LONDON TV SCREENINGS: Banijay Rights CEO Cathy Payne admits the distribution landscape has changed significantly in the past 12 month, but she is glimpsing shoots of recovery and opportunities to recalibrate.

Cathy Payne

“No one wanted Peaky Blinders when we first had it. No one wanted Black Mirror. We forget how much the world has changed,” says Cathy Payne, CEO of Banijay Rights, one of the founding members of the London TV Screenings five years ago.

Payne makes the point in discussing how the international TV business has shifted in the last 12 months, a period that has seen the industry go, if not quite from boom to bust, then certainly into a different dealmaking paradigm.

“The American pre-sale market is not there,” she says, reflecting on how US buyers have withdrawn from the landscape as the streaming wars gave way to a bursting of the peak TV bubble, an advertising drop and writers and actors’ strikes – all contriving to cause a sharp contraction.

“Budgets did go very high a few years ago and they were largely driven by the streamers, and certainly there’s been a pull-back on that,” says Payne. “Netflix used to come in on coproductions where they’d take the second run in the UK, first-run rest-of-the-world. That’s just not something they’re doing like they used to.”

And yet, despite these developments, the Banijay exec, whose career spans three decades and numerous market cycles, is unfazed. Indeed, her point about Peaky Blinders and Black Mirror is made to counter some of the doom and gloom pervading high-end scripted in particular.

“Some of the best shows I’ve ever worked on never pre-sold,” she says.

Yes, the global distribution outlook has changed as a result of US retrenchment, Payne concedes, and UK public service broadcasters (PSBs) must adapt to this new reality, but she believes there are ways of navigating this.

“There’s never been a time in the UK when so many shows commissioned by a UK broadcaster, be it the BBC or ITV, have been unable to complete their funding because no one wants to underpin the risk from the outset,” she says, addressing reports that a string of greenlit projects are sitting on the shelf due to funding shortfalls.

Baby Reindeer travelled well despite its relatively low cost

A widely held view is that these PSBs are now only able to contribute around 30% of high-end drama budgets, or only willing to do so for shows whose overall costs have exponentially outpaced their incomes. Payne’s opinion is that a “recalibration” is necessary.

“What broadcasters are having to look at now is what is the finance plan and is this a show that can be financed before they commission,” she says. “The one thing that I often say is you don’t have to spend a fortune to have a show that does travel. Baby Reindeer was not an expensive show, but it was a good, different show that really captured an audience’s attention.”

Indeed, Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd’s new drama, Half Man, from Mam Tor Productions for the BBC and BBC Scotland in association with HBO, is among the titles on Banijay’s 2025 London TV Screenings slate this week.

Also in the mix is a contemporary re-imagining of classic 1980s Jersey-set crime drama Bergerac, from Blacklight TV for UKTV’s U&Drama, which has already been sold to Sweden’s SVT, Norway’s NRK, New Zealand’s TVNZ, ABC in Australia and others.

Then there’s Maigret, a new take on the Parisian detective novels by Georges Simenon, produced for PBS Masterpiece in the US by Playground Entertainment, maker of BBC/PBS copro Wolf Hall and last year’s follow-up Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light, which Banijay Rights also distributes.

The latter series made headlines last month when director Peter Kosminksy told a UK government inquiry into the state of the nation’s film and TV industry that cast and crew all had to take a pay cut in order to get the show over the line.

Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light was turned down by each streamer in turn

“The Mirror & the Light was offered to each streamer in turn. Despite the fact its first series had won a Golden Globe, they all turned it down,” Kosminksy said. He went on to claim this was evidence the “inflated cost environment” the streamers had created – while resulting in some “extraordinary, mould-breaking programmes” – had unwittingly also contributed to a market failure, where shows of particular interest to a UK audience, such as Wolf Hall and ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, struggled for funding.

While BBC Studios distributed the first season of Wolf Hall, Banijay replaced it on the second, and Payne offers a slightly different take to Kosminksy. She points out that production financing would be a matter for the maker, Playground Entertainment, and The Mirror & the Light was always a BBC/PBS copro. So with UK and US rights already sewn up, the appeal to a global streamer would always be limited.

“There has been a pull-back on what’s available and those producers who can produce for the available funds will be the ones who get through,” says Payne. “We came on board for a healthy distribution advance against the series, but everything takes time to sell. It’s a much longer process than it might have been two years ago.”

Her mention of a “healthy” advance also contrasts with evidence to the same inquiry from Sister CEO and co-founder Jane Featherstone, maker of series including Chernobyl, Eric and Black Doves, who said she had seen sales advances “collapse.”

What one person might consider healthy is a matter of perspective, says Payne. “People have ambitions to do big storytelling but it’s very difficult to take a risk if you can’t underpin it, especially when you’ve already gone out to market and offered it and people aren’t prepared to come on board early,” she says.

Blacklight TV’s contemporary take on Jersey-set crime drama Bergerac

“As a distributor, what you can invest is a reflection of what you think you can sell and what you can bring back, and that’s what we’re working through. But it’s interesting – if people really, really want particular shows, they will find additional monies and there will be those ones that break through.”

Payne is naturally optimistic about the titles in the Banijay catalogue this year, which also include dramedy Just Act Normal, from The Forge Entertainment for BBC iPlayer and BBC Three; and thriller The Feud, from Lonesome Pine Productions in association with North East Screen for Channel 5.

International dramas on the Banijay slate are The Family Detective (Shine Fiction for TF1), Dutch thriller Elixir (Topkapi Films for NPO and New8), French horror thriller The Rose Family (Black Sheep Films for Cine+ OCS), Marie Antoinette (CAPA Drama, Banijay Studios France and Beside Productions for Canal+) and Swedish crime drama Fallen (Filmlance for TV4).

Factual titles span 7/7: The London Bombings (The Slate Works for BBC Two and iPlayer), true crime title The Drowning Pool (Caravan for Channel 5), Anatomy of a Murder (Workerbee), climate justice documentary The Silence of the Earth (Diagonal TV for TVE and Arte) and Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain (Hyphenate Media Group for CNN).

Playground’s new take on Maigret

Meanwhile, formats offered in London this week include cross-country skiing competition Against All Odds (Meter/Jarowskij for SVT), Mission Unknown: Atlantic (Banijay Productions Germany for Prime Video), Danish format The Rest of Your Life and docu-format AI Love You (Nordisk Film TV for TV2).

The London TV Screenings has become a major event on the international calendar, she says, and affords the opportunity to have a more intimate conversation about content with buyers than is possible at other trade markets.

Yes, there are plenty of uncertainties hanging over the business on a macro level, and also some more tangible ones day-to-day, such as how Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount plays out. But Payne maintains she sees “stabilisation shoots of recovery” from the overall market.

The prospect of All3Media and ITV Studios – two of the other Screenings co-founders – merging has been floated in reports recently and is also something she takes in her stride.

This is not surprising perhaps, given that Payne has remained in post through Banijay’s buy-out of EndemolShine, the merger of those two companies beforehand and, prior to that, Endemol’s acquisition of Southern Star, the Australian distributor where she started out.

“Consolidation continuing is just a natural state of play,” she says. “But consolidation only works if you get it right.”