Austin Williams

Green screen: the march of TV ‘planet placement’

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Britain’s film and TV industries want to help save the world. That’s hardly news. But one organisation is ensuring the industry focuses its efforts on environmental sustainability: Albert, which also goes by the name of Bafta Albert.

You might have seen the logo – a black footprint – at the end of many TV programmes, from BBC’s Newsnight to Sky Sports News. It’s a rapidly expanding body that few people other than industry insiders have heard of. But Albert is increasingly influential in determining how media institutions programme content, conduct their working practices and set their goals.

It describes itself as an environmental organisation which aims to encourage TV and film companies to reduce their carbon footprint. ‘We are leading a charge against climate change,’ it says. One of its big initiatives is Planet Placement – effectively introducing subliminal messaging. The unspoken idea is that almost everyone in broadcasting must accept Albert’s worldview. In many ways, it is the Stonewall of Sustainability.

‘He’s offsetting his cancelled flight by cutting down a tree.’

How did this happen? In 2010, Albert was founded by the BBC to provide a carbon calculator for the film and TV industry. Its name was proposed alongside another carbon-savings software package called Victoria.

At its launch the following year, BBC Vision’s Sally Debonnaire said that producers who want to ‘reduce their company’s energy bills no longer have to worry if they don’t know where to start’. Albert would do the hard work: providing spreadsheets, targets, training programmes and online tools to help companies be more environmentally friendly. One of its training packages is described as ‘an opportunity for all those in the TV industry to explore how to use authenticity and creativity to prevent the end of the f#<$ing world’. Production companies quickly signed up to demonstrate their sustainable credentials.

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