Banijay’s Patrick Holland On Balancing Budgets & Big Ambitions As The Picture Changes For UK Drama

Richard Gadd’s Half Man and the Peaky Blinders movie are 2026 drama moments in-the-making. The world of scripted TV drama has, however, been reshaped in a few short years since Covid, and as Executive Chairman of Banijay UK, Patrick Holland’s task is making sure those scripted moments work for both the broadcasters and streamers and the Banijay bottom line.

In March, Banijay CEO Marco Bassetti told us its scripted revenue will soon top $1B and pinpointed the UK as a hotspot for growth. The exact numbers by genre are not broken down for the UK, but the company says that drama revenue for Banijay UK was up 77% between 2023 and 2025 and will more than double by 2027.

“The shows that are moving are the ones where you’ve got that confluence of great writing, which attracts good cast, and a pragmatic approach; to be able to understand that is better to get a show set up and made, rather than sit there waiting for the millions to roll in,” Holland says.

He points to upcoming Channel 4 project A Woman Of Substance from The Forge, the prodco Banijay acquired in late 2023. “They worked out a way of shooting it that meant that it’s got all of that period grandeur, but without the costs of a full world-building. You’re able to shoot that in a period way that means that you don’t need a cast of thousands.”

Drama money was flowing freely in 2022 when Holland joined Banijay. The Hollywood strikes and streamers reining in spending meant the picture changed and producers and broadcasters in the UK felt the impact of U.S. dollars leaving the room. Several big-ticket projects got stuck in a limbo whereby they have a commissioning channel in Britain but can’t get a U.S. partner to complete the budget and get the show into production.

“’Complacency’ is too strong a word, but there was definitely a sense in which you got a BBC commission and then [assumed] the U.S. money would follow and you’d get it financed,” Holland says. “That definitely changed. There became much more of a sense of ‘That’s not going to work in my market, I’m not taking that show.’ That way in which you comfortably got to £3M [per episode] for a series has disappeared. But that’s not to say that you can’t think of other ways; you can still make a great show for £2M, or you can get there by having great investment partners.”

Recency bias mean that in the times of peak drama everything was great, and post-peak there’s some gloom, but Holland is upbeat about the fundamentals of the UK business. “The BBC is still commissioning 30 dramas a year, which is an amazing amount, and there’s Channel 4, and ITV are at about 20 dramas a year. Netflix is about 10 or 12 dramas. Disney is about eight. You add all those together, you’ve got a very large scripted market in this country.”

In terms of budgets, there is a UK and U.S. divide, but British prodcos can still sit at the top table when it comes to TV drama, according to Holland. “There are high-profile, high-budget shows like Shogunor The Last Of Usor House of the Dragon that are astonishing. These shows are closer to movies than they are to a television series.” But not everything has to be Alien Earth magnitude, he adds, citing Half Manthe new show from Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd and made by Banijay’s Mam Tor. “HBO are the co-commissioners [with the BBC] and it’s not the cheapest show, but neither is it the most expensive on HBO’s roster. But it shows you just what the U.S. thinks of high-end British talent and our ability to tell stories across borders.”

In its recent results, Banijay has pointed to an increase in revenues from its drama business. On Holland’s watch, the UK business has very much speculated to accumulate. His pitch to Marco Bassetti and Banijay Chairman Stéphane Courbit was for a pot of cash that Banijay UK would invest in indies to establish a better foothold in the UK drama biz. A £50M Growth Fund was duly created.

“We were looking at some of the companies that were being acquired at the time in scripted, people like Bad Wolf and Element Pictures, and they were going for very high multiples. The cost of buying into mature companies was seen as prohibitive,” he says. The goal was, therefore, to mostly invest in smaller outfits and scale them.

“Our investment buys a minority chunk of the business and as that company starts to get into profit, we can then acquire the next chunk of equity, and then we can consolidate that company as one of our own,” Holland explains. “The pitch was that this is really good as a way for us, in three or four years, to have a much larger scripted slate. It also sent out a message to the drama community in the UK that we’re really serious about scripted. There was an element of trying to change the perception. We’ve always been seen as a much more as an unscripted business. We were 70% unscripted and 30% scripted and now this year, we will have be 50-50.”

