Kevin Lygo from ITV speaking at VLV Spring Conference 2024

Hello, how are you? I'm very good, thank you. It's been quite the start of the year. Yes, it has. Yes. No, we've had a very strong start, I think primarily with drama. And I mean, if I just launch straight into Mr Bates, which I hope most of you have watched. It would be good to say I knew it was going to be that big a hit, but I didn't. And we were very keen to make it. ITV has a long tradition of making true stories into entertaining and accessible drama, as you all know. So I was very happy to do it. It was commissioned, of course, remember dramas are commissioned approximately two years before they appear on air, so it's quite a while ago now. And it was brought in by some producers that we work with, a very well-known writer, Gwyneth Hughes, and they... I think like a lot of the public, you knew of the story, you didn't know the whole story. In fact, you didn't realize how awful it all was. And when they pitched the show to myself and Polly Hill, head of drama, it was a very easy quick yes, let's just do it. So two years later, the four hours kind of turn up on your desk and you're thrilled as you see it. So that's why I decided to put it January 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of this year, to start the year with something good and quality and all the rest of it. And it worked. It points to a number of interesting things, I think particularly for this group. One is a quintessentially British story made for and by a British commercial PSB. Surprisingly, I suspect we've lost money on it. It cost more to make than we have been able to sell it around the world and fund from our own normal broadcasting levels. So it leads me on to what happened after it had gone out. There is no doubt that the challenge for all of us now in mainstream television is getting enough audiences to turn up on the night to watch anything you want them to. It's really, really difficult. So just five or six years ago, you would have expected a drama like this on BBC1 or ITV to get six, seven million viewers, maybe more if it was really gripping or had some big stars in it. Now four on an overnight is about as good as you get for a new show. This is a challenge for us commercially, of course, because that's a lot fewer eyeballs than we would normally expect. But the plus side is that with the launch of ITVX just about 18 months ago now, it is definitely easier for people to catch up, hear about it, find it, watch it at their leisure on whatever device they would like to. So what happened with Mr Bates was, as I said, about 4 million, which was a good figure but not stunning. And then it just snowballed and everybody started talking about it and the newspapers writing and everyone is outraged. And look, it was a very well-made drama, that's got to be part of the mix. And it was a story simply, unflashily told with a very good cast of British actors without necessarily a great big star in the center. And what then happened was within about a month, 10 million other people had watched it on ITVX. And one of the harsh realities of studying what audiences do on a streaming service like ITVX is you know exactly how many people watched it, when they dropped off, how many watched from episode one to episode four. And this is called a completion rate, which was new to me when we started but now I'm very familiar with it. And I have to say with Mr Bates, it was incredibly high. Something like 95% of people who watched episode one within a day or two had watched episode four. So that was a great sign. Perhaps more importantly for ITVX was that half of those people, some 5 million of them, had never used ITVX before. So we pulled in a whole cast of new people, some 5 million of them, who didn't really know what ITVX was, hadn't gone there, didn't know where it was. Lots of queries on the viewers inquiries: what's this, how do I get this ITVX thing? Very simply, I'm pleased to say, they found it, they used it. And for us, not only is that a new group of people coming to X, but when they're there, it's a good service, it's easy to use, it works well hopefully in your homes. And they saw other things that they had a chance, rather annoyingly, to see over the last few years other dramas we've made, but they saw them for the first time because these were people who don't come to ITV very much. And they saw other dramas and they then sampled that. So it was a kind of glorious win for us in all these different ways. And we were then inundated. My inbox was full of people saying, 'Oh, I've got a miscarriage of justice.' I mainly, and I'm not joking, half of them were about potholes. So it was right, potholes. Okay, well if somebody can come up with a good story about potholes, we'll clean up. But the one that we had been thinking about that has been around for a while, of course, was the contaminated blood scandal. And that's a very serious issue and an extraordinary story, but a difficult story to capture. And so we thought, well gosh, there really is an audience for these things if you get it right. Maybe we should have a go at this. We then heard, you know, with spies that the BBC were doing it, so we thought well maybe leave it alone. And then we got a call from a well-known writer called Peter Moffatt, and he said, 'Look, are you interested in the blood scandal thing?' And we said yes, but I think the BBC are doing it. He said, 'No, no, no, I've just finished writing eight hours for Netflix.' And we said, 'Oh well, we're definitely not going to do it then, are we?' And he said, 'No, they just pulled the plug.' Because I think on the ground it was a bit parochial. So we thought, hello, so in we charge. And we're just trying to get it together now, but we have absolutely every intention of making it, because it's already written, although we need to change it a bit, for transmission next year. But I think what it illustrates is what I missed the first half of Caroline's talk, but I suspect this terribly important factor in what public service broadcasting is, which is British-made content for British audiences. And this is a British story, although it has tentacles into America where a lot of blood came from. And that for a streamer, and I'm not even criticizing them, they can see internationally perhaps not of interest to them, and they developed it, good on them, but they're not going to proceed. We would proceed, the BBC I'm sure would proceed. So I think it's just quite heartening that domestic stories, if you like, can find an audience. You can see the difficulty. It's not a difficulty for the BBC because they're loaded with money. The difficulty for us is, you know, Mr Bates has made a loss of something like a million pounds, and we can't continually do this. Of course some things are very profitable on the channel and some things aren't, but it's a challenge to be able to fund some of the things that aren't obviously of international appeal. I mean, we're hoping with Mr Bates because it caused such a furore here that maybe sales will pick up, but there's no evidence of it yet. If you're in Lithuania, four hours on the British post office, not really, thank you very much. So you can see the challenges here. What have I just been blathering on about?

