing Daisies, was a flop. Five years on, it will be hoping for a Homeland-style hit.
*The Job Lot*
Set in a West Midlands job centre, The Job Lot features Russell Tovey, star of BBC3's Him & Her, and Sarah Hadland from BBC1's Miranda as the boss from hell, whose mission is to turn the "unemployed into the funemployed".
Like The Office, but broader, the single-camera comedy is scripted by three first-time writers and is a gentler, more restrained offering than ITV's other big sitcom hope, Vicious. Produced by the makers of hit BBC2 sitcom Rev.
*The Guilty*
After one drama about the hunt for the murderer of a young boy, here's another. A time-shifted thriller set in 2008 and the present day, The Guilty stars Tamsin Greig as a detective investigating the death of a boy who disappeared at a neighbourhood barbecue and is discovered five years later. Katherine Kelly (Mr Selfridge) and Darren Boyd of Sky1 comedy Spy will co-star in the three-part drama from the team behind BBC1's Sherlock.
*Broadchurch 2*
A sequel to ITV's biggest drama hit since Downton Abbey was inevitable, although it remains to be seen where the murder mystery goes next, now that the murder has been solved and its two biggest stars, David Tennant and Olivia Colman, appear destined to leave the scene. Creator Chris Chibnall said he had the idea for a follow-up before the first series, and will film next year. It will, he promised, tell "another very different story". Reported by guardian.co.uk 34 seconds ago.
There was something out of the ordinary about Broadchurch, the TV murder mystery that kept nearly 10 million viewers guessing until the killer of 11-year-old Danny Latimer was revealed this week. The work almost entirely of a single writer – unusual for an eight-part drama – it featured only one murder (the average episode of Midsomer Murders has four).
Most surprising of all, perhaps, was that Broadchurch was on ITV, not necessarily a channel known to viewers as the home of edgy (or edge-of-your-seat) thrills. At the risk of hyperbole, ITV claims it is the most tweeted-about TV drama ever, with a reported 260,000 tweets from 137,000 people – making it, to use a pre-Twitter phrase, genuine watercooler television.
ITV's director of television, Peter Fincham, who has overseen a creative resurgence since his arrival five years ago, bridles slightly at the suggestion that it was not traditional ITV fare.
"ITV is a mainstream broadcaster, but if there's an implication that mainstream means bland, I would reject that absolutely. If you really want to broaden your audience then going for something that's a bit soggy in the middle won't do. You have got to be bold, go out on a limb, and people will come with you."
There are more surprises to come. On Monday the Broadchurch slot will be filled by two new sitcoms, not a genre you usually associate with ITV. One of them, Vicious, boasts the combined star power of Sir Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi as a bickering couple in what may be the UK's first mainstream gay comedy.
"If it feels like a risk, then good," says Fincham. "It's an enormously warm comedy, with characters who, deep down, love each other, and I hope the audience will.
"When you are doing well – ITV has had a pretty good year on a wide range of fronts – that is the time to up your level of risk, not to pull back. No risk, no reward."
ITV, as he suggests, is on a roll, an upward curve that can be traced back to Downton Abbey, the Julian Fellowes drama that Fincham commissioned during the depths of the advertising slump in 2009, when his channel barely had two pennies to rub together. Back then only the BBC did costume drama and, like Broadchurch, it helped redefine people's perceptions of ITV. It launched in 2010 within a couple of weeks of another ITV show, "structured reality" series The Only Way Is Essex on digital channel ITV2.
"It was an interesting and slightly defining moment," recalls Fincham. "In both cases, it gave each channel probably its noisiest hit in years."
Downton Abbey was followed by the likes of Appropriate Adult, Mr Selfridge, and Fincham's latest commission is a four-part drama, The Great Fire of London, written by ITV News' political editor (and novelist) Tom Bradby. It will tell the story of the 1666 inferno over four consecutive days and from multiple perspectives, from King Charles II to baker Thomas Farriner.
Broadchurch will also return, although it remains to be seen whether its two biggest stars – Olivia Colman and David Tennant – will be back, its writer, Chris Chibnall, is promising a "very different story". "I don't think it's going to start with another body on the beach," is all Fincham will offer.
Fincham would not be at ITV at all were it not for the royal scandal that beset the BBC in 2007, when a badly edited press trailer for a royal documentary appeared to show the Queen storming out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz. Fincham, then the controller of BBC1, carried the can for the so-called "Crowngate" scandal, quitting the corporation after two and a half years and taking charge of its commercial rival a few months later.
When he joined ITV, it was still labouring under the shadow of reality flops such as Celebrity Wrestling and Celebrity Love Island. It was about to get worse as Lehman Brothers collapsed, a global financial crisis unfolded and ITV plunged into the red. Fincham wielded the axe, ditching long-running shows such as The Bill and Taggart.
Radio Times editor Ben Preston says: "There was a time before Peter Fincham got his feet under the table when ITV had slipped out of the repertoire of many people's viewing, but it is forcing its way back on to the menu."
ITV is riding high on Saturday nights with the return of Simon Cowell's Britain's Got Talent, currently lording it over BBC1's The Voice, following in the footsteps of a rejuvenated Saturday Night Takeaway, essentially an updated Noel's House Party fronted by Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly.
Fincham also made a mark with celebrity diving show Splash!, featuring Tom Daley, winning an audience of more than six million viewers despite a sceptical critical reaction. Fincham says the press "looked down their noses at it. I hate television snobbery of any sort."
Former BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessey, now executive chair of independent production company Boom Pictures, attributes ITV's success to "knowing what its audience is and not being afraid to take risks. Splash! was a big, bold commission, and when they work you reap great rewards".
