Speed Is Saving Creativity. And Killing Television.
We keep telling ourselves that British television is still the best in the world. It is a comforting belief, repeated so often it has become a kind of industry lullaby. Yet if the programmes are as good as we say they are, why are fewer people watching them? Why are younger audiences drifting away in silence? Why does commercial money keep slipping towards platforms that barely existed a decade ago and if our work is as exceptional as we insist, why is the market responding as if it isn’t?
The answer, I believe, is speed, or rather the complete absence of it. I actually think that TV does produce the best content but annoyingly, even when our industry does produce something that genuinely cuts through, something that actually connects, we seem incapable of capitalising on the moment. Channel teams move so slowly that any heat a show generates evaporates before anyone has a chance to act. A programme finally catches fire and, instead of throwing oxygen at it, we stare at the flames, hold another meeting, discuss next year’s budget and then wonder why it has already gone out.
Television needs a reality check. We live in a world built on immediate gratification, where audiences expect a constant flow of content and where creators outside of our traditional structures deliver exactly that. Digital responds to appetite in real time. A show lands on YouTube on a Tuesday and by Wednesday morning the team are already building the next instalment because the metrics demand it. Television, by contrast, behaves like coaxing an ageing lawnmower to life. You pull the cord, hear the sputter, feel that brief spasm of triumph and then watch as it coughs itself back into silence because you did not move fast enough. The commissioning system has become a machine incapable of holding momentum, even when it finally connects with the audience it claims to serve.
LESS & MORE
Budgets are not going to grow. Given how the industry is structured, they may never return to the levels people still nostalgically cite. So if we cannot buy speed with more money, we have to create speed with method. That means doing less of the wasteful reinvention that plagues every returning show and far more of the work that preserves momentum.
There is a persistent belief inside broadcasters that a recommission must begin again from the start, as if every returning series needs the same delicate courtship as a brand new idea. It doesn’t. Once a programme has landed, you already have the creative blueprint, the muscle memory, the working edit pipeline and, crucially, a team who understand the show instinctively in a way no deck or onboarding document can replicate.
This is where slowness becomes genuinely destructive. Anyone who has worked in production knows the weary struggle of keeping a team together between jobs. Freelancers scatter to the four winds because they have mortgages to pay. In this new world of falling budgets, the freelance model is collapsing because there is no certainty at all. Ask any freelancer. It is brutal out there. And it harms small indies most. You cannot build a functioning company culture when every recommission arrives too late for the people who actually made the show to still be available. The speed of a recommission is not just a creative issue. It is the difference between stability and chaos for the entire workforce.
So how do you fix it? Recommissions need to happen far earlier than they currently do - sometimes before the show has even gone out. I think if a channel sees something it genuinely believes in, something it knows it wants more of, it should hit go immediately. Not after the ratings report. Not after a Q4 budget review. Trust your instinct while it is still warm because if you wait too long, the team will have dispersed, the opportunity will have cooled and the chemistry that made the first series work will take more time and more money to recreate. A recommission that turns up six months late is not a recommission. It is a restart. And restarts cost more, take longer and lose the energy that made the idea work in the first place.
Speed is not about producing more episodes for the sake of it. It is about removing friction. It is about keeping hold of the people, the instinct, the rhythm and the creative heartbeat that already exist. When something works, the fastest thing you can do is carry on while the idea is still alive in the hands of the people who shaped it.
WHY DIGITAL ALWAYS WINS
Digital has absorbed something television has never properly understood. Speed is not a tactic. Speed is a philosophy. It determines how ideas are chosen, how teams operate and how audiences behave. It recognises that momentum is not a luxury in the modern attention economy. Momentum is survival. When digital creators find a spark, they fuel it immediately. They do not debate tone for months or wait for next year’s budget cycle. They move, they publish, they iterate. They stay in the conversation while people are still listening.
Spend a week watching a successful YouTube creator and you will see a model of content-making television once understood but let slip away. They shoot what they can shoot, edit what they can edit and refine the next piece while the previous one is still warming the algorithm. They are not reckless. They are responsive. Their work improves because they are constantly in motion, constantly learning, constantly adjusting in real time. Television has spent years convincing itself that slowness equals quality, when in reality all it produces is distance. Distance from the cultural moment. Distance from the audience. Distance from the spark that made the idea compelling in the first place.