I think it's just more accessible, more entertaining. You've got an hour an episode, it draws you in with all the drama tropes that we used to do this. So I think telling a story in a dramatic way with a bit of creative license and all the rest of it, it's not surprising that engages more than... I mean, the BBC I'm sure had done a documentary about that, I think we had certainly there been news reports all over the place. So I just think a drama can draw different people in and obviously just be more emotional about how you respond to it. And I'm sure most people have watched Mr Bates, but I think we have a clip that we can play showing some of its impact. It is really extraordinary the impact it had. The government acting immediately in a way that they totally failed to do for years. Yeah, they haven't paid people. And that's what... You know, we were going to obviously have a big do and have a celebratory dinner with Alan Bates and so forth, and he was the one who said, he's quite a tough guy, he said, 'I don't want a celebration till we get paid.' And quite right. And when is that going to happen? It seems to be interminable. But no, look, it's obviously had a really good positive effect. You know, Alan's always a bit, 'I'm not sure about the drama,' you know, whatever. And we had a screening for all the people that were involved, and at the end he was like, everyone was crying and clapping and all this, and he was like, 'Yeah, I get it now, I see what you're doing.' He said, 'My house doesn't look anything like that,' because it was the most dreamy cottage. No, I know, but that's directors for you.

Yes, no, I thought it was good and I thought it was emotional and it was sort of just really, really quite simply but well told. And so you just have hope. But these days it is harder and harder to guess in advance now what something is going to do and whether people will turn up at all and all the rest of it, because as was pointed out earlier, there is so much choice and competition now in your homes every night. And although I heard the professor say, 'But is the quality there? Everything that's ever been made you can watch now,' and there is some wonderful stuff out there, it's quite hard to find. But the competition, none of us have ever seen anything like this. And that's the real pressure on the production community, on commercial broadcasters, in getting sufficient audiences and the right audiences for various commercial partners to want to get at. That is the reason we're all a bit tense and nervous these days, but the BBC included.

