BBC Wolf Hall boss issues dire ‘censorship’ warning over TV future as he makes stance clear on funding crisis
BBC Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky has issued a stark warning about “censorship” in the media amid the “greatest crisis we’ve ever faced in my working lifetime”.
Kosminsky, 68, also revealed that he and actor Mark Rylance took a huge pay cut to make the recent critically acclaimed series, Wolf Hall: Mirror and The Light.
The Bafta winning television writer and director has been celebrating the success of the second series of his Tudor drama, based on the books by the late Booker Prize winning author Hillary Mantel.
The series stars Oscar winning actor Rylance as Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromell, following his rise and fall from power in Tudor England.
Both the first series, released in 2015, and last year’s offering were lauded by critics as premium entertainment.
However, even with such pedigree and award-winning names attached, the 2024 series struggled to find funding.
Kosminsky explained that he worked “completely unpaid” for much of the production and Rylance took a “significant” pay cut to get Wolf Hall: Mirror and the Light made.
To that end, the celebrated director warned of “greatest crisis we’ve ever faced in my working lifetime” in lack of funding for original TV.
“There’s a real danger that we lose the habit of making these kinds of dramas,” he told Deadline.
The 68-year-old explained that Britain has “one of the proudest traditions of television in the world” but was in danger because streams and networks “don’t think it will travel internationally… we’re in a desperate situation”.
Kosminsky added: “I don’t think that streamers have set out to crush trouble-making drama. This destruction of a time-honoured strand of our British programming is an unintended consequence of their of financial model.”
As a result, the director believed the lack of funding was creating an environment of “silent, insidious self-censorship” in the British film and TV industry.
He argued that could mean important shows like ITV’s Horizon Scandal hit Mr Bates vs The Post Office and the BBC’s Three Girls, which shone a light on the grooming gangs scandals respectively, would not be made.
“It’s not because projects will pile up in limbo without enough money to complete their funding, but because more won’t even get to that point.
“Producers, directors, and writers won’t bother trying to submit them because they know there’s no chance of making them,” he continued.
Outside of Wolf Hall, Kosminksy has faced the reality of the funding crisis first hand in his attempts to get three-part dramatization of the Grenfell Tower disaster made.
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For the last two years, he has been lobbying the BBC to greenlight the project, which they have repeatedly clarified their commitment to.
“It will be a complicated drama involving special effects and visual effects and probably quite a large cast,” the director reflected grimly about the state of the project.
“It’s not unreasonable to ask: how’s this going to get made? Currently, we’re voyaging hopefully,” he said.