The 50th Edinburgh TV Festival will be the last to be held in the Scottish capital, with the event moving to South Manchester from next year. A charity-run industry gathering that charges a full-price ticket of more than £1,500 is shifting venue after saying high costs had forced it to look elsewhere. The TV Foundation says the move will "radically reduce the costs" for attendees. That’s the official line. The reality is a festival built around access, networking and who gets to be in the room has become so expensive that even its own organisers are now shopping for a cheaper stage.
Who Gets In, Who Gets Left Out
Campbell Glennie, the charity’s chief executive, said the move was about "exploring how we can reduce costs for delegates and make the festival open to more people." The TV Foundation says it makes no profit from running the festival and instead puts funds into programmes to improve training and widen access, with several sessions this year aimed at tackling the class gap in the industry. That class gap, though, is not some accidental side effect. It sits right at the centre of the event, where delegates pay to mingle, pitch, and hope the right commissioner notices them before the coffee goes cold.
Adeel Amini, a freelance executive producer who founded the campaign group The TV Mindset to support casual workers in the sector, said: "The price of the ticket is already ridiculous and unaffordable, especially when the industry has been going through a crisis and so many people are out of work." He added that the conference showed how "two-tier the industry is," with a divide between those who pay their own way and executives whose companies pick up the tab. "It’s there for commissioners and production companies to go and mingle and have these parties and either lament the state of the industry without doing anything much about it or just give themselves a round of applause without acknowledging the workers at the heart of it," he said.
Sydney Lima, a documentary presenter and co-founder of the Rich Parents Club, said members were reporting that TV was becoming "an increasingly gatekept industry," and suggested that recent hits from working-class writers such as the Channel 4 series Big Boys would no longer be commissioned. "As funding cuts continue, employers rely on smaller pools of talent, more often than not, from within their own networks – or even gene pool," she said. That’s the polite language of exclusion stripped bare. The gate stays up. The same names keep circulating.
Brussels-Style Access, Local Disappointment
The move also exposes how local and national power jostle over prestige events while ordinary workers are left to absorb the costs. Glasgow had initially been on the table, requiring only a 40-minute train ride west, but Holyrood ministers threw their weight behind a campaign to keep the festival in Edinburgh. Off the record, some TV figures blamed the Scottish government for the failed attempt to keep the event in Scotland. Manchester won instead, backed by Andy Burnham, then the Greater Manchester mayor, who promised the necessary "infrastructure, talent, ambition and creativity" to host the festival from next year.
At Edinburgh’s valedictory gathering, many delegates did not hide their disappointment. One Scottish television producer said the decision reflected a problem in the industry, where production companies south of the border have brought London-based workers to film in Scotland and failed to hire local talent. "It’s a fucking joke," they added. The line lands because it’s familiar: work arrives, outsiders are flown in, local people are told to be grateful for the crumbs.
The festival’s relocation comes as the wider industry is under enormous financial pressure. The BBC is shedding up to 2,000 staff, ITV and Sky are merging broadcast operations and Channel 4 is under pressure. Traditional UK broadcasters are struggling to compete for audiences and advertising money against the rise of deep-pocketed US-based streaming titans, such as Netflix and Amazon. The market sorts the sector, then calls the wreckage competition.
This year’s main MacTaggart lecture was delivered by YouTube’s Pedro Pina, who hit back at proposals to make public service content more prominent on his platform, now the second most-watched media service in the UK. As British commissioners cut their TV production budgets, freelancers are bearing the brunt, making it harder to find funds for networking events like the TV festival. The people doing the work are squeezed first. The platforms and commissioners keep the microphones.
The Alternative Event Machine
On Thursday evening, television executives, performers and fringe organisers gathered at Edinburgh Fringe Central for the launch of an initiative for the media and creative industries from 2027, funded in part by the Scottish government. David Smith, director of Screen Scotland, which is partnering with the Fringe Society on the project, said it was not a replacement for the TV Festival. "It will be inclusive of TV, but it won’t be a TV festival," he said. The Scottish culture secretary, Màiri McAllan, said it was "hugely disappointing that a London-based company took the decision to move the Edinburgh International TV festival," but said the SNP government was now focused on Screen Scotland’s alternative and was "working with the TV, media, and festivals sectors to ensure that we deliver an unmissable event."
That’s the electoral circus version of adaptation: the festival moves, the ministers issue regret, and a new initiative is assembled with public money and sector partners to keep the machine running. Smith said plans were still being formed on what that event would look like, but added: "I hope to get back to some of the chaos of the original TV Festival, the fact that it was slightly more seat-of-your-pants."
Daran "Jonno" Johnson, the head writer on this year’s surprise hit SNL UK, said the benefit of the two festivals being in the same city was that "so many industry people are suddenly in town in the last week" that it was helpful "to have that pipeline between fringe comedy and telly." Kimberly Hart-Simpson, a Manchester-based writer and actor whose one-woman play Amnesia won a Scotsman Fringe First award this year, said her concern was "whether TV industry professionals will continue to commit to attending the arts festival to discover and support emerging talent."
Alex Cartlidge, co-director of Country Mile Productions, said at an event at the fringe venue Shedinburgh that if TV companies had the choice next year between going to Manchester or coming here, "99% of people will come here." That’s the blunt arithmetic of cultural power. The festival follows the money, the money follows the gatekeepers, and the workers are told the system is open because someone somewhere has a bursary.