The likes of Kudos and The Forge are sizable enough that they have their own standalone infrastructures, but the other labels feed into a scripted hub at Banijay, which offers shared back-office and resource. Holland says start-up labels need to keeps overheads down and focus on getting green. “When you look at Deadline and you say, ‘Oh, my God, why has that company closed?’ The reason they closed overnight is because they lost a show, and the overhead was just too high. If you can try and de-risk that for companies, it means that it’s much more of a long game.”

Shows going through the scripted hub include the huge projects like Half Manpsychological drama Unchosen (fka Out Of The Dust) from Double Dutch, as well as the returning rebooted detective series Bergerac from BlackLight TV and more modestly-budgeted shows from that label such as Welsh crime drama The One That Got Away.

Banijay has told investors it is doing more business with the streamers and the likes of The Forge’s The Buccaneers for Apple, which has greenlit a third season, and Kudos-produced House of Guiness for Netflix are big-ticket SVOD items.

“The level of ambition that the streamers can bring from the get-go is astonishing,” Holland says, but he also likes the old system of making a show for a PSB or broadcaster and then selling it around the world. “Our creatives want to pitch to the PSBs, because they’re still seen as a massively important place to go to creatively. And commercially, if we can grow a show with a PSB and retain the value over time, that is valuable to us as a business. Kudos, for example, is still making significant money each year out of Broadchurch.”

Talk of working with pubcasters inevitably leads to the chatter linking Holland to any of the top jobs at the BBC. A former channel controller at BBC Two, he is a vocal advocate for the UK’s pubcasters. A move is not, however, in the cards, he says when asked if he will be at Banijay for the foreseeable. “Definitely,” he says. “It’s an enviable position being across such a range of great creatives…I really get a buzz from that. This is one of the best jobs in television, so I’ve got no plans on leaving anytime soon.”

The Script For 2026 And Beyond

The 2026 pipeline includes Fallingfrom one of the creators of AdolescenceJack Thorne. It stars Paapa Essiedu & Keeley Hawes as a priest and a nun who fall in love. Thorne – the UK’s most prolific and successful TV writer – is also adapting Suzanne Heywood bestseller Wavewalker with Kitty Kaletsky and James Norton’s Banijay-backed label Rabbit Track. That banner also has a new Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley) project. Mam Tor, meanwhile, has Open Water for the BBC, based on the lauded Caleb Azumah Nelson novel and which Holland likens to Normal People but in South London. Elsewhere, work is underway on an adaptation of Eloise Ridge’s buzzy debut novel ‘Life’s A Bitch’ after Conker Pictures beat out competition to land the rights.

Returning series are often the real money-spinners and Season 3 of SAS: Rogue Heroes is filming with hopes for a Season 4. Banijay is also hopeful that Kudos’ House Of Guinness comes back for a second run. Thomas Shelby’s journey is set to continue in the Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man film, while two new seasons of the regular series also greenlit for the BBC in the UK and Netflix in the U.S. “The movie will take people’s breath away,” Holland says. “Cillian and Barry Keoghan together—that’s pretty special. Rebecca Ferguson is astonishing in it too.“

Banijay bought Peaky producer Caryn Mandabach Productions and renamed it Garrison Drama. Aside from a sticky tax issue, it looks to be paying dividends with the two Steven Knight-penned series and a feature coming. Banijay has also backed Popcorn Storm, the indie run by Negeen Yazdi and Tom Harper, whose directing credits include Peaky.

Meanwhile, the purse strings of U.S. buyers are loosening. Michael Thorn, boss of the Fox network, talked this week about helping the British drama industry turn its ‘blinking greenlights’ to ‘full greenlights. Elsewhere, a recent report from producers industry body PACT showed a healthy uptick in exports of UK-produced shows, and notably to the U.S.

“As that report recently showed, British drama is massively loved across the world,” Holland says. “The reason why Marco and I talk about our UK scripted investments growing, and being an area where we will invest in more, is because we can see that growth. The global appetite for high-end scripted is not going away, and in UK we’ve got the language, we’ve got the talent, and we’ve got the know-how to be able to make these shows in a way that has an authenticity that works across the world.”