This Tuesday, the Edinburgh TV Festival (ETF) celebrated its 50th birthday. Although not the first event in the world to celebrate television—the Prix Italia predates it by nearly 30 years—it is nonetheless the first of its kind in the UK and, to this day, offers a unique space for TV professionals to debate the state of their industry.
Still ongoing until Friday, the festival this year has by all accounts been the typical jamboree: attended by hundreds of senior executives, wannabe producers, directors and stars, with most public attention likely drawn to the keynote James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture delivered by YouTube exec Pedro Pina. Inaugurated at the first event in 1976 and continued every year since, the lecture is nowadays regarded as a prestigious milestone in the industry calendar.
All business as usual, you might say—and yet this will be the last time the ETF is held in Edinburgh, with the celebrations of its impressive record overshadowed by the announcement in June that from 2027 the festival will move south, to Manchester. Manchester won a bidding process initiated by the festival organisers, they said, “amid increasing challenges around accessibility, affordability and sustainability”.
It is a decision that has not impressed the film producer Lynda Myles, former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) who founded the ETF with Gus MacDonald, a former Granada TV executive and now Labour peer. In a letter to the festival’s current organisers in July, seen by Prospect, Myles wrote: “I was shocked and surprised to hear that moving the Edinburgh Television Festival away from its Edinburgh home was under discussion… For the national and international television communities, the TV Festival and Edinburgh are indelibly linked. Edinburgh provides a unique life source for the event in a way which cannot simply be reproduced elsewhere.”
If anything, the move suggests that the ETF—run by an independent foundation since 2001—has lost sight of what it is for, why Myles and MacDonald founded it or indeed why it has been held in Edinburgh specifically for five decades.
When Myles took over as director of the EIFF in 1973, she was the first woman to direct a major film festival. Dispensing with its reputation as a showcase for respectable documentaries, she introduced a more radical and iconoclastic programming, with screenings of new European and world cinema, exploitation cinema and other avant-garde works. She ran the first major UK retrospectives of neglected directors such as Samuel Fuller, Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin, Jacques Tourneur and Raoul Walsh, and coincided each with new published books of criticism. For an event that had grown polite and rather dull in the years since its first iteration in 1947, it was a minor revolution.
It was against this backdrop of new ideas—and after noticing that the most important British directors such as Stephen Frears, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh were not working exclusively in cinema—that Myles turned her attention to television. With the support of MacDonald, the EIFF’s vice chair, the first ETF was held over two days in 1976. The particular focus of that first outing was the work of producer and director James MacTaggart, who had died of a heart attack two years earlier at the age of 46. The choice was not coincidental: MacTaggart was remembered for pushing the boundaries of traditional drama into a less realist direction, with groundbreaking shows like Three Ring Circus and Diary of a Young Man. For the first memorial lecture that still bears his name, Myles chose another likewise radical figure: the playwright John McGrath, a founder of the 7:84 theatre company known for its political agitprop like The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. McGrath did not disappoint: he delivered a ferocious attack on the kitchen sink realism that dominated the industry at the time.
Eventually, the TV festival separated from the EIFF and acquired its own independent structure and direction. The MacTaggart Lecture continued, though not always in its founding radical spirit: among those who have been invited to deliver it over the years are no fewer than three Murdochs (Rupert in 1989, James in 2009 and Elisabeth in 2012), Mark Thompson on two occasions, once in 2002 as head of Channel 4 and again in 2009 as director general of the BBC; and other prominent speakers such as Verity Lambert, Jonathan Miller and Dennis Potter. (Other more recent people to take to the lectern, such as Dorothy Byrne and Michaela Coel, have been closer to the original brief than the likes of the Murdochs.
All of this is to say that the character of the festival has evolved, no doubt necessarily so, with the TV industry itself. But while it may have proven to have survived without its radicalism, it is less clear how the festival will thrive outside its original host city. Proximity to the world’s biggest arts festival was long seen as a key element in its success and profile, helping lead to the creation of hits like Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, both discovered in the Festival Fringe by executives while attending the TV Festival.
For Scottish players, the move was all the more upsetting when it was revealed that the TV Festival had received some £600,000 of public funding over the years. Screen Scotland, the body that represents the interests of the Scottish film and TV industry, began to work on a fresh option: if the TV Festival was determined to depart, it might be time for a new TV festival to take its place in Edinburgh. Their final decision is yet to be announced. But the outcome remains the same: by exiting Edinburgh the TV Festival leaves behind a weaker, more fragmented industry.
