Diederick Santer, chief executive, Kudos 23 June, 2016 | By Robin Parker
From Ancient Rome to the not-too-distant future of C4’s Humans, via ITV’s crime-solving 1950s vicar, Diederick Santer talks to Robin Parker about meeting diverse demand for drama.
CAREER
2016 Chief executive, Kudos 2015 Joint chief executive, Kudos (with Dan Isaacs). Lovely Day is absorbed into Kudos 2010 Founder, Lovely Day 2006 Executive producer, EastEnders 2000 Executive producer, BBC Drama Credits Cutting It; Jane Eyre; Much Ado About Nothing 1998 Script editor, Granada Credits A&E; The Last Train 1996 Script editor, United Productions Credits Where The Heart Is; Touching Evil Upcoming Kudos Dramas
Troy: Fall Of A City (BBC1)
Apple Tree Yard (BBC1)
The Boy With The Top Knot (BBC2)
Grantchester, series three (ITV)
Humans, series two (Channel 4)
Tin Star (Sky Atlantic)
Cicero trilogy (tbc)
The Tunnel (Sky Atlantic) Diederick Santer is learning to sing for his supper. The Kudos chief executive and former EastEnders executive producer leans back and muses on how the high-end drama boom has become both a blessing and a curse for the producer of Broadchurch and Humans.
“The market is demanding big, exciting, dynamic series – and that’s great, because what’s in demand is the thing we know how to do, and have been doing, since the beginning of Spooks,” he says. “But it’s become quite stressful. With companies splintering, US companies setting up here, agents becoming producers and film companies moving into TV, we have to work harder than ever to win the business and the talent.”
Kudos’s latest weapon in the global arms race for drama is an adaptation of Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy. The Ancient Roman power games contained within the 1,500 pages of Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator would appear tailor-made for the current appetite for lavish, complex historical sagas. The firm’s head of acquisitions Sue Swift has been pursuing the rights for years, but was told to wait for the publication of Dictator last autumn before negotiating any deal. This has, says Santer, worked to Kudos’s advantage. “Maybe five years ago, they would have been three movies, but today, they’re a gift to anyone creating a massive, internationally funded, high-end TV drama,” he says. Writers are now being sourced for what will be either an epic single run or a trio of series.
Not that Kudos is all about the shows that smash the tax-break ceiling. It is, says Santer, “really important that we do singles as well as blockbusters, and everything in between – and each with an equal amount of passion”.
Humans (C4) Nonetheless, the indie’s lower-tariff shows are increasingly getting a boost through co-production too, whether that be ITV crime drama Grantchester (PBS) or oddball Channel 4 comedy Flowers (US on-demand service SeeSo).
“I think of Kudos as a premium brand,” he says. “We never cut corners in production; we don’t waste money, we do it properly. There is a tiny, low-budget version of Flowers that we could have done, but we found a brilliant way to finance it with American money, cast it up and give it the production values it deserved.”
With different flavours from what some might expect from a Kudos show, both of these series illustrate the breadth that Santer wants to bring to the company.
A new phase Grantchester was initially produced by Santer’s own Kudos-backed indie Lovely Day. That label was then rested in the major restructure prompted by Jane Featherstone’s exit, which followed the also transformative merger of Endemol and Shine.
Replacing the formidable chief executive was no small order and initially Santer took on the mantle jointly with Dan Isaacs – only for Isaacs to rejoin Featherstone at her new indie Sister Pictures, shortly after its official launch in January, with producer Naomi de Pear following this month.
Grantchester (ITV) As Santer’s pet project, Grantchester remains a statement of intent as he goes it alone at the helm of the company.
“I don’t think Kudos mark one would have done that show,” he says. “It’s much more my sensibility than Jane Featherstone’s. She was delighted by its success, but a period crime show about a vicar is not really her sort of thing.”
Flowers, meanwhile, was “revolutionary”, he asserts. “It’s a show that celebrates the importance of sadness.” It also took a punt on writer/actor/ director wunderkind Will Sharpe and was a reminder that despite the loss of Spooks, Hustle and CBBC show M.I. High as places to develop new writers – Humans creators Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley cut their teeth on Spooks, as did David Farr, lead writer on Kudos’s upcoming BBC1 epic Troy: Fall Of A City – Kudos can still find ways to nurture talent.
