James Graham, the creator of Sherwood, Dear England And Brexit: The rude war, has called for the creation of “new universes” and more risks to be taken instead of television gatekeepers “falling back on proven intellectual property”.

Delivering the MacTaggart Lecture at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival, the prolific British author made a passionate plea for greater working-class representation in the television industry, while criticising the ongoing temptation for commissioners to opt for “originals, adaptations and extended universes”.

Graham used the annual platform in Edinburgh to argue for “new universes, which means – taking risks.”

He added: “New stories must be at the heart of commissioning – scripted or unscripted, factual or fictional … even in the most difficult circumstances where the temptation is great – and this is what we are experiencing now – to fall back on tried and tested intellectual property.”

The industry should view “risk” as a long-term, “vital” investment in the future health of the sector, Graham said at a festival where many British TV doyens called for greater risk-taking.

He said that the lead must lie with public broadcasters, who make their programming decisions “beyond commercial constraints”. However, he also acknowledged that streaming services had been “inventive” and “headstrong” and that the industry had benefited from this.

“But if there is to be an argument for the BBC in this modern, cross-platform environment – and there must be – alongside ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5… then it is certainly this one,” he added. “If you talk to American scriptwriters or programme makers, they are baffled by our complacency towards our public service broadcasters. They wish they had a BBC.”

The situation has been made worse by the recent years, when a “climate of extremes” has prevailed in the television industry, Graham added.

Two years ago there was “overproduction” and “not enough staff to fill all the orders,” he explained, and now it feels like “a drought, a desert” and “many of my fellow writers … are in limbo.”

He added: “Perhaps at some point we can ask ourselves how it is even possible that an industry that produces one of the most in-demand products in the world – content, entertainment, stories – has drifted into a global business model where so few are able to make money from something that has never been so in demand.”

Graham also took the opportunity to mock the notion that artificial intelligence will replace human creativity. “Despite all of AI’s so-called efficiency benefits and its very real threat to jobs, I firmly believe that it will actually be the audiences who reject its interference in ‘writing,’ content creation and art,” he added. “AI cannot and will never be able to take you by the hand. It will never feel quite the same again. And we need to remind people of that.”

Gareth Southgate and a “storytelling crisis”

Graham’s BBC drama Sherwoodloosely based on murders in a former mining town two decades ago, near where the author grew up, will soon air its second season, while also broadcasting the BBC Dear England based on Gareth Southgate’s English football team, adapted from his hit play starring Joseph Fiennes.

Graham is fascinated by the resurgence of English football under Southgate, saying: “Gareth recognised early on that the crisis facing England – the national football team, but I would say more broadly – was a crisis of storytelling,” which he used as a wake-up call to British creatives to return to the roots of storytelling.

“I believe that many of the crises we have faced in Britain politically and socially in recent years have been a crisis of storytelling,” he added. “The paralysis and stagnation.”

“Squeamish” towards the working class

He made a passionate plea for greater working-class representation in the UK television industry, as currently only 8% of people working in television are from the working class – a 12-year low. “We’re squeamish about defining that and so we still exclude it quite often from industry measures of diversity,” he said.

In addition to his criticism of franchises and intellectual property, Graham said that long-running, recurring series and soap operas that once served as a “training ground” for the voice of the working class had been “cut or canceled,” while there had been “a near collapse of the individual drama series as a whole.”

He proposed the creation of a new Game for the day Format with the best voices of the country’s working class such as Russell T Davies, Michaela Coel and The respondent Writer Tony Schumacher.

“I know that your passion for politically engaged and socially minded work matches mine,” he added, addressing the TV commissioners in the room. “And if that work is more in the individual TV movies and the mini-series, even though they are not obviously or immediately commercial – then we have to fight for those. Those who shine a light on injustice – from the poverty of the Cathy, come home 50 years ago to the postal scandal of today.”

On the subject of representation, Graham pointed out that BAFTA had only just begun to include classes in its diversity standards, and he laid out a plan to improve the situation.

“I would like to join others in our sector in asking that we begin to recognise class as a consistent and specific feature in our forms of diversity monitoring,” he added. “That it becomes not just a target, but a concrete component of industry bodies such as BAFTA – which have already shown demonstrable progress in these areas – when it comes to membership and nominations.”

Just in time, the festival unveiled a new Impact Unit to create “a permanent function that will help shape the way the television industry works to be open to all; a place where new perspectives, ideas and stories can flourish.”

Last year’s MacTaggart show was hosted by Louis Theroux, and other recent speakers include Coel, Jack Thorne and former Channel 4 news director Dorothy Byrne.