New rules to protect ‘distinctively British’ public service broadcasting’

[Solari]

Without wishing to delve into politics...

Canada has had very strict rules on Canadian-made content for many, many years - radio stations are required to play at least 40% Canadian music (so anything written and/or performed by a Canadian, and/or recorded in Canada); TV channels typically have to make sure that at least 55% of what they show (though this figure changes depending on the channel - film channels, for example, can get away with 30%) throughout the year is made in Canada (though I believe repeats of existing programmes can count towards this). While I doubt they will introduce anything that strict here in the UK, it is (I think) interesting to see how similar rules are already implemented elsewhere.

What’s the definition of Canadian for tv and film purposes? There is a lot of American set content that is made in Canada - does that count as Canadian even thriugh it’s funded by American companies.

It has to have been at least partially funded by a Canadian company - American-Canadian co-productions qualify as Canadian content ('CanCon'), but stuff that happens to have just been filmed in Canada doesn't. For example, The Tudors qualified as CanCon, as it was an Irish-Canadian co-production, whereas, say, The Handmaid's Tale doesn't, as it's merely filmed in Canada. News and current affairs does count towards CanCon, so a lot of the legacy commercial networks use that to count towards much of their quotas.

This sounds very similar to the quota that Australian TV has where a decent percentage of content has to be Australian made. Neighbours has survived on both 10 and 11 because of it.

Funny, that - I'm pretty sure Neighbours is only still running because it gets good ratings here. It was shunted off to 11 (or 10Peach, as it's now known - think a sort of Australian E4) a decade ago and has remained there since.

(Funny story about that - in 2011 10 decided to make a big show of beefing up its news output, and replaced its 6pm hour, which had hitherto consisted of The Simpsons and Neighbours, with more news. It failed miserably, and after about a year they ended the experiment. The Simpsons moved back to its 6pm slot on the main channel - but not Neighbours.)