Yes, I do actually. One, it becomes, you know, there's both a sort of corporate part of ITV and then there are a number of individuals that work in commissioning or producing or whatever who have bugbears or special interests or whatever it is. And it's still, I think, rather good that this personal curation amongst responsible, talented people can have an influence. So yeah, I think if you look at our current affairs documentaries over the last few years, you know, we do scoop up most of the awards. I think we are able, or I certainly feel a freedom, to go for things whether it's exposing what's happening amongst the Uyghurs in China or the Russian doc that we did recently. Whereas maybe the BBC find this harder now, I don't know, but we do seem to be, I'm delighted to say, the leader in this sort of old-fashioned but finding stories of wrongdoing, corruption, and everything around the world and in the UK. So yeah, I think we'll continue to do it. And in all the ways, I think in the old-fashioned categorization of genres which I heard mentioned before, it's still valid in a way, it's a shorthand. But if you take something like religion, you know, what doesn't work today is a sort of live from St Thomas's Church in Didsbury Wells. Those things we couldn't really do. But we can do a program on the end of Ramadan or the Hajj, and these are very, very impactful for specific audiences. So the response you get from the British Muslim community, for example, for these programs is extraordinary and overwhelming. And how in Eid, the festival you have at the end of Ramadan with Iftar, families would come together, they would eat and celebrate, and then they'd all watch our TV show at 10:30. It was extraordinary, it was lovely to hear from a lot of British Muslims. So I think we still, you know, as I said, I was trained at the BBC, there is this feeling of we've got to keep these public service values, but we have to update how we put them. So I think ITV has been very good about raising issues in Coronation Street or something where you have a large audience that would never watch a documentary about a certain issue, but you weave it subtly and carefully into popular storylines, and it works. As well as we can do campaigns and everything. I always feel they can be a bit heavy-handed, but they do have an effect. Our Britain Get Talking campaign has had an enormous effect and been seen by 42 billion people or something. So I just think we have to keep going with all these things and not sort of have wall-to-wall game shows or whatever it is. So religious content, arts content, science content will continue to be part of what ITV does. There is concern that a lot of that will get edged off. It's the old-fashioned stuff we grew up on. Always people quote Kenneth Clark, Civilization. And I did some digging on that. When it went out on BBC2, you know, 400 years ago, it didn't rate at all back then when there were only three channels. And in Japan when it was sold to Japan, they retitled it 'Some Aspects of Western Culture', which I thought was brilliant. But we grew up on this stuff, and John Julius Norwich in Turkey and things like this. I love them as a child and as a young adult, but there just isn't the audience really for that so much anymore. When I took over Channel 4, I went to pay homage to the great Jeremy Isaacs, and we were chatting, and he was saying, 'Oh, I know you've got to do these game shows and things, but couldn't we just have a Brahms quartet in the afternoon?' And I said, 'I think I'll send one round to your house, Jeremy, that's probably better.' So we do miss some of these things that we grew up with, but honestly the audience just isn't there, certainly in a way that makes sense for a commercial broadcaster. So we need to keep going but present it in a way that's a bit like hiding the pill in the dog food for your dog. You've got to not be didactic and hit people over the head with it, you've got to smuggle it in. And so the responsibility is on us as individuals to maintain that sort of desire and commitment to doing some good.

It's very important. We've been influential in constructing it and so forth. And for us, there are important things like listed events, prominence on these new platforms, which is vital for us to be in a good place. Because you know, it used to be that there was some bloke up an aerial with a spanner and he just tweaked it and then the entire country got all programs. Now you have to do so many different deals, so many different technological changes if you want to be on Samsung or Apple or an Amazon Fire Stick or whatever it is. So the complexities now of delivery of our programs is much more complicated and costly than it ever was. And the cost of DTT is enormous, as we all know, as audiences go down on DTT. But we're still committed to it all. So it's just another kind of handcuff on us commercially to make all the programs that we would like to make. I mean, make no mistake, absolutely everybody at ITV is united in thinking what we want to do is have as much money as possible to spend on programming. And it's more expensive to make, more expensive to deliver, and advertising is going down somewhat, although we're having a bit of a flurry this year. So these are the challenges ahead of us, but we've got to have hope. And it's not terrible yet.

Yes, it's look, it's a very complicated thing. And the kind of the pole around which we all dance is the BBC. And so it's very important that the BBC is properly funded, independently sits there and all the rest. They drive you mad, of course, the BBC, but that's what they do. But for us and for Channel 4, I think we need all the help we can get. The advertising minage thing is an interesting step into that. Some of the restrictions seem a bit old-fashioned to us. But I think everybody is willing us to survive. And things like Mr Bates really help. And we made a drama following up after that called Breathtaking, which was about COVID and the National Health. It was a three-part drama stripped across the week, written by a doctor who was involved in it, based on her book, and with Jed Mercurio, who is a very experienced, established thriller writer. The two of them came together and it was kind of crash, bang, wallop and really emotional and rather brilliant. I was nervous about that because I thought, would I want to watch something that's all mask acting and all that? But it was such a compelling treatment and story, and we thought yes, let's do it. Again, I'm sure it hasn't made money anywhere, but it was another example of something that I just don't think anybody but a public service broadcaster would do. So we were very pleased to have it.

