Not being in the [NBCU] building was really important to us. We didn’t have ultimate control. If they’d said, ‘You’re in our building,’ then we would have had to have gone, but they didn’t and they’ve let us stay here.
David Granger, Managing Director, Monkey Kingdom (Granger, D., 2016: 145).
Shoreditch, London E1, is cool. Within sight of the City’s iconic Gherkin tower, its warehouses, refurbished and decorated in graffiti and murals, sit alongside a faux-beach open-air cinema complete with deckchairs and Box Park, a mall of repurposed shipping containers offering an “independent and revolutionised retail experience”
(Boxpark, 2017). Once home to Edwardian theatres, textile manufacturers and commodity storage houses, the area now houses a high concentration of creative industry businesses.
I feel strangely displaced here. A suit and white shirt seemed appropriate for meeting the Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of a company, but I feel as if I look like a stranger in a strange land, that I should have landed in the City a few streets away. I bump into a former production student of mine. Strong eyeliner, tattoos visible, dressed bohemian. She fits right in. She works here. I don’t.
The 1930’s Tea Building, an eight-storey structure once home to the Lipton tea-packing operation, is now occupied by a number of service-sector businesses. Many of the building’s original features remain. The bare brick, wooden hinged-door elevators and exposed pipework speak of the building’s industrial heritage but serve as
post-industrial ironic trimmings for the post-modern activities that it now houses. As a promotional website about the building declares, “The Tea Building used to be full of tea. Now it's full of ideas” (Teabuilding, 2017).
Monkey Kingdom (known internally simply as Monkey) was formed in 2001 by David Granger and Will Macdonald after leaving Chris Evans’ Ginger Productions (TFI Friday, 1996-2015; Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, 1994-1995; The Priory, 1999-2002).
Monkey specialised in non-scripted factual and entertainment programmes (My Kind of Town, Monkey Kingdom, Embassy Row, Greengrass Productions for ABC, 2005; The Charlotte Church Show, Monkey Kingdom, 2006-2008; A Comedy Roast, Monkey Kingdom, 2010-2011). In November 2010, NBCU International announced that it had acquired Monkey following the studio’s previous acquisition of the UK’s Carnival
Television (Downton Abbey) and the launch of its joint-venture with Working Title, a British film-production company, WTTV (Andreeva, 2010).
I meet David Granger, the Managing Director (listed on the company website as Creative Director) and am taken through the otherwise open-plan office-space to a glass-walled break-out meeting place - the Engine Room - furnished with sofas and a coffee table. As I set up my recording equipment, David is talking about the importance to him - the company (who don’t wear suits) - of the physical separation from NBCU’s Bloomsbury offices. This arrangement means that NBCU executives have to arrange meetings by email. There are no surprise drop-ins. The most senior people in the Monkey offices are the Monkey team, not the NBCU studio staff.
DG: The independence you get, I suppose, well, it’s two things: One is running your own company, which gives you independence because you are the
architect of your own pitfalls or success; and the other bit is the creative aspect.
Those two dove-tail, really, around the creative side of it, which is you can sort of think up what you like - no-one’s telling you what to do. […] Before NBC we could make any show we wanted. Now we have to be more careful that we are making shows that will have IP value beyond the UK. […] They are an
aggressive American company who set tough targets and expect results and if you don’t deliver those than they come and will have a view on whether you are working effectively or not (Granger, D., 2016: 144-145).
Granger’s reflections on Monkey’s period of so-called ‘true’ independence, between 2001 and 2010, reveal the importance of the concept of negotiated dependencies - associations that facilitate agency - and how, when these dependencies are broken, the risks of disassociation which may follow…
DG: We absolutely went through moments with [pre-owned] Monkey, going, ‘If we don’t get a job in, then we can’t pay [the employees] this month.’ You know,
‘Do we pay ourselves this month, do we not?’ It absolutely got very close sometimes, and scary. […] It’s quite daunting, definitely, because I think you think, ‘It’s creative and just come up with some ideas and make a show,’ well, no, you know? And I think that when you come out of the back of working with Chris [Evans] who just walked into Channel 4 and said, ‘I think I want to do a [show], and they went, ‘Fine, go on and do that,’ […] and you realise it’s not like that. And once you emerge from the shadow of a big beast like Chris Evans, then you think, ‘We made TFI Friday,’ and, of course, people don’t think that.
They think, well, ‘Yes you did, but you were working with Chris and Waheed Ali [Granger’s former employer. Co-founder and Managing Director of Planet 24 (The Big Breakfast, 1992-2002; The Word, 1990-1995)] and all these other people who are brilliant, and now you’re Dave and Will sitting there’ […] and you think, ‘Shit, they might not give us 200 million quid for a series,’ because they might think, ‘They’ve got no idea what they’re going to do!’ (ibid.: 156).
In this chapter, cultural geography is used to consider the demarcation of space and place, both physically and culturally, that helps to define the behaviours and identities
of workers in the independent production sector. In the interview segments and observations above, the importance of both physically situated and bounded locations in which activity takes place - offices, geographic locations - and also conceptually shared and meaningful spaces - socially produced and consumed fields of knowledge and agency - can be identified. Through the production offices of Planet 24 and The Big Breakfast, through to Shoreditch itself, studios’ and broadcasters’ facilities, between independent and in-house production, and team-membership, the situated-ness of production activity, professional identity, and agency is revealed. As such, the power of the concept of independence is related not only to discursive fields but also to physical places and conceptual spaces.
The chapter is divided into three sections. Place considers those areas which can be physically identified, including buildings, office-spaces, geographic regions and countries. Through places’ architecture, interior design, town-planning or the construction of inter- and intra-national boundaries, the assumptions, beliefs,
behaviours and identities of their occupants, and thereby cultures, are both formed and formative. Space, taken as defined by Scott (2000) as sectoral networks and
transactional inter-dependencies which define sets of cultural norms and practices, considers the culturally-bounded situations of production, including the transactions between independent and studio production models. Spaces of production crystallise and are made distinct and local (I use this term not only in the regional sense but in the sense of the creation of distinctly identifiable agencies) through tangible place-ness and intangible ideology (attitudes to independence, creativity, commerce,) while retaining the trans-local networked characteristics fundamental to economic and knowledge exchange. While the localisation of place facilitates the construction of a particular culture, the networked characteristics of space demand inter-cultural transaction and, therefore, translation. As such, a layer of culture which provides a semiotic common ground facilitates these transactions. Production Diasporas
considers the existence of such a shared trans-local culture. History, memory, time and distance become resources which facilitate creative and economic transactions, which transcend place-ness through their networked nature.
The visit to Monkey took place in June 2016. I met first with David Granger, Managing Director, and secondly with Jason Crosby, Chief Operating Officer. The meetings each lasted one hour and were audio-recorded and transcribed in full. In addition to the interviews I observed and photographed the area surrounding the company offices and the exterior and interior of the building and the offices themselves. The interviews are
inter-woven and taken out of sequence in order to address the particular themes of analysis.