The director of acclaimed period drama Wolf Hall says filming of last year’s second series was nearly called off weeks before it was due to begin because of budget pressures.
Peter Kosminsky told BBC Two’s Newsnight they eventually opted to axe costly exterior scenes in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light, meaning almost everything in the Tudor drama, screened by the BBC, became “conversations in rooms” instead.
He argues public service broadcasters including the BBC and ITV can no longer afford to make high-end British drama.
The Bafta and Golden Globe-winning director is calling for a 5% levy on UK subscription streaming revenues, with the proceeds collected for a British cultural fund.
Kosminsky told the BBC that six weeks before shooting began, having already cut certain props, locations, costumes and cast members, he and the producer decided the gap was still “too great” to go ahead with making The Mirror and The Light.
“That’s not something that has ever happened to me before, in all the years I’ve been making programmes, that you actually have to stop six weeks from production.”
Kosminsky has previously revealed that he – alongside Sir Mark Rylance, who played Thomas Cromwell, executive producer Colin Callender and Oscar-winning writer Peter Straughan – took significant pay cuts to get the programme over the line.
He said the original script “had many scenes set outside, many scenes involving horses, we had a whole joust, an extraordinary scene as conceived by Hilary Mantel, the original novelist – and we had to cut everything”.
He said he was still “incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved, and the response overwhelmed us all”.
But the original concept was a programme with “more fresh air in it, where you got more of a sense of Tudor society out in the world, and the lives these people lived when they weren’t in the throne rooms, palaces and beautiful dining rooms”.
Kosminsky said things had got worse since he filmed the drama, which was broadcast in November.
Now, he argues, public service broadcasters would not be able to afford to commission Wolf Hall or Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the landmark ITV drama about the Post Office scandal.
One day in the not too distant future, he warns, British audiences will notice these types of programmes are “gone”.
Kosminsky also believes there is “no way” the BBC or ITV could afford to make Adolescence, the current hit show from Netflix about a teenager accused of murder.
Adolescence writer Jack Thorne thinks traditional broadcasters could have made the drama, but they would have had to cut some of the most expensive scenes.
“It would have been a slightly different version of it,” Thorne told the BBC.
“In episode two, I wrote a fire drill that involved 300 extras. Those 300 extras had to be employed for 10 days. That is an awful lot of money. So all these things would have been difficult on a public service budget.
“I think we could have done it, it just would have been very different. And truthfully, it probably would have needed co-finance from abroad, and the problem at the moment is that finance has disappeared.”