I think we've also got a clip we can show of that. Oh, Breathtaking. It was going, 'We will make sure the NHS gets all the support it needs. Morning, just had a call from L. Might be the first one. I'm not going to make it home this weekend. Sorry, it's just madness. There's currently no PPE at all. They were overwhelmed. The virus is always going to be ahead. Trust the guidelines. This is insane. Where's the defense? The public can be assured that we have a clear plan. There is no plan. Members of our team are wearing bin bags and going home. If they're going to die in the night, don't go there. We're already there. You know this thing is spreading. They just keep coming. But no one is giving up. Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.' Breathtaking on ITV1 and ITVX. 'Public can be assured we have a clear plan.'

No, definitely. And was it too soon? Is the timing right? All the rest of it. But it's a joy, I think, of... it wasn't a sort of 10-part series where you thought, 'Oh my word, is this going to work?' And the team, you know, people often think it's all about the idea. The idea is the first step in any good show, whether it's an entertainment show or a drama or something. I am equally influenced by who is the team making this, because there are lots of ideas and they can be wonderful programs or terrible programs, whether it's a good or a bad idea. Honestly, it's like novels. Quite often bad novels make very good TV or films, and really great novels don't, because they are different things. Television wants plot as much as anything. And so the team, as I mentioned, the team behind it were... we've worked with a lot. It's the same... Jed Mercurio writes Trigger Point, which is 100 miles from Breathtaking, but actually in years to come, they'll be writing essays about what people have done, and they look at Jed and they'll see the similarities in the technique of telling these stories, because you have to hold people. We're all the same. If you're not grabbed in the first 10, 15 minutes, there's so much else on, you're just going to leave. It's one of the great problems with comedy now. Comedy, you know, I spent half my life working in comedy, and people were much more inclined to give it a chance. And now if you don't laugh in the first two minutes, you go, 'Oh, stuff this, I'm not watching it.' And it's so difficult now for any channel to get a decent size audience to comedies, to give it a chance. I remember, you know, that old... I was at the BBC when Only Fools and Horses appeared, and I can remember the first series, the review in... I can't remember what paper... 'Only a fool or a horse would watch this.' And so I think this is the challenge. We have to up our game in how we tell these stories, whether they're true or funny or just dramatic or whatever it is. But that's on us to keep drawing people in and entertaining them and grabbing them when.

We did, we did it launch. We tried, we threw everything at the wall launch to see. Because this, although it may not appear, it is quite a different thing to schedule if you like a streaming service like ITVX or the player. And we've discovered many things in the way we did. So we tried everything from a period of exclusivity with a big show and publicising it and having it only on ITVX. We then had, we would put it on ITVX for a few months and then put it on the main channel and see what happened. And we did all of this. And what I think we've arrived at is, it may seem obvious and I should probably be sacked for not realising it earlier, but we've got the biggest marketing platform in the country. The way to get – if you take the view that what really matters is getting as many people as possible to your show – you put it on the channel and make it all available on ITVX that day. There is no doubt that's how you get it. There is now beginning to be a different set of people watching streamers – including the iPlayer and ITVX – as opposed to linear television. The hope is you get a bigger group of people at the end of the day to watch every one of your shows, because it is a slightly separate group. It's not necessarily younger or ABC1-ish or anything – some people like plonking themselves down saying 'what's on the telly', others are more proactive and think 'right, I'm ready for something, let me see what I can find on the streamers'. ITVX has to lodge itself into people's psyche so that when you're deciding what to watch tonight, you give ITVX a really good chance. Part of that is not only what we put on and the way we market it, but the prominence issue on Samsung tellies, so that if you've got Netflix, Amazon and Apple, you've got ITVX there as well and the iPlayer. That's really important, because they can put you on page 42 and you won't get many viewers if that happens.

