Spilling the T with BAFTA CEO Jane Millichip

With a career spanning almost 35 years, Jane Millichip makes a formidable CEO for BAFTA due to her breadth and depth of knowledge on the screen industry’s needs. As a purpose-led individual, she has carved a career that has served her and the fellow creatives she has nurtured from all over the world. Together TV ’s Head of Marketing Francesca Aita sat down for a cuppa to get the T from Jane on BAFTA’s role through the turbulent times faced by the screen industries and her profound advice for governments.

FA: What are your career milestones that led you to where you are today?

JM: Apparently, when I was eight, I rushed into the living room, hands on hips, announcing I was going to become a foreign correspondent. I always had an interest in writing and the news. I did my degree in French, Italian, and Political Science at the former Sheffield Polytechnic [now Sheffield Hallam University]. It was a great academic and life experience.

My first job was at Haymarket Publishing as an editorial assistant on Car and Accessory Trader. My first published article was three pages on in-car air fresheners! After that, I thought, “I can write about anything”. I quickly moved on to media titles, editing an international magazine called TV World, about the TV industry.

Despite editing it for four years, I felt like a bit of a fraud because I hadn’t worked in TV. Then, by chance, I was offered a job in television distribution. Since then, I’ve worked as a distributor, run a production company in New Zealand, and been a commissioning editor for a cable channel. I’ve alternated between creative and commercial roles. I was at Sky for nine years, building departments and businesses, and I was on Sky Studio’s launch team as Chief Content Officer. After that, I felt ready for a new challenge.

FA: Why did you want to move?

JM: I wanted to foreground a sense of purpose. While Sky was brilliant, I needed to refocus. I’ve always needed a purpose in my roles, even in commercial ones, which is why I’ve been a trustee of a small environmental charity called SEEd (Sustainability and Environmental Education).

For the first time, I left a job without having another lined up. I thought I might never work again, but I needed time to decompress and think. During that time, the opportunity at BAFTA came up. It was a robust recruitment process for a charity, but that made me really look into BAFTA and fall in love with it. I’ve been here almost two years now.

FA: What do you think screen industries will look like in the future?

JM: I hope they will sit at the heart of Britain’s cultural landscape. The screen industries are vital for the health and wealth of society. Whether it’s entertainment, a challenging documentary, or a game tackling loneliness, screen industries create important content for community and society.

Humans have always told stories; it’s hardwired into us. Look at cave paintings or the Australian song-lines. Storytelling is essential to making sense of society, driving it forward, and challenging ourselves. It’s also a key part of the economy. People often talk about the ‘soft power’ of the creative industries, but we should drop the “soft” – it’s just power. The UK has a strong reputation for pushing the envelope in narrative form, and we need to nurture that reputation.

I would hope governments put creative learning back into the heart of the curriculum. Whether you want a career in the screen industries or not, critical thinking and creativity are essential skills.

FA: How central is creativity in all this?

JM: Creativity is incredibly central, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We need to foster creative, critical thinking from an early age. We should celebrate experimentation and curiosity because they drive storytelling forward.

Jobs for life are unlikely in the screen industries going forward. How do we support sustainable, agile careers? It starts with education. BAFTA’s work in inspiring future practitioners and consumers of the Screen Arts is vital. It’s important we cherish this part of our cultural landscape.

FA: What are the biggest challenges the screen industries need to address from your experience?

JM: The industry is always changing. Current challenges include the economy, concerns around AI, and the balance between consolidation and fragmentation. What I’ve seen is an agile industry that adapts incredibly well to change. For example, technology provided the catalyst for linear channels to adapt to time-shifted TV and the streaming world. Meanwhile, the need for storytelling remains constant.

At a skills level, we need to balance the need to encourage diversity and inclusion for career starters with the need to improve mid-career progression for under-represented groups - ensure people have the skills and resilience to manage agile and sustainable careers, particularly where job secure is far from guaranteed. Currently, those who face socio and economic inequality are less likely to withstand the regular economic downturns we experience in the screen arts. To prevent a talent drain we need people enablement and system change.

