Collected performers’ overseas earnings up by £1m

Published Tuesday 9 August 2005 at 13:10 by Jeremy Austin

Performers earnings from British-made productions broadcast abroad have soared by £1 million in the past 12 months, the British Equity Collecting Society has announced.

The £3 million collected for 2004/5 is an increase of almost 50% on the previous year. In future years the total collected is expected to increase at still greater rate as BECS, a private limited company, negotiates deals with more countries. To date, the funds gathered by the organisation on behalf of performers amount to more than £7 million since income began to accumulate in 2000.

Chief executive of BECS Laurence Oxenbury said: “It makes a considerable difference to performers who work in old feature films because they are getting revenue from the films that they have never received before. We have had to build up a huge database of performers. We have built records of who is in what and who is in each film and each television series.”

BECS was set up by Equity in 1998 and now has a membership in excess of 18,000. Its board consists of members of the union’s ruling council. Money was due to British performers from countries throughout Europe and it was realised a body was needed to be created that could collect and distribute that cash on their behalf.

BECS has for some time operated agreements with Denmark, France, Greece, Norway, Spain and Switzerland to collect and distribute money earned through legal rights that exist there and is seperate from money earned from overseas sales under BBC, ITV and Pact contracts.

Payments are now made for archive radio programmes played on BBC7, to account for people being able to receive BBC1 and 2 in the Republic of Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands and from Performers Rights Revenue from nine European countries. Germany and Italy are among them for the first time.

Performers have to register with BECS to enable the society to accurately collect money on their behalf, although some will have received payments without being members as a more accurate database of cast lists of British productions is established.

Countries expected to yield more income in the immediate future include Belgium, Sweden and Romania, while BECS is currently in dialogue with Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Baltic states and Hungary.