ITV's fortunes are inevitably entwined with those of Cowell. But while Britain's Got Talent is back on form, The X Factor was beaten in the ratings last year by BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing. It remains one of ITV's most popular shows, but suffered in Cowell's absence as he presides over its US incarnation on Fox.
Cowell's latest ITV show, Food Glorious Food, a thinly veiled take on BBC2 hit The Great British Bake Off, in which the winner had their dish turned into a ready meal by Marks & Spencer, came to an end with just 2.4 million viewers last week, a quarter of the audience for Britain's Got Talent.
Will it be back? "I don't know yet," says Fincham. "I so wanted to go to Marks & Spencer to buy the fragrant white chicken korma. It looks absolutely delicious!"
Fincham is more certain that Cowell's two-year deal with ITV, which comes to an end this year, will be renewed. "If we don't enter into a new contract then somebody's cocked it up somewhere. The lawyers have got it wrong."
Also up for renewal is ITV's exclusive deal with Ant and Dec. "I'm not sure there's ever been a better moment in our relationship," he says. "It's a stable, supportive, long-term relationship in which we look after each others' interests."
A millionaire from the sale of the independent production company Talkback (which made I'm Alan Partridge and Da Ali G Show), Fincham has only ever had three jobs. He might by now have had another – as director general of the BBC, had he not been forced out.
He admits, with great reluctance, that he was sounded out for the director general's job last year, when it was given to the ill-fated George Entwistle, who lasted just 54 days in the job.
"I absolutely did not apply or throw my hat into the ring or put myself forward for the director general job, nor have I for any job at the BBC since the day I left in 2007," he says.
"I may have had a strange call at some point from a headhunter type, I can't remember. You never know in this business when you are being sounded out for something or if someone is working their way down a list. I have never seriously been in discussions or in the frame for any job at the BBC since the day I left."
It was ITV's revelations about Jimmy Savile, in its current affairs strand Exposure, that sparked the crisis at the BBC that precipitated Entwistle's departure. Fincham spent several months considering the evidence, watching many interviews several times over. "I can remember saying in a meeting, listen, we now need a very good reason not to do this because not to do it is to sit on this evidence," he says. "We knew it would be a big story, but did we think it would have quite the repercussions and ramifications? No."
He adds: "It became a story about the BBC. That wasn't, I would argue, our doing."
But for now, Fincham's attention is on his new Monday-night comedy slot. Vicious, an old-fashioned sitcom filmed in front of a studio audience, will be followed by another new comedy, The Job Lot, filmed on a single camera in the style of The Office.
Having worked with the likes of Steve Coogan and Sacha Baron Cohen, if anyone can put the smile back on ITV it is surely Fincham. But it will be no easy task. It is not long since one of Fincham's predecessors joked: "The biggest joke about ITV's comedy is there isn't any."
Fincham likes to compare ITV to the National Theatre, situated a stone's throw down the road on London's South Bank. "ITV is not massively different. We are putting on shows on big stages and we want the best talent.
"There is a state of mind – and maybe some time in the past, or maybe you see this outside – that says if you want to fill those seats, don't go for high quality, go for cheap pap. Nonsense. That would be the very worst way for ITV to go. There is a difference between popular and populism."
*Coming soon …*
*Vicious*
Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi play two gay men who have lived together in the same London flat for nearly 50 years, in this resolutely old-fashioned sitcom filmed in front of a studio audience. Former Rising Damp star Frances de la Tour plays their best friend, and Misfits' Iwan Rheon is their new young neighbour. It was created by playwright Mark Ravenhill and Gary Janetti, the US writer/producer whose credits include Family Guy and Will & Grace. Impeccable pedigree, but will it live up to it?
*Breathless*
Not a remake of the Jean-Luc Godard film, but a drama about gynaecologists working in 1960s London on the eve of the arrival of the pill and the legalisation of abortion. Any resemblance to Call the Midwife is presumably intentional. Co-created by one of the originators of BBC1's Casualty, it will star Jack Davenport as a brilliant and charismatic surgeon, and promises a cauldron of "lies, deceptions and guilty secrets, driven by love, ambition and sex". Nurse, the screens!
*The Americans*
A rare foray into the US market, ITV bought the rights to cold war spy thriller The Americans, starring Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as a pair of KGB spies posing as a married couple in Washington DC in 1981. ITV will show the first two series of the drama, which airs in the US on Rupert Murdoch's FX channel. ITV's last big US show, Anna Friel drama Pushing Daisies, was a flop. Five years on, it will be hoping for a Homeland-style hit.
*The Job Lot*
Set in a West Midlands job centre, The Job Lot features Russell Tovey, star of BBC3's Him & Her, and Sarah Hadland from BBC1's Miranda as the boss from hell, whose mission is to turn the "unemployed into the funemployed".
Like The Office, but broader, the single-camera comedy is scripted by three first-time writers and is a gentler, more restrained offering than ITV's other big sitcom hope, Vicious. Produced by the makers of hit BBC2 sitcom Rev.
*The Guilty*
After one drama about the hunt for the murderer of a young boy, here's another. A time-shifted thriller set in 2008 and the present day, The Guilty stars Tamsin Greig as a detective investigating the death of a boy who disappeared at a neighbourhood barbecue and is discovered five years later. Katherine Kelly (Mr Selfridge) and Darren Boyd of Sky1 comedy Spy will co-star in the three-part drama from the team behind BBC1's Sherlock.
*Broadchurch 2*
A sequel to ITV's biggest drama hit since Downton Abbey was inevitable, although it remains to be seen where the murder mystery goes next, now that the murder has been solved and its two biggest stars, David Tennant and Olivia Colman, appear destined to leave the scene. Creator Chris Chibnall said he had the idea for a follow-up before the first series, and will film next year. It will, he promised, tell "another very different story". Reported by guardian.co.uk 34 seconds ago.