EXCLUSIVE: Almost exactly two years ago to the day, Lindsay Salt stood in front of a room packed full of some of the biggest stars and most storied creatives and producers from the world of British TV drama.
In many ways, the BBC’s Director of Drama commissioning had been preparing for this moment for the entirety of her first 12 months in one of the most powerful jobs in British television. That night, she unveiled an enormous slate, with a dozen shows totaling 66 hours featuring the likes of Rebecca Hall, Joseph Fiennes and Aimee Lou Wood and coming from the creative minds of Richard Gadd, James Graham, Alice Birch and more. In an era of what she termed “peak caution,” Salt, who manages a drama budget of hundreds of millions of pounds per year, called on producers, writers and directors to “venture into the creative unknown” for her.
Yet the industry was only just emerging from the U.S. labor strikes and venturing into said unknown became tougher when the BBC was rocked by an unprecedented slowdown in American funding for its shows. The brief post-Covid boom era was very much over and Salt needed to get on board quick.
Soon after, the corporation publicly admitted for the first time ever that it was struggling to fund its own slate. Shows like the high-profile adaptation of Booker Prize-winner Shuggie Bain with A24 were being left in funding limbo, often still requiring more than half of their budget from outside sources to get to a position where they could film. What followed was former Sky and Netflix commissioner Salt’s trickiest few months at the Beeb.
“That was a moment,” Salt tells Deadline at the BBC’s New Broadcasting House. “This phrase came up two years ago about a ‘two tier system’ where it was like PSBs [Public Service Broadcasters] can do certain types of show, and streamers do a different [more expensive] type, and I just didn’t want that to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We had to reject that and find ways to still do those bigger budget shows.”
As she sits down with Deadline for her first big interview three years into the job, Salt is now more sanguine about that period, which she says became a sharp learning experience over how to fund TV when the bottom has dropped out the market. “I hear about these glory days where everyone was just offering [full funding] on every single show but I didn’t know any different,” she adds. “I do now feel like we’ve weathered the storm. Seeing the industry rally round to protect BBC output and say it’s still vital that we do big shows was so important.” In Salt’s view you “lose the BBC at your peril,” as she urges audiences to contribute to the government’s vital green paper into the future of the corporation.
Thankfully, Salt now acknowledges the “two-tier system” never came to be, although some shows still remain in limbo. American co-pro money has slowly been creeping back into the market and Salt comes bearing receipts. Since the start of the year, the BBC has launched The Night Manager Season 2 with Amazon, Industry Season 4 with HBO and Jack Thorne’s Lord of the Flies, which just sold to Netflix. The only big BBC launch that hasn’t sold to the U.S. is Waiting for the Out, the adaptation of Andy West’s prison memoir that was made for less cash than the other three and is a far more local story.
“That’s four incredibly different shows, which really highlights the variety of what we can do,” says Salt.
‘Doctor Who’ “not going anywhere”
One show that very much fell victim to a post-Covid era of boom then bust was Doctor Who. Disney+ jumped aboard when American majors were breaking out their check books in 2022, but pulled out of the landmark deal after just two seasons, leaving the BBC, BBC Studios and producer Bad Wolf in a pickle.
With question marks hanging over the future of one of Britain’s greatest TV exports, Salt says conversations over financing the show for a long-term future in a Disney-less era have not started yet. She holds the BBC line that the current focus is the Christmas 2026 special, which is being penned by showrunner Russell T. Davies.
“There are different ways of setting up a show,” she adds of the current landscape. “We just need to make sure we do it in the right way and make sure we take the right time to do it. Ultimately it’s one of the BBC’s most treasured brands, so it’s not going anywhere.”
When Deadline interrogates how Doctor Who can continue with millions of pounds less budget per episode, Salt again harks back to her early time in the post. “I managed to walk into this job when the co-pro market imploded and I’ve learned a lot about the tenacity of producers and writers to make things at all budget levels,” she adds. “Things are getting funded in so many different ways now.”
Salt doesn’t rule out attempting to strike another splashy American co-pro deal for Doctor Who. HBO Max, a streamer that the BBC is working with on Richard Gadd and Michaela Coel’s new projects, is finally about to launch in the UK. “We’ll wait and see how we figure it out. HBO have been great partners creatively. There’s a lot of stuff that is changing out there.”
Where limbo projects are concerned, there is, sadly, no news on Shuggie Bain, Salt tells us, a show that may be doomed to remain in financial purgatory. But Salt is more positive about The Ministry of Time, A24’s adapation of the hit Kaliane Bradley novel, which Salt reveals will roll cameras later this year. Since being announced two years ago, that one had gone a bit quiet. Casting is still in play.
What may have helped Salt amid the fires of the co-pro crisis was her experience working in Anne Mensah’s Netflix UK scripted team, which she says taught her about the value of a balanced and thriving content “ecosystem.” She is a fan of the streamers, rejecting the notion that Netflix is a “TV tourist,” an accusation that dominated proceedings at the Edinburgh TV Fest after Channel 4 executive Louisa Compton threw shade at Netflix over Adolescence and the streamer’s dedication to nurturing talent.
“Subverting expectations”
Producers tell us that Salt, an assiduously polite and upbeat executive, has a more populist tilt to her taste than predecessor Piers Wenger, who championed shows like Coel’s I May Destroy You and now runs the UK outpost of hipster studio A24.
