LONDON — It has not been the best of times for Sky One, the flagship entertainment channel of Europe’s biggest paybox BSkyB.
The writers’ strike looks certain to have a big impact on its schedules due to the high amount of U.S. scripted fare it carries: “Lost,” “24” and “Prison Break” are all Sky One shows in Blighty.
Its reach has been hit hard by the success of the U.K. digital terrestrial platform Freeview (Sky One is absent from the Freeview channel lineup), and BSkyB’s dispute with cable combo Virgin Media, which no longer carries the channel.
These factors have helped rivals like niche weblets ITV2 and E4 gain ground at Sky One’s expense.
To compound the channel’s difficulties, its attempts to grow a dependable portfolio of returning homegrown domestic shows have been, to say the least, erratic.
Sky One’s controller Richard Woolfe, therefore, has much to be thankful for in what his team have achieved courtesy of a former British soap star who has helped create an award-winning presenter-led documentary series.
Last year “Ross Kemp on Gangs,” made by Tiger Aspect, confounded the skeptics by winning the BAFTA for best factual series; the eponymous presenter first found stardom by playing a lead role as a tough guy in the BBC blue-collar sudser “EastEnders” some two decades ago.
Remarkably, this was Sky One’s first ever BAFTA in almost 20 years on air. In the show, Kemp, the erstwhile ex-small screen hard man, played the earnest straight guy as he traveled the globe in search of some very unsavory characters.
Equally remarkable was the fact that “Ross Kemp on Gangs” won the silverware despite strong competition from a BBC documentary in which Stephen Fry talked movingly of his life with mental illness, “The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive.”
After more than three series of rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s most violent criminals, Kemp’s new Sky One series takes him into another kind of macho culture — the world of the ordinary British soldier fighting the Taliban in the chaos that is Afghanistan.
It is anyone’s guess if “Ross Kemp in Afghanistan” will captivate another jury at BAFTA, not that Sky One needs to worry on that score.
The show’s success (a recent episode beat the final of E4’s “Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack”) confirms that in Kemp the channel has created the kind of rock solid brand that all networks crave in a multi-channel, multi-platform world.
The formula for “Ross Kemp in Afghanistan” is essentially the same as that deployed for three series of “On Gangs.”
Once again the actor turned TV guide to scary places takes auds to the heart of the battle zone — risking his life in the process.
It is easy to be cynical about these shows that may or may not glorify violence, but there is no denying their meticulous production methods that suggest high budgets — or the appeal of Kemp’s deceptively prosaic style.
The Sunday Times often acerbic critic A. A. Gill got it about right when he wrote: “He talks haltingly, his observations are broad brush and not particularly cute, but he has masses of intense empathy and a dogged inquisitiveness that borders on bravery, and he says what most of us would say if we were there.”
Brand Kemp now looks set to run and run on Sky One — provided another, bigger network doesn’t poach him and offers his agent a better deal for the actor.
Programmers at ITV, which once had Kemp on their books playing the central character in action saga “Ultimate Force,” must be kicking themselves for failing to realize the former-soap star’s great potential as a gifted presenter of documentaries that win ratings and gain critical plaudits.
The only real downside for auds is that because Sky One operates on a tight purse, Kemp’s docus are endlessly repeated, a strategy that risks undermining the presenter’s popularity.
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