Ben Stephenson

Ben Stephenson is the Controller, Drama Commissioning for the BBC. In March 2010, he answered questions from a number of writers about his job, writing for the BBC, and the upcoming slate of BBC Drama projects.

Where does the original idea for a drama come from?

The nature of dramas is they all come from a myriad of different places. What matters is that the person who's ultimately writing it owns it more than anyone else.

A Passionate Woman is by Kay Mellor who wrote Band of Gold, one of the best shows ever made. A Passionate Woman is an incredibly personal piece, she wrote as a stage play for the West Yorkshire Playhouse and wanted to make it for TV.

Luther by Neil Cross, he was a new writer to us. In-house met him, he pitched this idea, we all loved it, the script was commissioned.

The Deep through Tiger Aspect, Simon Donald, first original piece he's written for the BBC, that was actually the idea of Julie Gardner who said "Wouldn't it be fun to do something with submarines?" They pitched it to various writers, Simon loved it.

Five Daughters was an absolute passion of Susan Hogg, who's an executive producer in house, and Philippa Lowthorpe who's a brilliant factual drama director. Five Daughters and The Deep may have come from somebody else's idea, but the writer fell in love with it more than anyone else.

Six Feet Under was not Alan Ball's idea, it was an executive producer at HBO's idea, who pitched it to various people and Alan Ball fell in love with it more than he did.

Anyone can have an idea. Ideas are not the problem. Ideas are easy. What's hard is making an idea work in a script, and making it complex and rounded, intelligent and different. It's the execution that's difficult.

Whether it's at the BBC or another broadcaster you've got to say: Why do we want to make this idea? What's different about it? What's our ambition for it? What do we really want it to achieve? And if you're all on the same page with that then you're fine.

When you're commissioning something, do you know that it will be stripped across a week?

No, obviously if it's five episodes you've got the option of doing them like that, but it depends whether it feels like it will sustain weekly, or whether it feels like the intensity of it is better off over the course of a week.

Something like Five Days, Criminal Justice, they're not really thrillers, they're not really about a plot, they're about the characterisation - particularly the second series of Criminal Justice which was intense and different and uncompromising and had quite an unsympathetic heroine. I think across five weeks you might have drifted away from it, whereas across a week it held you to its smallness and intensity.

It's always about what is the best way of showcasing the drama for the audience, that's all that ever matters. But you can't really know that until you see it.

Has the BBC iPlayer changed scheduling?

Not really. The iPlayer's an amazing invention, but the majority of television is still watched live. Something like 89% of television is watched live. If you get 200,000 on iPlayer - which is still a lot and can add to the overnight - it's a relatively minor amount overall. Particularly for mainstream... It's different for Being Human, which got about a million on the overnight and then we added about 500,000 through repeats and iPlayer.

I think Skins and Shameless actually get more from their non-original Tx, although some of that is still linear repeats. But mainstream television certainly is, contrary to popular belief, still very much watched at 9 o'clock on the day it transmits. Catch up obviously is increasing, but if you get three million for a show on BBC1 at 9 o'clock, you're not suddenly going to find that you actually reach 6 million. And the pick up on iPlayer for Five Days is no more than it is for anything else, which I was quite surprised by. I thought it'd be way up.

We got six and a half million for Five Days,  ten million for Doctor Who, sixteen million for EastEnders. ITV got nine million for Unforgiven. Mass audiences still want to watch TV live. They still want to find something as it happens, they still want to feel that sense of liveness and freshness. I'm sure it will continue to diversify and the figures will continue to get smaller but audiences still want to turn on.

Are there any shows on any other channels you wish you'd commissioned?

Skins. That's probably it.

People tend to have a view that some things go round all the broadcasters until somebody bites, is that how it really works?

I don't really like it if people pitch them to all three of us because I think that puts us into a competitive place, which I would just take the BBC out of. If it's right for all of us, then it's not right for the BBC. Also that then becomes a commercial process and we're not commercial so I just exempt ourselves from that process.

Don't you think that's slightly unfair?

A company will pay for development, so Skins was in paid development by Channel 4 and it would have been wrong to show it to us anyway. The reason something would be shown to different people is to see who could give the best price and make the best offer. I don't think that's right for a non-commercial channel. From my perspective I'd rather it went to one broadcaster at a time.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6