In Brighton, a woman with 35 years in television behind her now stacks shelves and works the till at a Waitrose supermarket.
Nicky Taylor is 60. She spent her career as a showrunner and executive producer, and she says the freelance work simply dried up. Trade outlet C21Media reported on her story after she described the switch in a first-person piece for The Daily Mail.
From commissioning editor to checkout
Taylor is no minor name in British factual and daytime TV. C21Media lists her as the creator and executive producer of series including Channel 5’s reality travelogue franchise Celebrity 5 Go…, Love Your Garden and Cowboy Builders. She also worked as a factual and daytime commissioning executive at ITV, and spent six years as an executive producer at Ricochet, a production company backed by Warner Bros International Production.
Then the commissions thinned out. “Looking back, the writing had been on the wall for a while,” she wrote. The signs were small at first: “fewer TV commissions, longer gaps between projects, the phone ringing a little less often than it used to.” For most of her career, she said, one series ended and another was already lined up.
She pointed to two possible reasons. Streaming and social media had hit the middle ground of factual television hard. But she also wondered whether her age played a part.
Piecing together a living
Taylor did not wait to be rescued. “I didn’t take it lying down,” she wrote. She updated her CV, rang former colleagues and worked her network, and concluded that nobody was coming to save her. “If I wanted a future, I was going to have to build it myself.”
That meant taking whatever paid. Besides the Waitrose shifts, she looks after dogs, does care work and helps out at an after-school science club, all of it to cover the mortgage on her home.
She says she is far from alone. “Talented editors with extraordinary CVs were – and are – struggling to find work,” she wrote. Producers and directors she knew had become Uber drivers and delivery men, and people who had spent decades making some of Britain’s best-loved programmes were stitching together freelance jobs to pay the bills. C21Media said the domestic screen sector has struggled since the Peak TV bubble burst.
Her article drew dozens of messages of support on LinkedIn from industry colleagues, according to C21Media, and many admitted to their own struggles to find employment.
The story surfaced as Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy announced that the government would soon name a “creative freelance champion”, an appointee meant to speak up for self-employed workers in the creative sector.
