Another year, another Edinburgh International Television Festival. So, how has it gone down with the delegates? allmediascotland.com picked up a handful of instant reactions……
“It has been great, there have been a lot of good sessions. It has been a really stimulating event from my point of view. The best session for me was 10 Things You Should Know about Viewers.” Phil Morrow, managing director, Wild Rover Productions
“It has been very good, I haven’t been to the festival for a couple of years and it is nice to be back. It has a good programme and it is an interesting time with lots of debates. The best session was An Audience with Andy Harries: A Masterclass; he was great. There should be more of those master classes at the festival because I think we need a little bit of that rather than beating ourselves with whips; it is good to hear how people have crafted their business.” William Miller, director of Talent and Brand Ventures, BBC Worldwide
“It has been really interesting as ever, there are still a lot of unresolved questions about the BBC and in the end that is what people will leave thinking about. What is the next thing, what is the next step for the BBC, how is it going to reshape, if it is going to reshape? I especially enjoyed Build Your Own BBC where the panel had to decide which bits to keep and which bits to chuck, it showed the difficulties of the BBC because they didn’t really chuck anything, they wanted to keep it all. There is an agenda-setting element to the Edinburgh Television Festival, there has been for many years, and this year is no exception. A lot of the things that have been talked about this weekend will form the basis of the agenda for certainly the next six months, nine months, twelve months.” Dennis Mooney, TRC Media
“I think Mark Thompson’s speech has made it very, very clear what the real end game here is. There are two big players – BBC and Sky – and a weakened BBC, you have to ask yourself who benefits from that. Overall, numbers have went down a bit but people are starting to really engage with some of the bigger issues now.” Pat Younge, chief creative officer for BBC Vision Productions
“I think it’s been a vintage Edinburgh. We’ve had lots of controversy and lots of debates. Mark [Thompson']s speech set the cat among the pigeons and will give us a lot to chew over for the next few months. It’s been a good year.” Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Channel 4 newsreader
“It can’t be easy organising this kind of thing but it just feels like with the sessions, there is far too much hot air and not enough true debate. To give an example of one session which was based around TV games, audiences and money, we were given a potted history of games. Now, frankly, not everybody working in TV is an idiot and didn’t know the Playstation existed and things like that. Try and get past that and get to the crux of the issues is all I’d say.” Ian MacKenzie, media and projects manager, Nations and Regions at Channel 4
“I always love the Television Festival, I met my wife at this festival so I am sentimentally attached. I always genuinely, properly love it. I did Question Time where I exposed my remarkable ignorance about everything in television and then exposed my terrifying knowledge of Dr Who on a master class. I enjoyed the master class more, I am aware I was appallingly ignorant on Question Time, I didn’t know any of the answers.” Steven Moffat, executive producer and writer, Dr Who and Sherlock
