ITV1 plans massive drama budget cuts

Published Thursday 27 July 2006 at 16:45 by Liz Thomas

Drama on ITV1 is facing budget cuts of around £20 million over the next year as the network’s latest clampdown on costs begins to take effect.

At the moment the broadcaster spends close to £900,000 a day but in coming months this figure will sink to around £800,000, as part of chief executive Charles Allen and director of television Simon Shaps’ drive to deliver a total of £100 million in savings from across both the schedules and the organisation.

However the network’s director of drama, Nick Elliott, was confident that the reduction in cash flow to £300 million a year would not have an impact on the quality of programming. He said: “It is just a matter of being smarter about what you commission. That’s not a bad thing.”

Elliott added that the move to scale back the more expensive single and two-part dramas would free up money to be spent on high quality productions and pointed to the forthcoming Jane Austen season and the much-awaited return of Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker.

Earlier this year Shaps said that the aim was to substitute high-cost underperforming drama with more commercially viable programming.

As part of the schedule overhaul there will be more glossy high impact drama on ITV1 in a bid to pull a younger, more upmarket audience, as this demographic is important to advertisers.

As The Stage revealed last week, the network is developing a Spooks-style series entitled Whistleblowers and it is also working on a high concept drama which has similarities to Life on Mars.

Entitled Time of your Life, it is still in the early stages of the commissioning process but follows a woman in her thirties who wakes up after being in a coma since she was in her late teens, as she tries to rebuild her life and come to terms what has happened in the years she has missed.

• Meanwhile, ITV chief executive Charles Allen is reported as being close to announcing his retirement from the company, only months after seeing off a takeover bid headed by Greg Dyke. Allen has been chief executive since 2004, when Carlton and Granada merged to create the company. He started at Granada in 1991.