The government needs the guts to stand up to 'the bully in the White House', says director of hit BBC series

The director of hit BBC period drama Wolf Hall says the government "needs to have enough guts to stand up to the bully in the White House" to protect the future of public service broadcasting.

Peter Kosminsky told Sky News' Breakfast with Anna Jones that calls for a streaming levy to support British high-end TV production was urgently needed to stop the "decimation" of the UK industry. His comments follow the release of a new report from the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) committee, calling for the government to improve support measures for the UK's high-quality drama sector while safeguarding the creation of distinctly British content.

Specifically, the report calls for streamers - including Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+ and Disney+, all of which are based in the US - to commit to paying 5% of their UK subscriber revenue into a cultural fund to help finance drama with a specific interest to British audiences. Kosminsky, who made the case for the levy and gave evidence to the committee in January, called global tariffs recently introduced by Donald Trump "the elephant in the room".

He said he feared they would make the government reticent to introduce a streaming levy, but said it was a necessary step to "defend a hundred years of honourable tradition of public service broadcasting in this country and not see it go to the wall because [the government are] frightened of the consequences from the bully in the States". Kosminsky also noted that the streamers would be able to apply for money from the fund themselves, as long as they were in co-production with a UK public service broadcaster.

Earlier this year, a White House memorandum referenced levies on US streaming services, calling them "one-sided, anti-competitive policies" that "violate American sovereignty". In response to the call for streaming levies, a Netflix spokesperson said such a move would "penalise audiences" and "diminish competitiveness".

They added: "The UK is Netflix's biggest production hub outside of North America - and we want it to stay that way." The Association for Commercial Broadcasters and On-Demand Services (COBA) said such a levy "risks damaging UK growth and the global success story of the UK TV sector," and "would risk dampening streamers' existing investment in domestic content and would inevitably increase costs for businesses". COBA said it welcomed the committee's support for targeted tax breaks for domestic drama.

Kosminsky also told Sky News the second series of Wolf Hall was nearly called off just six weeks before it was due to start shooting due to financial pressures, adding: "It was only because the producer, the director, writer and the leading actor all agreed to take huge cuts in their own remuneration that the show actually got made." He said that both he and the show's executive producer, Sir Colin Callender, had "worked on the show unpaid for 11 years on the basis that we would get a payment when the show went into production.