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Drawing on interviews with leading film executives, politicians and industry stakeholders, including Alan Parker, Stewart Till and Tim Bevan, this book provides an empirically grounded analysis of the rise and unexpected fall of the UK Film Council.

[...]Holmes explains that concerns over on-air lotteries that sought to 'buy the audience' were indeed debated in the US in the early days of the quiz show while the BBC often played down the 'educational appeals and cultural uplift' associated with some US programmes for fear of coming across as elitist and paternalistic (pp. 37, 43). Discussing the control exercised by producers of the aforementioned 1950s series regarding the casting of on-screen 'characters' and the creation of a tense and anxious performance in order to produce a dramatic narrative, Holmes goes on to explain how the tensions between ordinary/extraordinary and authenticity/performance have become even more heightened as reality TV has 'developed an appetite for the type of \"ordinary\" people that can guarantee something close to a semi-professional performance' (p. 118). Yet, while the novelty of appearing on television appears to have been replaced by a savvy attitude about what is expected of participants, Holmes reminds us that there has always been a tendency to choose 'ordinary' people to appear on such programming precisely because they are 'extraordinary' in some way. [...]the 'concept of \"performance\" need not be seen as inauthentic, dishonest or calculated ...

In this book we have told the tale of the rise and unexpected fall of the UK Film Council. It is a story rich in characteristically overweening ambitions for the British film industry, of both deft and inept political backdoors dealings, clashing egos and conflicting interests, falling over hubristic tripwires and, in the end, as the decade-long outcome of the banal organisational routines of strategising and decision making, some genuine achievement. We have found the brief history of the UKFC not only to be fascinating but also revealing about the challenges faced by cultural funding bodies as they negotiate competing