For 35 years, Nicky Taylor produced television. Delia Smith. Loyd Grossman.
The Hairy Bikers. The BBC, ITV, Channel 5.
Food shows, travel shows, lifestyle shows. Then the phone stopped ringing. Taylor is 60 now.
Four days a week, they stack shelves at a Waitrose in Brighton. They work the checkout.
They process Deliveroo orders. They restock. It is not a lifestyle choice.
It is survival. The money tells the story. Taylor used to earn in a day what they now earn in a week.
The olive oil subscription got cancelled. Not a dramatic collapse, just a small, quiet subtraction from a life that once had room for such things.
No gardening to speak of. No cruise taken. The third quarter of life, as Taylor calls it, is not a winding down.
It is a reinvention born of necessity. The television industry did this.
Not all of television — the top end, the hit dramas, the celebrity-fronted behemoths, those still get made. But the middle ground of factual television, the dependable work that kept people like Taylor moving from one production to the next for decades, that work has been hollowed out. Streaming took viewers.
Social media took attention. The commissions got fewer. The gaps between projects got longer.
Then the gaps became permanent. Taylor is not alone.
This is a story that repeats across the industry now. Freelancers in their fifties and sixties, people who built careers on reliable production schedules, are finding themselves adrift. The networks still exist.
The channels still broadcast. But the volume of work has shrunk, and the people who once filled that volume have been left to find other ways to pay the rent.
What happens next is the question. Taylor is working harder than ever, but the work pays less. The physical toll of stacking shelves at 60 is different from the physical toll of producing a travel show at 40.
The mental shift is different too. One day you are in a production meeting with a national treasure. The next you are checking the sell-by dates on yoghurt pots.
The contrast is not lost on Taylor. The wider fallout is still unfolding.
Other former television executives in similar positions will watch Taylor’s story and recognise their own. The industry has not yet built a safety net for the people it shed. There is no retraining programme for former producers who need to become shelf-stackers.
There is no pension plan for the freelance workforce that spent decades without permanent contracts. Taylor is making it work, four days a week, at a Brighton supermarket.
But making it work is not the same as being fine. The olive oil subscription is a small detail. It is also the whole point.
When a person who traveled the world producing television has to cancel a subscription to olive oil, something has shifted permanently. Not just for Taylor. For the industry that no longer needs them.
For the people who will follow the same path. For the viewers who still watch the shows but do not see the people who made them, now standing at a checkout in a green apron, scanning groceries.
Taylor’s story is not a retirement story. It is not a slowing-down story. It is a story about what happens when an industry moves on and leaves its people behind.
The television industry is changing. The people who built it are finding out what that change actually costs.
