It’s possibly never been more evident that this little thing we call the TV industry goes through peaks and troughs. Let’s be honest, you’d be hard pressed to find many people who think television in the UK is going through a particularly great patch right now. Okay, we have Masterchef (yes, yes, I know), but at best we can say the industry is treading water in the wake of 2007’s catalogue of disasters and revelations.
But, like soaps (just look at the turnaround EastEnders has pulled off recently), these things go in cycles, and it’s not all doom and gloom. Take this story from over on this very website’s news pages. Tony Jordan has let slip that his production company, Red Planet Pictures, is developing a new drama for BBC1’s Saturday night family slot, currently the home of the soon-to-return Doctor Who and Robin Hood. Going under the title of The Ministry, Jordan has said:
“It’s an anything goes-type show that we hope the whole family will sit down together and watch in the way they do with Doctor Who.”
While I’m wary of drama producers tailoring shows specifically for what is now a much talked about chunk of the schedule, this is exciting news. Exciting enough for me to go and get a celebratory Double Decker.
Why exciting? Well, for starters, Jordan is one of the most best working in modern TV drama. His list of credits take in some of the most stylish shows of recent times, most notably Life on Mars and Hustle and Jordan only has to return to pen an episode of EastEnders and it becomes newsworthy (I’m conveniently forgetting at this point that Jordan is credited with creating Holby Blue – nobody’s perfect!).
As the man behind Red Planet Pictures, he is head of a company that is clearly invested in the future of television drama, as evidenced by The Red Planet Prize, a writing competition to find a scriptwriter of the future. Joanna Leigh was announced as the winner of the first Red Planet Prize at the beginning of the month, and the competition is expected to return later in the year.
The point here is in Red Planet we have an independent drama producer that is meeting the challenges of producing modern television drama while casting an eye to the future of the genre. Like Kudos, who Jordan has a very long association with, there appears to be a vibrancy about what they do, and that’s to be applauded.
Although at this stage we know very little about The Ministry, the involvement of Gareth Roberts as a scriptwriter, alongside Stephen Greenhorn, is another cause for celebration. Roberts penned one of my favourite episodes of new Doctor Who – The Shakespeare Code – and will be back this year with The Unicorn and the Wasp, featuring Agatha Christie. Not only that, Roberts is responsible for one of my favourite pieces of TV drama of all time – Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? – from the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Yes, yes, you all know I’m something of a Whovian daftie, but this two part story from the so-called “children’s” drama had a scope that most adult dramas can only dream about. And I honestly don’t say that lightly.
So with this pedigree, The Ministry has me excited before any details are actually known, and that doesn’t happen very often. As Tony Jordan says:
“We are giving the TV producers of 2028 something to bring back.”
The Ministry? Wasn't that the agency a couple of well-known secret agents worked for?
I wonder if it's a production development name for something more well-known...
Could we be seeing the return of champagne celebrations and high-jink, high-English spy escapades for the first time since 1977 (or 1998 if you want to be anal about it...)?