THE ECONOMICS OF SPEED
And here is the part broadcasters should care about most. Speed saves money. Slowness costs it. When broadcasters delay a recommission, the team disperses and rebuilding from scratch costs significantly more. When a returning series is treated as if it is a brand new commission, you repeat work that has already been paid for. When technical sign-off drags on for weeks, you pay for idle edits, extended suites, extended staff, extended everything. Budgets are not fixed laws of nature. They are shaped and inflated by the glacial systems that manage them.
For production companies, slowness is not an inconvenience. It is existential. You cannot retain good editors when the gap between series is at least half a year on a good day. You cannot build a permanent team when no one knows if or when a recommission will appear. You cannot run a sustainable company when your financial life depends on decisions that arrive months too late for your workforce. A recommission delivered at pace stabilises companies, protects jobs, creates continuity and lowers cost. Slowness does the opposite.
THE SLOWEST PART OF ALL: DELIVERY
But perhaps the most damaging slowness sits in the part viewers never see. Delivery. Even when a show is cut quickly, even when the team have captured something alive, the entire process is dragged into the mud by technical compliance. This isn’t about safety or duty of care. This is about a sprawling architecture of legacy requirements that add cost, delay and friction at exactly the moment the programme should be finding its audience.
YouTube can ingest a 4K file within minutes. It runs automated checks, processes it, flags issues almost immediately and makes it available while the idea is still warm. It does so because the system is designed for speed. It prioritises access over internal comfort. It assumes momentum is normal.
Television does the opposite. A finished show can sit for days because of a technical review process designed for an era when broadcast infrastructure genuinely demanded caution. Viewers at home now watch on equipment far more capable than the systems the broadcasters themselves are using, yet the industry continues to enforce specifications that cost thousands per episode but deliver no meaningful improvement to the viewer. Audiences cannot tell the difference between a £15,000 post pipeline and a £2,000 one. They care about the story. They care about the tone. They care about the energy. They do not care about whether the file meets engineering standards that have not been updated in a decade or what file ‘wrapper’ you’re delivering a show in.
Despite what the boffins will tell you technical drag does not protect quality. It slows everything down. It makes the work way more expensive than it needs to be. It delays transmission. It stops teams moving on to the next project. In a world where budgets are shrinking and where production companies are under extreme pressure, this is waste we can no longer afford. If I was in charge of a channel now, this is one area that I would instantly look at. As an Industry, we need to be less afraid of ripping up the rule book and making sure we can compete with the new content players.
THE CULTURE THAT MUST CHANGE
Ultimately, all this slowness comes from a belief that caution is safer than speed. That taking time reduces risk. That programmes improve with endless polishing. They don’t. Fortune really does favour the brave and the new digital entrants have shown that. Programmes improve when the team who made them are still in the room the second time round. Programmes improve when they arrive close to the moment they were made. Programmes improve when barriers are removed, not added.
Television continues to behave as though time is neutral. It isn’t. Time eats energy. It eats certainty. It eats budgets, trust and it eats audiences, because in an attention economy the only people who stay relevant are the people who keep turning up.
THE WAY FORWARD
If television wants to survive, it needs to build systems that move at the speed the world now lives at. That means less reinvention and more continuity. Fewer layers of approval and more instinct. Faster recommissions. Tighter delivery pipelines. Honest examination of which parts of compliance matter and which are simply historical artefacts. It means treating audiences not as patient spectators but as people with infinite choice who will not wait for us.
Speed is not a threat. It is the only competitive advantage the industry has left. And if we build around it, if we design our workflows to support it, if we protect the teams who thrive on it, there is a future in which British television is not just surviving but leading. But if we continue at the pace we are moving now, the audience will keep drifting, the talent will keep leaving and the medium will keep shrinking.
Television is not dying because people no longer care. It is dying because it is standing still and in a world moving this fast, standing still is just another way of disappearing.