Is the tax man stifling TV talent?

Peter Bennett-Jones, boss of Tiger Aspect, has a rare knack for quality popular TV. Now, as he tells Louise Jury, he is worried about the future

Peter Bennett-Jones is so impeccably polite and well-spoken that it is hard to imagine him getting really furious about anything. He has an apparently charmed life, the chairman of Britain's biggest independent production company, Tiger Aspect, which has won Emmys and Golden Roses galore and filled our TV screens with Mr Bean, The Vicar of Dibley, Fat Friends and Teachers. He has been best mates with Rowan Atkinson, the creator of Bean, and Richard Curtis, the writer of Dibley (and Four Weddings and Notting Hill, of course), since they were all Oxbridge thespians at the Edinburgh Festival in the 1970s. He now lives in Oxford with his wife and three children and gives a large amount of time to supporting Comic Relief.

But just when life ought to be rosy, Peter Bennett-Jones, 47, sees trouble ahead for the television industry. The first cloud on the horizon is the proliferation of available television channels. While there are those in TV who warmly embrace the multi-channel era, Bennett-Jones, a cerebral and cultured man, fears a dilution of standards.

"There's an expanding market, more platforms, but there isn't really an expanding financial pot," he says. "How thinly can you spread the talent and audiences without upsetting the ecology that has given us such brilliant television in the first place? Having more is not necessarily having better."

Of more pressing concern is a bolt from the blue delivered by the last Budget when the Chancellor removed, at a stroke, a tax break which has been boosting the television sector since 1997. Bennett-Jones and others in the industry had expected the rules would be tightened, and Tiger Aspect, for one, had planned accordingly. But the clampdown was far, far worse than expected. With no warning, the scheme has been restricted to films made for cinematic release. Even worse, the measure is effectively retrospective, because it hits shows now in production which were budgeted with the concession in mind.

Bennett-Jones fears the sudden loss of the tax break, which added around 10 per cent to a production's budget, will kill off some smaller independents this year and make life difficult even for the biggest.

"It's disastrous," he says. "We were told it was safe to plan ahead then the Treasury sprung this on everybody. It seems vindictive. The desired effect (of the concession) was to foster and invigorate British production talent and that was exactly what was happening. The Government is saying that this tax incentive was never meant for television, but that wasn't the practice or the message from the Department of Culture in recent years. Margins are so tight that this immediately puts companies from a profitable or break-even position to loss-making without any warning. We're all lobbying to get them to soften the blow."

Bennett-Jones's attack is the more damning because he is not a whinger. He has been a get-on-and-do-it success story. From running the drama society at Cambridge, he eventually moved into television and, when Rowan Atkinson's agent died, became an agent too. He has never worked for anyone – which has its benefits as well as its headaches. "If you want to champion things, it's easier if you control them."

His mantra, if he has one, is that spotting talent is the key. He discovered Reeves and Mortimer in a club in Deptford, south London, and noticed Eddie Izzard at a charity benefit. "On the whole, there are lots of ideas around at any one time, but there's a much greater scarcity of people who can mould the ideas into entertainment. Really exceptional people are a rarity." His management business now represents an oddball range of comics from Harry Enfield to Dylan Moran and The League of Gentlemen.

If you were to try to describe Bennett-Jones himself in terms of comic genius, he has a slight hint of the Stephen Fry English eccentric. He is tall, very proper and rather imposing. He is, in many ways, an unlikely purveyor of some of the most popular entertainment seen in Britain. Yet when he chaired the panel of judges at this year's Montreux Television Festival, he was eloquent in his support for the Golden Rose winner Pop Idol, which he described as "almost perfect television". Then again, he says his "ultimate broadcasting model" is Radio 4. He is not easy to pin down.

His future plans are as eclectic as the man. He has a movie he is hoping to make this summer which, he says, "is not a million miles away from Billy Elliot", a film developed by Tiger Aspect. Another film in the planning is Johnny English, a spoof spy story with Rowan Atkinson. He is behind a musical at the Cambridge Theatre, London, this autumn, written by Tim Firth and using the music of Madness.

Looking to the future, he does not rule out ever selling Tiger Aspect to a bigger media group, seeing Talkback as having acquired significant financial clout from becoming part of Freemantle Media. "If I ever found the right partner, I would do the deal." A partner who had an appetite for what they are good at doing would simply make it easier to get projects off the ground, he says.

In the meantime, he is unpretentiously pragmatic about the televisual art. "We're not looking to reinvent the wheel," he says. But he is a staunch defender of it. "Television is fantastic, by and large. There is something for all tastes and of very high quality. You can't expect to like all the output all the time."