FA: What is BAFTA’s role in the industry?

JM: Our purpose is broad: we enrich the cultural landscape, drive progress, level the playing field, and celebrate and inspire. Our four mission themes are: Champion, Change, Equip, and Create.

First, we champion the screen arts within the industry and for the public. We aim to change industry standards by enabling system changes and introducing best practice, including work on diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), social mobility, and levelling up. Equip is where we work directly with individuals through our career development programmes like BAFTA Breakthrough and Elevate. This year’s focus is on social mobility.

Lastly, we create content through televised awards, industry programmes, masterclasses, and debates. We bring together film, games, and television practitioners to share best practices. Our membership of creatives and practitioners informs everything we do, and we rely heavily on their expertise.

FA: How can BAFTA help the industry through the current challenges?

JM: We recently rebooted our impact strategy to focus on how BAFTA can impact more people, more positively, more often. We do a lot of good work, but we need to scale it up. BAFTA is uniquely positioned as the only arts charity that represents film, games, and television. We aim to convene efforts across the screen arts and help foster creative convergence.

We’re also working on diversifying our membership. We’ve set targets based on ONS data and are tracking social mobility.

One of the things that we're debating now is what's phase two of the social mobility work. We have the toolkit. We indexed towards social mobility in some of our industry programmes last year. For example, Shane Meadows gave the David Lean lecture , it was a great lecture where he spoke a lot about his background. We are working on foregrounding this work and finding our role. And of course, the other huge area of work is on climate action, through BAFTA albert!

FA: Tell us more about your environmental work with BAFTA albert.

JM: I’m fortunate to have inherited a decade of hard work on BAFTA albert. It’s about ensuring environmental sustainability is infused into all of BAFTA’s work, not siloed.

Our mission themes – Champion, Change, Equip, and Create – apply to BAFTA albert as well. Traditionally our strategy has focused on two key areas; decarbonisation of production, specifically our certification and Carbon Action Plan for TV; and climate content, working with creatives to embed climate into storytelling across the screen arts. We have recently rebooted the BAFTA Albert strategy to include biodiversity, and to collaborate with major broadcasters and streamers on cross-sector standardisation and Scope 3 ambitions. ?

FA: How is BAFTA supporting creative professionals during this significant time of upheaval?

JM: Last summer, we surveyed our members, especially freelancers, about their work levels. Over two-thirds reported having significantly less work than before the pandemic, and a third were considering leaving the industry.

We’re adapting our industry programme to focus on essential skills for the future. Whether through networking, mentoring, financial planning, or skill-building, we’re supporting our members and helping new entrants into the industry.

It's really important to us that colleagues In this sector are able to build sustainable careers. We've been collecting data on social mobility and listening to our members to understand the challenges they face.

FA: Here we come to the Pass it On question. A previous guest asked: If you had one superpower, what would it be?

JM: The ability to breathe underwater! I love scuba diving and would love to observe the underwater world without disturbing it with loud breathing apparatus. Years ago, I did some reef conservation work in Indonesia. During one expedition, I found a nudibranch [sea slug] we couldn’t identify. It was logged as an unknown species and was briefly named “Millichip” It’s very unlikely it was a new species, but for a while, there was an orange, hairy nudibranch called Millichip!

Check the previous conversations with: Roberta Lombardi, Meta ? Jack Eatherley, Do/Social ? Jane Stiller, ITV - Katie Jackson, Channel 4 - Paul Davies, BBC ? Zai Bennett, Sky ? Camilla Arnold, BSLBT ? Owen Jenkinson, Freeview ? Paul Amadi, British Red Cross ? Jennifer Carey, Channel 4 ? Justin Bairamian, BBC Creative ? Satmohan Panesar, ITV