Caitlin Moran: Crowd-funded online TV shows are the future

We asked industry insiders for their opinions on TV's future, and now we're showcasing our favourite responses

Radio Times Staff

Published: Monday, 5 September 2016 at 10:45 am

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Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been asking industry insiders to tell us their predictions for the future of TV over the next 10 years, with the responses compiled here.

However, there were one or two particularly eloquent replies that we felt bad about cutting short, so we’re printing a couple of respondees’ answers in a longer form as an accompaniment to the main article.

One of those respondees was author, columnist and Raised by Wolves co-writer Caitlin Moran– so here’s what she had to say when we asked her opinion, in full.

Clearly there's going to be more crowd-funded TV shows going straight onto the net – any writer/actor/comedian with a solid fanbase will be able to swerve the terrestrial commissioning process and go straight to their fanbase, as has happened in the music industry, and is starting to happen in the US.

This also allows "creators" greater freedom in what they write about/how they write about it, and seems to be the most obvious and rapid way to address the still-notable under-representation of people of colour, women and the working classes. Audiences will, in effect, become commissioners.

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Caitlin Moran with sister and co-writer Caz (far left) and Raised by Wolves stars Alexa Davies (middle left) and Helen Monks (middle right)

Just something as cheap and effective as an all-BAME chatshow would be brilliant programming – giving people a space to discuss "issues", but mainly fun/amusing/interesting stuff.

I'd also really, really like to see a post-Internet TV show that worked like Snopes.com – taking the week's most contentious Twitterstorm issues and dealing out some heavy fact-checking. Feels like this creeping post-truth/social-media-echochamber world sorely needs some heavy-assed truth-ferreting.

And I want the world to work urgently on getting Kathy Burke to do something. We're currently wasting one of the world's greatest resources every second she's not on air.