I think his point was more the state of broadcast television at the moment. There has been a major advertising slump in UK TV - for example channel 4 is in dire straits, cutting 17% of their workforce, stopping commissioning an holding lots of shows back from broadcast as an accounting ploy to not pay production companies until the next financial year.

ITV on paper are doing much better but to find their biggest hit of the year actually lost money says alot about the state of UK broadcast TV. The first run advertising and the UK streaming catch up money (or fragments of subscriptions to ITVX) haven’t made the show profitable.

Shows now need to be saleable abroad to make money and a show like this just doesn’t sell enough to make profit.

Its bad news because it means ITV and others are less incentivised to make these types of shows and instead retreat back to cheaper shows (reality and quizzes), and stuff that will sell abroad. Stuff that sells abroad is not necessarily bad but it does push to more generic types of TV over culturally important or unique shows that would only appeal here.

There isn’t really a solution to this in the commercial sector. Advertising might bounce back but probably not as that money is now directed at the Internet and social media, not TV.

The BBC could be a champion for this type of stuff but it’s doing badly too as the license fee has not kept up with inflation for years, so it’s having to make very deep cuts to keep as much of its many commitments going as possible.

Meanwhile American streamers including Netflix are gobbling up the market and UK broadcasters can’t compete with the shear scale of their operations.

Personally I think the funding for the BBC needs to go up substantially, and maybe slices of new money even become available for any broadcaster to apply for to ensure culturally important shows can be funded. The commercially viable stuff will always have funding but the more niche and UK specific stuff needs to be protected and probably subsidised to maintain a cultural voice and support diversity in the output of our creative industries.