Green screen: the march of TV ‘planet placement’

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.

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. All BBC, ITV, Channel 4, UKTV, Sky and Netflix productions in the UK are now required to register their carbon footprint using Albert’s calculator.

In the past decade, Albert has grown into a media machine and is now a subsidiary of Bafta. Its overriding message is that broadcasters have a duty to change the public’s environmental attitudes and behaviour.

At COP26, the UN climate change conference in Glasgow last year, a series of debates held in conjunction with Albert set out the terms of acceptable broadcasting. Broadcasters were encouraged to sign a pledge to make environmentalism central to their activities. This included a commitment to ‘reach more of our audiences with content that helps everyone understand and navigate the path to net zero, and inspires them to make greener choices’; to ‘develop processes that help us to consider climate themes when… commissioning, developing and producing content’; and to ‘recognise the importance of fair and balanced representations of visions for a sustainable future’.

What broadcasters have agreed to is a promise to ensure the correct message filters through to an unsuspecting public. Sky, together with the Behavioural Insights Team (or ‘Nudge Unit’ as it was known when it was set up in 2010 by David Cameron’s government), claims that 75 per cent of people support ‘TV broadcasters “nudging” viewers to think about the environment, whether that’s through documentaries, advertising or increasing the coverage of environmental issues in the news’. Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy has recently been announced as chair of the Albert news consortium. He has been enlisted to ‘explore how the climate change conversation is represented on screen’. Broadcasters must now take into consideration whether their output fits with Albert’s principles. So much for impartiality.

By buying into Albert’s mission, the broadcast media have agreed to combine forces to make sure their output, from soap operas to news, sport to children’s cartoons, puts the planet into programme content. ‘Collectively, our industry reaches millions of people every single day. That represents an unprecedented opportunity to shift mindsets… It’s a chance to shape society’s response to climate change,’ says Albert. The broadcasters agree: ‘We believe broadcasters have a clear role and responsibility to encourage lifestyle changes,’ said Dana Strong, CEO of Sky Group. As an example of where this leads, in the run-up to COP26, the producers of Casualty, Coronation Street, Doctors, Emmerdale, EastEnders, Holby City and Hollyoaks worked together on a climate-change storyline.

But Albert’s influence doesn’t stop there. Production houses can join its certification scheme, in which their company is tracked, traced, monitored and advised on how to do better. The resulting certificate has up to three stars. (Birds of a Feather, for example, has been awarded two stars; Loose Women, three.) As Albert says: ‘This is the only possible way our industry can move forward.’

The war movie 1917 was the first large-scale UK film to gain a three-star Albert certification. It earned this for, among other things, digging trenches sensitively to ‘ensure that as little damage was done to the land and biodiversity as possible’, as well as the hair and make-up department minimising landfill ‘by using bamboo toothbrushes and biodegradable wipes’.

Scripts can also receive praise. I May Destroy You was commended for an episode which, Albert says, deals with ‘how the climate movement engages with black people and black communities and highlight(s) some of the hypocrisies that can lie at the heart of the climate movement when it’s being pushed by privileged middle-class white people’. As for Love Island, Albert applauds the ‘tactful placement’ of ‘personalised, reusable bottles… so much so that over 260,000 bottles were purchased by fans from the latest series alone’.

Albert exerts a huge amount of power in the world of TV and film production. But how many viewers are even aware of its existence, or the rise of ‘Planet Placement’? It may come as news to discover that Albert is in the director’s chair.