Considering how often BECTU is reminded by employers about the supremacy of the free market, it's surprising how many of our members are touched by the public sector - through their funding, or regulation, or both.
Easy examples of this are the public money that goes into the BBC and the cultural sector generally. ITV has just been a major subject of one of the biggest pieces of legislation to go through Parliament in the last year - the Communications Act - and theatres and cinemas, whether privately or publicly funded, can't operate without local authority licences.
Even the film industry, the cultural sector's answer to the Wild West in many members' eyes, doesn't escape the public interest.
Not only is the UK branch of this global industry a recipient of various grant-aided finances, but it has to put up with the complaints of politicians who lump it together with the English cricket team as yet another national flagship that has failed to achieve world domination.
Less sophisticated commentators almost add the words "despite being British, dammit" to this accusation. More sophisticated ones on the other hand are currently studying the latest report on the UK film industry, released last month by Parliament's Select Committee on Culture Media and Sport. Chaired by Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, best known for his routine savaging of the BBC, the Committee published its report last month - coincidentally in the middle of BECTU's ballot in which freelance film members voted to accept a new industry agreement with PACT.
If asked, they would probably also vote for many of Kaufman's recommendations...though perhaps not the bit where he once again savages the BBC, if only slightly.
His committee urged the government to continue the special tax breaks open to UK film makers, praised the efforts being made by Skillset and the Film Council to improve training in the industry, and called on public service broadcasters to spend more of their revenue on producing UK feature movies.
This last suggestion, which allowed Kaufman his Beeb-bashing moment, has yet to be debated within the union, although members working for public broadcasters have already pointed out that ITV, BBC, and C4 already plough well over £1bn into UK-produced drama between them. Nor do they act as "pimps for US loan sharks", as Stephen Fry has decribed the Film Council's role in distributing grant aid to film producers.
However, Kaufman was at least consistent by including BSkyB, an outfit that often seems immune to public scrutiny, in the list of broadcasters who, he says, should offer more support to the UK film industry.
British TV channels do not, contrary to popular belief, cram schedules full of cheap US movies. According to evidence seen by the Committee, the BBC plays an average of one movie per day on BBC1 and BBC2, ITV slightly fewer, while Channel 5 leads the field with more than 570 showings per year.
Admittedly, only a small proportion of these movies are UK-made, but Kaufman's report dwells only for a moment on the real key to this problem - many British films, some of them lubricated by public money, don't ever get screened because the distribution chain is dominated by US companies.
The top six distributors, of whom five are US-owned, control 89.9% of the UK market.The remaining 10% is fought over by four dozen smaller companies, including all but one of the UK's distributors.
Not surprisingly the minnows struggle to get British films into cinemas while they are up against major US operators whose only interest is to place as many Hollywood movies as possible in the UK's 3,250 screens. That number incidentally represents a renaissance in cinema-going in our country - it's the highest for more than 40 years, and illustrates an appetite for movies which would surely extend to UK-made films if only they were on offer.
Putting them into our cinemas and multiplexes is going to take a drastic shake-up of the distribution industry, which can only happen through public intervention. If the taming of Fox, Warner's, Buena Vista, Columbia, and UIP requires waspish political skills, I can't think of a better person to play the part of Saint George than Gerald Kaufman himself.
Tony Lennon
October 2003
