The People Who Choose What You Watch: Northern TV Executives Changing the Story From the Inside

Every television programme begins as a decision. Before the cameras roll, before the cast is announced, before a single frame is shot — somebody, somewhere, says yes. Or no. That person, whether they carry the title of commissioning editor, channel controller, or head of drama, holds more influence over what British audiences watch than almost anyone else in the industry. And for most of television's history, that person has been sitting in an office in London.

The slow but meaningful shift of commissioning power northwards is one of the most significant structural changes in British television in a generation. It's not a revolution — the industry's centre of gravity hasn't moved dramatically — but the accumulation of individual appointments, institutional relocations, and deliberate policy decisions is beginning to reshape what stories make it to screen, and whose.

How the System Used to Work

To understand why Northern commissioners matter, it helps to understand how deeply geography has shaped British television's editorial culture.

For decades, the commissioning process was almost entirely concentrated in London. The major broadcasters — BBC, ITV, Channel 4 — operated from the capital, and their decision-making hierarchies reflected that. Stories pitched from the North faced an additional, rarely acknowledged obstacle: they had to convince people who didn't live there, hadn't grown up there, and often had only a tourist's understanding of what Northern life actually looked like.

The result wasn't necessarily malicious — it was structural. Commissioners greenlight what they understand, what resonates with their own experience, what feels true to them. When the commissioners are almost uniformly from a particular class, a particular region, a particular set of cultural reference points, the output inevitably reflects that.

"There's a reason so many Northern stories on television used to feel like they were made for a Southern audience to observe rather than a Northern audience to recognise themselves in," says one senior figure in the industry, speaking candidly. "Because they were. The people making the decisions weren't the audience for the story."

The Institutional Shift

The BBC's decision to move significant parts of its operation to Salford, culminating in the opening of MediaCityUK in 2011, was genuinely transformative — though the full effects took years to materialise. Relocating commissioners and executives to the North wasn't just a logistical change; it was a cultural one. People who had previously experienced Northern England primarily through the programmes they commissioned about it now lived and worked in it.

Channel 4's move of its national headquarters to Leeds in 2019 continued the process. The broadcaster's commitment to spending a significant proportion of its commissioning budget outside London has had tangible effects on the kinds of projects that get developed. When the people deciding what to make are embedded in Northern communities, going to Northern pubs, sending their kids to Northern schools, the editorial lens shifts — subtly but meaningfully.

This isn't to suggest that institutional relocation is sufficient on its own. Plenty of commissioners have moved north and brought their London assumptions with them. Location is a necessary but not sufficient condition for genuine change.

The Individuals Making a Difference

What matters as much as where commissioners are based is where they're from — and increasingly, the industry is seeing the rise of executives whose Northern roots are genuine rather than administrative.

These are people who grew up watching television in houses where the heating went off at nine, who understand the rhythms of Northern social life not as research but as lived experience, who know what a story set in Sunderland or Huddersfield or Wigan should feel like from the inside.

Several such figures — working across drama, documentary, and factual entertainment at major broadcasters and streaming platforms — have spoken to Up North TV about what difference it makes to have that background when you're sitting across the table from a writer pitching a Northern story.

"I can tell immediately when something is authentic and when it's been written from the outside looking in," says one commissioning editor based in Manchester. "It's not always conscious on the writer's part — they're not being dishonest. But certain details are wrong. Certain rhythms are off. Certain assumptions about how people relate to each other, what they value, how they talk about money or family or work — they're just not quite right. And if you don't recognise that, you greenlight something that Northern audiences will find alienating."

Representation Behind the Camera

The conversation about representation in television has rightly focused on what appears on screen — the diversity of characters, the range of stories told. But representation behind the camera, particularly at the decision-making level, is arguably more structurally important. The commissioner's choice shapes everything that follows.

There's a growing body of evidence — anecdotal but consistent — that Northern commissioners are more likely to champion stories about working-class life, about communities that have experienced deindustrialisation, about the texture of Northern social experience, than their counterparts whose frame of reference is different. This isn't a matter of simple geography determining editorial taste; it's about the difference between understanding something intellectually and knowing it in your bones.

It also matters for the pipeline of talent. When a writer from Middlesbrough or a director from Bradford sees someone who grew up somewhere like them now holding a commissioning role at a major broadcaster, the message is clear: this industry has room for you. That signal — rarely articulated, enormously powerful — shapes who applies for development schemes, who pitches ideas, who believes their story is worth telling.

The Work Still to Do

None of this should be taken as a suggestion that the battle is won. The Northern commissioning community remains smaller than it should be relative to the population and cultural output of the region. Certain genres — high-end drama in particular — still skew heavily towards London-based decision-making. And the informal networks of the industry, the relationships built over drinks at industry events and lunches in Soho, still tend to exclude those who aren't physically proximate to where those conversations happen.

There's also a legitimate question about whether institutional Northern-ness is enough without active commitment to Northern storytelling. A commissioner based in Leeds who consistently greenlit stories set in Chelsea would be geographically Northern without being editorially so.

But the direction of travel is encouraging. The people now sitting in positions of genuine power — the ones who can say yes to a script, who can fight for a budget, who can insist on authentic casting — increasingly include voices that the North would recognise as its own.

And in an industry where a single decision can determine whether a story reaches millions of people or disappears into a development drawer, that matters more than almost anything else.

"The North has always had extraordinary stories," says one executive, leaning back in her Leeds office with the kind of quiet certainty that comes from believing something deeply. "What it needed was more people in the right rooms to make sure they got told. We're getting there. Slowly. But we're getting there."