Salt, responding to this charge, bristles a touch at being called mainstream and says her taste is more complex. She adores Blue Lights, the Northern Irish cop show from Salisbury Poisonings creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, but reiterates several times during the interview that Coel and Gadd – two of the top British authored voices of this era – are both making their next projects with the Beeb.
“I think I put a lot of pressure on subverting expectations,” she explains. “That’s sometimes the hardest thing. I want my team to read a script and be able to say, ‘Well this is great but we’ve seen it before, or this feels like Happy Valley again’. I’m always trying to think about both authored and mainstream shows, with the hope that some of the shows that are more authored might cut through to the mainstream, and some of the more mainstream shows actually go off and do something unexpected.”
“Subverting expectations” drives Salt’s approach to shows across the authored-to-mainstream spectrum. She views commissioning through the lens of “head, heart or gut” and ultimately judges scripts on whether they cause a “visceral reaction” for her on any of the three, which can be felt in “lots of different ways.”
Gadd, for one, is a huge fan of Salt’s (the pair worked together on Baby Reindeer), having previously said he “thinks the world of her.” His new show, Half Man, in which he stars opposite Jamie Bell, is about two brothers through the generations. Salt comes right back with praise, hailing Gadd for “interrogating the grey in the most visceral, extraordinary, delicate way.” She says he is successfully shutting out the noise emanating from the U.S., where a lawsuit still rumbles from the notorious “real life Martha.” “Richard tends to focus very hard on a show he’s doing and puts every waking second into that show,” she says.
Meanwhile, Coel’s next project, First Day on Earth, just set a buzzy cast including Ncuti Gatwa, the former Doctor. A24’s Wenger is involved with that one.
Returning to Blue Lights’ Lawn and Patterson, Deadline can reveal that the pair’s debut show from their new Sony-backed production vehicle Hot Sauce is the BBC’s D-Notice, a political thriller set in the world of investigative journalism, which Salt compares with Paul Abbott’s State of Play and hopes can be another expectation subverter. Named after a mechanism which allows the government to advise journalists about national security, former investigative Panorama journos Lawn and Patterson certainly have the chops for D-Notice, which is still in development. “It’s very early days but Declan and Adam doing a juicy conspiracy thriller feels exciting,” says Salt.
Salt has also greenlit Shy & Lola starring Night Manager actor Hayley Squires and Bel Powley, who can soon be seen in HBO’s Harry Potter playing Aunt Petunia. That one from Baby Reindeer maker Clerkenwell Films follows two women forced to become allies when a murder entangles them in the criminal underworld operating in Shy’s small coastal town in the North of England.
And then there is a show Salt commissioned “completely on instinct” after watching 1536, the new play from The Great writer Ava Pickett, which is about a rising tide of puritanism and misogyny amid the arrest of Henry VIII’s wife Anne Boleyn in Tudor England. Salt saw it in the theater and Pickett is now adapting it for the BBC.
“You have to be proactive in this job,” says Salt, noting that she tries to set this example to her team. “If you’re not proactive and you’re not going to see [shows like] Ava Pickett’s play, but are reactive and presume people will bring you things, then you’re in danger.”
State of the nation
1536 is “a bit state of the nation in ways that we haven’t really explored,” which Salt says is exactly what she wants to do with her next tranche of shows.
Lucky for her she has James Graham’s adaptation of his soccer play Dear England coming over the summer – another one that struggled for funding but got there in the end via a deficit from Sony.
“I watched the play two and a half years ago and there is a section about the English flag,” says Salt. “Ep 2 [of the TV show] is about what the English flag means to all different people and it felt so pertinent. So many of these writers feel the mood of the nation before we might even realize it ourselves. Seeing that come to life several years later is special.”
More state of the nation pieces will help Salt and her team battle the winds of what she described as “short-termist” thinking that has crept into drama commissioning in recent years. “I said from the beginning that the more shows we can land with the intention that they will have long-lasting impact, the better,” she says.
With this in mind, she is pushing hard on the next generation of brands, with both Peaky Blinders and Call the Midwife prepping movie versions, while The Night Manager Season 3 and a Matthew Macfadyen-starring version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold are leading the latest John le Carré adaptation charge. Salt reveals that the first ep of The Night Manager Season 2, which perhaps underwhelmed in the overnights, has now broken the record for the biggest on-demand rating for a broadcaster drama launch since current records began – nearly 5 million (it should be noted that these records only began in 2022).
Remebering Danielle Scott-Haughton
Nevertheless, it is this long tail of a show which drives Salt every day in such a high-pressure job, and she returns here to her “head, heart, gut” approach.
“You want shows that last for a long time,” she adds. “You can’t always predict that. It’s a core feeling. You need to have a really visceral reaction and that can be in lots of different ways, but if you haven’t had that then the show will fizzle out.”
Someone who understood this more than most was Salt’s former colleague Danielle Scott-Haughton. Salt and her team’s work at the BBC was placed in perspective last month following the tragic death of the Peaky Blinders commissioner, which came completely out of the blue. She died unexpectedly in her sleep and was in her 30s.
Severeal weeks on, Salt says her grief is “different on every day” but she has been completely inspired by what people have told her posthumously about Scott-Haughton.
“I knew she was this beacon of light and positivity but what has come out over the past month is that she was connecting people all the time,” says Salt. “She used to say to writers, ‘Your words matter, and you belong here’.”
As a means of encapsulating what the BBC drama boss and her team are trying to achieve, that final line is difficult to top.
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