“Things are more authored now,” Santer concedes. “But we are still bringing people through on Grantchester and Humans, which are heavily storylined, but where writers can still do their own thing within them.” For all of his drive, Santer cuts a pretty laid-back figure. “I lucked out,” he smiles, noting that he inherited the company with a full order book from the BBC, ITV, C4 and Sky. “I probably do things slightly differently from the previous management, but the values remain the same. Shows like Broadchurch or Humans are creative passions that then became, by virtue of being good, a phenomenon. I have no need to be at the creative heart of every thing we do in this building, when Kudos has all- stars who could easily be running their own outfits. It’s not for me to creatively manage them beyond giving them the space to do their thing.”
Flowers (C4) Most of these execs have been there longer than his own six years, including Martin Haines, the company’s former head of commercial, business and legal affairs, who recently returned as chief operating officer, and veteran production head Alison Barnett, whom Santer admits to tapping up constantly for behind-the-scenes tales about Blake’s 7, Bergerac and Howard’s Way.
Santer is steering Kudos through a changed environment in which it is now one half of the Endemol Shine behemoth. The chief benefi t? Working with the expanded Endemol Shine International, he says. “On Troy, [ESI chief executive] Cathy Payne read the script early on and said, ‘we’ll back this, guys, don’t worry’. So we’re not scrabbling around – whether or not we get that glossy American partner to top up the BBC’s standard drama tariff, we’ve got it covered, because she’s taken a big bet. It’s glorious to be given that confidence.”
He also gets to pitch to access a bigger internal development pot. This week, meanwhile, he was hobnobbing in Los Angeles with fellow drama heads from around Endemol Shine’s international group of companies – including British ‘rivals’ Tiger Aspect, Fifty Fathoms and Artists Studio. “It’s important not to compete too much, but we can learn from each other’s experiences,” he says. “While scripted is enjoying such a boom, we have to make sure we’re looking ahead. How is the market going to consolidate? Will these platforms still be here in five years’ time? How do we bring talent through? And are we being sucked into doing the high-end stuff?”
Diederick on the set of EastEnders For all his ambitions for a mixed slate, Santer gives the impression that it is becoming a bit of a slog to get domestic drama away that has no obvious coproduction appeal. “Suddenly, to make a drama under £1m an hour seems unthinkable,” he notes. “We do want to make things that are about how people live in Britain right now.”
Perhaps the answer lies in more of the genre-blurring with which Kudos made its name. For all the thrills and spills of a Spooks or a Humans, Santer is adamant that no drama is a million miles from his soapland alma mater.
“The most memorable TV moments tend to be people talking in rooms,” he says, citing the climax of Drama Republic’s Doctor Foster. Even The Night Manager was at its most thrilling once Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston got talking. “For all the amazing shots of Majorcan villas and all the military vehicles that get shot up, it’s the two-handers you remember, when the leads went head to head,” he says. “You need directors who can handle both the scale of the piece and the heat between two characters at climactic moments.”
Even in Troy? “Oh yes,” he laughs. “There will be people talking in rooms; some of them might even be gods. And they’ll be talking in boats. Or inside a horse.”
NURTURING TALENT
In a bid to promote and reward internal talent, Kudos recently linked up with Creative Skillset’s High-End TV Drama Producer Step Up Fund.
Paul Gilbert, who had been head of drama development at Big Talk, came aboard for series two of Humans to gain his first producer credit.
“As an established series, we felt we wanted to give the right person the opportunity to produce the series while under the guidance of hands-on executive producers,” says executive producer Chris Fry.
“There is no better place to learn the role than on the job, and as long as there is support throughout, there is no reason why this programme cannot help give the industry the next line of drama series producers that it so desperately needs.
“Paul has all the right qualities to excel at producing and is running a very tight ship. It is really enjoyable seeing someone so passionate thrive in the new role and make it his own.”
Kudos head of production Alison Barnett says the company’s involvement in the scheme reflects its wider engagement with talent development and ambitions to inspire the next generation of producers.