The NTAs are a stark reminder that the streaming revolution hasn’t happened to most of Britain
In July, Ofcom apparently sounded the death knell for broadcast television with a Media Nations report that spoke sadly of ‘long-term decline’. We the people are fleeing old-school terrestrial television, the regulator insisted. So, what are we to make of this year’s National Television Award winners?
The NTAs are unlike other awards in that they’re voted for by the general public. It’s a litmus test of the nation’s most beloved.
And, guess what, the winners were, with a single exception, terrestrial TV shows.
Mr Bates vs the Post Office won three NTAs. Kate Garraway’s moving Derek’s Story won Best Authored Documentary.
There were gongs to Emmerdale and Coronation Street, an award for David Attenborough and recognition for Saturday night entertainers Ant & Dec…
Indeed if you look back 20 years to the NTAs in 2004, Corrie and Ant & Dec won the same awards. Your average viewer has not, after all, budged one iota in what they really, really like.
Going further back you could pretty much swap in shows from 1982’s Broadcasting Press Guild Awards – Terry Wogan’s cheerful gags match Davina McCall’s sly nods, Toby Jones playing real-life hero Mr Bates even looks a little like Robert Hardy playing real-life hero Churchill in his Wilderness Years and Netflix’s one win – Bridgerton – is a fantasy period drama that’s as accurate as ITV’s Brideshead Revisited.
You’d think from the acres of column inches granted Succession, Slow Horses and the rest of the streamer critical hits that they’d be sitting fair and square in the centre of this most democratic of awards nights – but these two programmes themselves weren’t even nominated in their respective years (a process also done by public vote).
The truth is the British people are more eternal and unchanging than the media currently argue. We like cheeky entertainment presenters like Ant & Dec who took over from Michael Barrymore (he won the NTA entertainment presenter gong from the award’s inception in 1995 to the end of his career in 2001 after the death of Stuart Lubbock in his pool). Barrymore, of course, was like an overexcited Bruce Forsyth – and so the pattern repeats and repeats.
We like pugnacious middle-aged men standing up against the system. We like funny middle-aged women, even if they’re men dressed up. We like period drama in whatever form it’s fashionable these days. And we don’t get much of that on the streamers at the moment.
It’s also clear that the old fashioned habit of simply turning on the TV and seeing what is on – rather than going to the bother of searching through a streamer’s menu – is alive and well: many of the NTA winners were primetime shows.
And Ofcom’s media nation’s report for 2024 actually found that only 14% of our viewing went to what the industry snappily calls subscription video-on-demand or SVoD services – services we call Netflix, Amazon and Disney +. While Ofcom estimates from shortly before then found that of the whopping 28 hours plus a week watched by your average Briton, over 18 hours were still terrestrial viewing.
This isn’t to say there is no change underway. Ofcom’s figures show, in theory, that the young are drifting away – less than half of 16-24s tuned in to broadcast TV in 2023. But Ofcom points out they’re preferring YouTube and TikTok. Anyone with kids today who was alive in 1982 will know that YouTube and social media time is actually replacing magazines. I’d be upstairs spending valuable time with Smash Hits and the NME as well as probably a good 40 minutes spent swapping out 7-inch singles on my record player.
And if they can’t get the votes yet, it’s worth noting that the streamers are desperate to get in on the areas currently occupied by terrestrial.
Here’s a pop quiz – which of the following new shows are ITV commissions and which are going to be on Netflix?
Holly Willoughby presenting reality show Bear Hunt with Bear Grylls; Toxic Town with Broadchurch’s Jodie Whittaker as a mother in a David and Goliath fight for justice alongside Cracker’s Robert Carlyle; The Choice, with Suranne Jones, ex-Coronation Street, as a prime minister whose husband is kidnapped, and Banned Camp, where celebrities complete challenges in an isolated holiday camp, just like I’m a Celebrity?
It’s a trick question of course. All the shows are coming to Netflix. Were they on terrestrial TV you’d think they could well be in line for an NTA some time soon.
As George Orwell once nearly wrote – the viewers looked from broadcaster to streamer, and from streamer to broadcaster, and from broadcaster to streamer again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.