Chris Brogden, Tinopolis

In late 2016, Chris Brogden exited Tinopolis to help Gordon Ramsay launch an indie. By January this year, he had returned to the Welsh production group.

The past three years have been a whirlwind for the former Sky entertainment commissioner, who tells Broadcast his time with the celebrity chef ’s All3Media-backed venture gave him the skills to drive Tinopolis forward as director of content.

“I’m a lot more commercial now, much more strategic and, crucially, have more experience of working in the US,” he says, six months into his new appointment. “Working at Studio Ramsay was effectively like running a start-up. I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles and that has served me well – it would serve anybody well, really.”

Back in the fray

Having risen to creative director of entertainment during his first stint at Wales-based Tinopolis, Brogden returned to the fray after the departure of previous content director David Mortimer, who left to join STV Productions as managing director.

Brogden has since spent time “rekindling” the relationship between Tinopolis’ UK production companies and US labels Magical Elves and A Smith & Co, with which he speaks several times each week.

There is work to be done: Magical Elves’ founders Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz recently departed and were replaced by internal promotions Casey Kriley and Jo Sharon. On their appointments, Tinopolis US chair Arthur Smith claimed the move would “set the stage for a new generation of hits” for the Nailed It! and Top Chef producer.

Brogden is reluctant to say too much about the shape these shows might take but the US label chiefs have impressed him with their creativity and work ethic.

“Whenever we talk, I find out they are speaking to all of the suppliers you would expect them to – and more,” he says. “These guys are pitching big new returnable formats to networks, with great talent attached.”

Brogden was left disappointed, however, after Mentorn Media’s recent Paradise Hotel reboot for Fox US had its run reduced following poor early ratings, and it has been widely reported in the US that the reality tentpole has been axed.

He admits the US market can be tough to crack and points to the early teething problems experienced by CBS’s US iteration of ITV2 mega-hit Love Island (pictured above). It was outperformed early in its run by ABC’s mini-golf hybrid Holey Moley, but has since been re-commmissioned.

In his current guise, Brogden acts as a “conduit” between the US labels and the UK, so that format ideas can be passed nimbly between the two territories, fuelling the creative process.

“We can’t set rules and say, ‘Only UK indies can pitch in the UK’, but equally it makes sense that our UK labels do the majority of the pitching over here,” he says.

Question Time producer Mentorn and The Sex Clinic indie Firecracker are the labels that Brogden believes changed the most during his absence.

The former pivoted towards entertainment and is working up returnable formats under the guidance of his former Sky colleague Celia Taylor, while the latter picked up swathes of orders, instituted personnel changes, moved from Chelsea to Tinopolis’ Hammersmith office and established itself in Scotland.

Meanwhile, The Only Way Is Essex commissioner Claire Zolkwer’s fledgling indie Thunderclap Media picked up its debut order, for BBC3 constructed reality format Galdem Sugar, having been set up by Tinopolis in 2017.

On the international sales front, Passion Distribution has also started playing more of a role in the creative process (see News, page 7), working closely with factual indie Pioneer Productions.

Smashing transatlantic silos speaks to Brogden’s approach to running Tinopolis, which is smaller and has far fewer labels than deep-pocketed super-indie rivals like All3Media and Endemol Shine.

“What we can do better than these guys is collaborate and function as a group,” he says. “Our portfolio of companies has far less overlap, none of them are directly competing with each other, and that’s why those particular companies were acquired.”

Tinopolis is dominated by factual, fact ent and current affairs production but does have two drama indies – Hinterland producer Fiction Factory and The Politician’s Husband maker Daybreak Pictures – both of which have been quiet of late.

Would Brogden, who has little drama experience, consider selling the labels and pumping more into making Tinopolis a behemoth of the unscripted world? Not on his watch.

However, he positions these labels as “mainly development companies” owing in part to their refusal to accept co-production financing for projects, instead seeking total IP ownership.

Both are in active discussions with the terrestrials. “Drama mainly needs to be deficit-financed or to pick up cash from other places but we don’t do that so much,” he adds. “Daybreak and Fiction Factory have been set up with low overheads and if they get a big UK commission then that’s brilliant – we keep all the IP.”

Elsewhere, Tinopolis’ position as ‘the only out-of-London super-indie’ is paying dividends as focus turns to nations and regions commissioning.

Channel 4’s forthcoming hubs in Bristol and Glasgow should also be beneficial. “More and more broadcasters are asking us to make shows out of the nations and regions and it’s great that we easily can,” says Brogden.

Many of Tinopolis’ labels are based out of or near to Cardiff, while Mentorn and Firecracker both have Scottish bases, and the latter has recently been scooping up commissions from the fledgling BBC Scotland channel.

Nations and regions

However, Brogden was unimpressed with Ofcom’s recent updates to the rules governing nations and regions programming and wishes the regulator had gone further. It chose not to force producers to have an existing out-of-London base for productions in order to qualify as regional.

Brogden and his team believe this is detrimental to building secure production centres outside the M25.

“It’s a shame because indies can still ‘game the system’,” he says. “The only way the push can work is having people permanently in the nations and regions, so that once a production is finished, they can move on to something else. This is how training works in a freelance-dominated world: you build a skills base that begins to help itself.”

Rather than simply paying lip service, Tinopolis’ commitment to training is evidenced with a host of out-of-London schemes devoted to developing talent pipelines.

For example, sports producer Sunset & Vine ran an apprenticeship scheme during its Glasgow Commonwealth Games coverage in 2014 and some of these trainees were subsequently handed roles on Mentorn’s Robot Wars reboot in Scotland, which ran for three series on BBC2.

The road ahead is tricky and short-term success could be hobbled by the demise of Paradise Hotel in the US, but Brogden’s plan is clear and his next three years will likely be as much of a whirlwind as the past three.

The extent to which Tinopolis is able to capitalise on the opportunities created by having additional commissioning power and talent in the nations and regions could be a defining factor in the super-indie’s mid-term success.

With a warm, approachable manner, Brogden is clearly a good man-manager and he is certainly across these challenges, but he is also grappling with a company that has experienced structural difficulties for a good many years, including ongoing rumours about its potential sale – most recently, former ITN chief executive John Hardie has been rumoured to be eyeing a potential takeover.

Understandably, Brogden refuses to be drawn on this: “If conversations happened then I would of course be involved but this has become such a regular story that we don’t really talk about it anymore.”

There are trials to come and Brogden will hope he can continue putting that newly gained “commercial and strategic” experience to good use.

How he faces up to both the day-to- day and these more long-term structural challenges could define his next three years in charge.