I had lunch with a very senior figure in PACT’s hierarchy last week, an old friend whom it is always a pleasure to see. We mulled over PACT’s fast-growing power and influence in the television industry and with government too. PACT’s influence expands in tandem with the growth of its ‘Super Indie’ members. This is despite PACT’s own operating budget now being a small fraction of what it was five years ago.

PACT has fewer members now than ever before, but they are richer, and include a genuine international reach and market domination. It made me realise that the UK independent production sector has quietly undergone a revolution within the last decade and the word ‘culture’ has been erased from all PACT’s descriptions of its own remit.

PACT has a clear vision that its job is to ensure its members can make money out of their intellectual property. Everything else that PACT does is secondary to that role. PACT’s members aren’t programme-makers, or writers, or even producers, they are primarily businesses, and they are on a roll.

I have written in this column before that corporate production companies can be very satisfying places to work, but one of the key differences between corporate and broadcast indies is that the former make productions to a brief and take a fee for their efforts. Broadcast indies don’t get a fee, but are expected instead to make their profits by exploiting their productions, or the integral formats of them, elsewhere to recoup their expenses and make a profit. They are effectively speculating on their futures, and some of them are becoming very rich as a result.

But it wasn’t always this way. Twenty years ago, the indies used the language of business to be allowed to make the kind of programmes outside of the broadcasters that they wanted to make. Cultural arguments were battled over much more fiercely than business ones. Business was seen as the necessary medium for making interesting programmes, in the way that petrol is seen as a necessary medium for making cars run.

Michael Darlow’s book ‘Independents Struggle’ gives an excellent account of the birth and rise of the indies. Producers who had left their staff jobs at the BBC and ITV to set up their own companies and make the programmes they cared about, began to get a taste for business growth and to see the potential for real wealth.

When Channel Four’s Chief Executive, Jeremy Isaacs, said of the indies in 1982, “Let a thousand flowers bloom”, I don’t think that Isaacs or any of those indies predicted how many of them would be millionaires twenty-five years later.

Now the indies are run as serious businesses, often headed by teams of people who have never actually made programmes themselves. