Drama boom set to launch Space Project
THE team behind the Space Project, Manchester’s newest TV production base, is expecting the 360,000 sq ft site to thrive on the back of a booming UK TV drama industry.
It is the brainchild of Sue Woodward who has already overseen the transformation of an old Sharp Electronics factory in Oldham Road, Newton Heath, into the Sharp Project, a centre for digital and creative firms, as well as TV and music production.
She went on to persuade Manchester City Council to let her take on the former Fujitsu site in Gorton and turn it into a “drama hub” with five production stages across 55,000 sq ft as well as dressing rooms, construction workshops, prop stores, and flexible office space. The site is off Wenlock Way, next to the now demolished estate that was used as a setting for the Channel 4 series Shameless.
The makeover has cost £10.6m with £6.1m coming from the council, £4m from a European Regional Development Fund grant, and £500,000 from the Homes and Communities Agency. Workmen are still applying the finishing touches but the BBC’s children’s channel CBBC is already shooting a new drama called World’s End.
The UK TV production industry has more than 1,500 independent TV production companies, employing 21,000 people with total revenues of £2.2bn, according to the Treasury. It has enjoyed a major boost by the Government’s decision last year to introduce a tax credit for TV drama which offers refunds of up to 20% of UK-based spending for qualifying TV productions. Mrs Woodward says she saw the potential of the Fujitsu site after turning productions away from the Sharp Project.
“Drama is an unbelievable growth sector for telly. We’re really good at making it and TV audiences lap it up, but there’s always been a lack of space. The industry was lobbying for the Government to bring in the same tax incentives for long term drama as for film, and since then there’s been an avalanche of US productions filling up space in London,” she said.
“It’s not just catching the overflow from London. Up here we’ve got Jimmy McGovern’s RSJ Films, Nicola Shindler’s Red Productions and Paul Abbot’s AbbotVision. We’ve got talent in front and behind the cameras. A lot of companies want to stay where the spirit of that drama is coming from. We want to build on and expand the indigenous Northern-based talent.
“We’ve a brilliant relationship with the BBC, Peter Salmon [director of BBC England] has been a fantastic supporter, we’re exactly what they need. With those two things together – the BBC and the local talent – we will get more business. We’ve had Sky in the Sharp Project for four years producing Mount Pleasant and Channel 4’s Fresh Meat for three years, so in London we already have a track record.
“But we’re not here to steal work from London, we’re here to accommodate the expansion of work in the UK because the UK is really full. If we don’t do it, it will be Latvia, or Ireland, or Estonia.”
The aim is to have the Space Project operating at maximum occupancy within three years, and to have created 500 jobs – an essential goal given the facility’s location in one of the city’s most deprived wards.
“The name of the game is to attract very high quality productions which help us to increase the apprentice programme,” says Mrs Woodward. “Drama and TV isn’t just about people in front of the camera. There are runners and caterers, accountants, make-up artists, set builders. There are lots of jobs and that can have ripple effects in a place like Gorton.”
