Keith Scholey on Silverback’s call to eco action
Keith Scholey, joint CEO and director at All3Media’s wildlife prodco Silverback Films and its eco-focused subsidiary Studio Silverback, discusses how the genre is evolving, its attempts to reach younger audiences and how conveying the environmental message shouldn’t be left to just documentary makers.
Keith Scholey: “The world has yet to grasp the scale of the importance of climate change”
How are nature documentaries innovating to reach younger audiences?
The honest answer is we’re behind the curve in natural history, possibly massively behind the curve. The longform format has served us so well for so long, there was no incentive to look into shortform. The change in that model has been drastic and has taken the natural history genre completely by surprise. So absolutely, we have to modify.
Streamers worry about YouTube, not other streamers. TikTok and YouTube are obviously massive but we need to invent a business model that will make it work, because natural history is expensive.
Are those discussions happening in your company?
Studio Silverback did a great YouTube series called Seat at the Table back when YouTube was commissioning. But then they stopped and went back to their other models, which clearly work very well for them. But it’s about getting the business model to work [with wildlife].
I’m very worried that the downturn in longform will be protracted. We’ll have to find other ways to reach the audience to make sure they keep being aware of wildlife because, if it drops out of the media, it will cause drastic conservation issues. For the past 40, maybe 50 years, wildlife has been on television, but it might not stay on television.
Aside from this, how else is the wildlife genre changing?
The next big innovation in natural history has got to be narrative. Narrative has been lost from the genre: a lot of it is sequences that you could put in any order. That’s possibly fine for old analogue telly, but it doesn’t work for streaming. A streaming drama like Slow Horses has you on the edge of your seat because the narrative is so strong, so in natural history we must get back to strong narratives. If there are big innovations coming through in natural history, it’ll be around narrative, not technology. When the natural history thriller is created, you’ll see the genre come back big time.
Regarding the climate emergency, has the TV industry taken the responsibility that it should?
The world has yet to grasp the scale of the importance of climate change to everything. The media still drags its heels around the issue and the implementation, but we’re running out of time. Anyone who’s got children or grandchildren or who worries about the future generations, anyone in the media industry just needs to get off their ass and do something about this. But it shouldn’t be left to the producers of natural history programmes to be talking about an issue of such huge national security.
The news departments do their bit, but it isn’t given the same level of importance. I was a senior manager in the BBC and I had some big arguments when they still insisted on saying climate change ‘might’ be caused by humans. They carried on peddling that line way after 99% of the scientific community confirmed that it was. But that left a level of doubt.
What do you think about the idea that the message has to be presented in a more positive way to avoid eco anxiety and people feeling impotent?
We’re doing a film called Ocean with David Attenborough [for National Geographic] because there is a UN conference happening in June next year, about agreeing to protect a third of the ocean. There are lots of problems with the ocean because we’re just trashing it, but the quickest thing we can do is stop overfishing it. So that’s why we’re making a film about it. We did this with whaling: whales were being exterminated to extinction, but they banned it. Now we’ve got more whales.
But what I get frustrated about is it shouldn’t be left to just nature documentaries. OK, now there’s a feature film made about climate change called Don’t Look Up. Tell me another one. Tell me the last drama series you saw about this. What are entertainment producers doing about the biggest problem facing the world? What is theatre doing about it? When was the last really big pop song you heard that was addressing the environmental crisis?
The heavy lifting has to be done by all forms of media – don’t leave it to a bunch of little wildlife filmmakers. That’s not where it has to happen; it has to now get completely embedded in culture and become a movement in the true sense of the word.
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