The Rise and Rise of the Independents
The story of a shift in power over the last fifty years of TV, The Rise and Rise of the Independents is a history of UK television beyond the broadcasters from the 1950s to the present day.
The book explores the nature of UK independent television through the men and women who shaped it, to find out how we got where we are today and where the industry may be heading next, with some independents becoming more powerful than the broadcasters who employ them.
From its surprising start in the 1950s founded by US exiles fleeing McCarthyism to the present day with the well funded Super Indy making this once very precarious occupation an international success far surpassing anything the British Film Industry has achieved in its 100 year history. Many of the key participants in the book have started companies form nothing building them into empires worth tens of millions of pounds. Along the way they have also produced some great British TV programmes , hugely popular not just in the UK but around the world.
Ian Potter former TV Curator at the National Media Museum has written the book with the help of insightful interviews with the pioneers of the new television age - Sophie Balhetchet, Peter Bazalgette, Peter Bennett-Jones, Jane Featherstone, David Graham, Tony Garnett, Colin Gilbert, Paul Jackson, Allan McKeown, Charlie Parsons, Terry Ryan, Nicola Shindler, Paul Smith, David Swift, Patrick Uden, Jimmy Mulville, Jane Lighting, Anne Wood, Beryl Vertue, Nick Fraser, James Gatward, Anna Home, Steve Morrison and many others.