There's freedom to commission things that you wouldn't... we thought it was, but you learn the real power and restrictions of your brand. There's a curious thing that happens. We commissioned a drama called 'Cleaning Up' with Sheridan Smith some years ago, five years ago maybe, and it did well on the channel. We had a catch-up service, ITV Hub, which was a bit crap and not many people watched, but it did well on linear television. It cropped up on Netflix last week – number two show on Netflix – and nobody knows it's ITV. That sticks in your throat. The other day my daughter came down to me – she'd been disappeared all day – I said 'What have you been doing?' 'Watching telly.' 'Good, that's great.' Must be one of the few parents saying that. She's 20, not a child. She said 'I found this brilliant bloke, you've got to watch him, get him on ITV, he'd be great, exactly what ITV should have, because you're a bit old fuddy-duddy, Dad.' I said 'Oh great, who's that?' 'It's this bloke called Louis Theroux.' I was like, okay. So the point is people discover things on channels. You can badge it. If Netflix presents you something, people go 'Isn't it marvellous?' I suspect if we'd shown 'Bridgerton', it wouldn't have done that well for us, because it's a much younger skewing audience and not what you'd expect from ITV. We can't just give people 'Midsomer Murders' every night, but if you stray too far, you're pushing at the boundaries of what people expect from you. We also have a tape to play of ITVX's highlights – the UK's freshest streaming service. Feels like quite a downbeat boast, but the trajectory of ITVX has been really good. It's worked. I wish we'd done it earlier. It's a wonderful thing and has brought new people to us. You can't underestimate the amount of work in launching it; we got it within a year of deciding. The technology behind getting it to work is beyond me, but there are hundreds of engineers coding to make it seamless. The extra investment in programming was a big move for ITV – it came off our profit, which the city never liked. But it's going to be the future. One day there won't be channels; you'll turn on your telly and see a range of apps. The EPG might be years away, but I think it'll last longer than everyone thinks. Digital channels didn't kill terrestrial. There's a lot of life in the old dog yet. It's such an easier and user-friendly way to watch what you want, on any device, with or without ads. It's an absolute cornerstone of ITV's output and definitely growing the future. It's growing exponentially every year. Advertisers can be more targeted; it's a very efficient way of getting your programmes to people.

Yeah, I think. Actually Times Radio was doing a segment this morning asking 'Is the era of the all-powerful newsreader over?' I saw that. No, surely not. I bet they don't think they're all-powerful. What was the question?

Well, in the first instance we're trying to find every penny that we can not on screen. We've got to turn over every stone in the office to make cuts there, to re-examine what we should do, what we don't have to do, how we can change things, what technology can do to help us, can AI – all this fear of AI but can it help us make programmes more efficiently and cheaper? We're working through it, it'll be an endless process. But trust me when I say the last thing we want to do is remove any spend on the programme output, because without that we have nothing. So we have to protect that at all costs. But yes, it's difficult, and budgets will go down over time, as they are everywhere. You hear the BBC bleating about it, and yet they have all the money in the world. Why do they buy all that American stuff? I have a go at many BBC people about this. They just bought 'Suits' – the thing with Meghan Markle – why did they outbid us? What's that got to do with licence fee money? That's their business.

Oh my god. Something that entertains you? For us it's pure entertainment in an old-fashioned shiny floor sense that ITV has excelled at from time immemorial. Today it's Britain's Got Talent, The Masked Singer, Ant and Dec. Reality television is definitely entertainment – I'm a Celebrity, Love Island, we've got a new one called Fortune Hotel. Audiences love it. It's important to continue investing in and trying new shows. A big part of ITV is maintaining existing hits – Coronation Street, I'm a Celebrity in its 20th year. It's very hard to get new shows to those audience levels, so keeping them alive and edging them on each year is unrecognised work. In dramas, 'Redeye' is an entertaining drama – not terribly profound, but it started strongly. It went out on Sunday night and by Monday midday 250,000 people had watched all six episodes. That shows it's working. Everything needs to be entertaining, otherwise people won't come or stay. At a dinner party you need to be entertaining or they'll walk off. Every show should be engaging so that someone watches and then wants to tell their friends about it – that's scoring.

Look, in the end, some people just follow the money. A lot of people don't. My experience with writers is they want to write the story they want to write. If we can be the environment where they can do that with help but not interference, being speedy – British writers understand what BBC or ITV is. When they pitch in America, it's completely different, quite fun but meaningless. I haven't noticed a resistance to working for us, though our rates are stretched and out of kilter. One difficulty is streamers – like the old studio system – they can tie people up for two years, taking them out of the game. That's not great for us. The BBC never did that. We have to watch it. But in the end, you have to make yourself attractive to someone who wants to make something good. The more famous or talented they are, the harder it gets. Phoebe Waller-Bridge – wonderful time, given a massive cheque – goes off to Hollywood. But she'll be back. We have to work harder at courting them and creating an environment where they can express themselves. They don't want to be totally left alone, indulgence leads to crap. There has to be a tension between broadcaster and producer or writer.

There's a binary correlation between size of audience and cost of programme. The challenge is production is more expensive than ever, gone up exponentially since COVID. The streamers pay crazy prices and have led to inflation. Tax breaks made everything more expensive for the broadcaster – good for the producer, but it's more expensive for me. 10 years ago BBC and ITV fully funded dramas at a million, a million and a half per hour. Now the cheapest drama is two and a half million per hour. Broadcasters put in about a million, so the producer has to find another one and a half to two million to get it made. That pressure falls on sales organisations like BBC Worldwide or ITV Studios. It gets harder. You have to watch that you don't lean too far into getting more money from America and stray from the original intention. The economics are really tough, it's a long game, you need deep pockets. Showbiz has always been a risk, more so now. For the first time, I'm coming across dramas we'd like to make that can't get the funding – that didn't happen five years ago. And Netflix spends $10 million an episode on The Crown; you can't compete with that.

No, no, I always say... ITV3 is a wonderful service using our own library in repeat terms of dramas, does really well, services a much older crowd. It's the largest digital channel in the country. ITV2 has a distinctive feel, sold only on 16–34s. ITV3 is for house persons, ITV4 is mainly for men – sport, fishing. They're run very effectively and cost-effectively. Their budgets are low compared to the main channel, but you can put more niche programming targeted at specific audiences. Love Island wouldn't have happened without ITV2. The combination of channel and streaming service is the best way to get audiences. They still have a proper function, they're commercial, they all make a profit. But they are more targeted and niche, and increasingly under threat from streaming services.

Oh heavens. Right, I shall support that, yes. I'll endeavour to change that as far as we can. You'll be pleased to know Simon Cowell rang me up yesterday to complain about the sound quality on BGT. I thought, oh thank you. It is a complaint that comes out, but it's inconsistent. I agree – on some programmes I think 'can't they pipe the music down?' It's a continuous process, you're right to raise it, we will assess it. I'm glad the audio description is better. I think we've got to wrap up soon, but does anyone have a burning question? Yes, the lady there in green.

I'd say it's a good point. 90% of what we do is originated material from British writers in drama, and comedy is all new. We're a mainstream broadcaster making money from big audiences. I wouldn't say we just go for the big stories. Anything new and original is a risk – some fail, some don't – but we have a commitment. A small percentage is based on existing IP or books. True stories and true crime we do, but it's not a substantial part of the drama output. If we spend £100 million on drama, probably less than £10 million is on true stories. But we also have to follow success – some of it isn't obvious. We did a drama about Hillsborough last year, honestly really good, nobody turned up. The Post Office – retrospectively it did well, but it could have not. There's still risk. An original British writer made sense of that story. For riskier subject matter or new experimental ways, you need to look to BBC Two or Channel 4. That's hard for us because it's unlikely to attract a large-scale audience.

What do you want me to say? It is odd – 11 warnings or whatever to GB News, but then nothing. What's the point of a warning? I quite like a warning. I don't know. It's difficult for Ofcom, they've got themselves in a bit of a pickle over these things. They need clear thinking, take stock and make a decision.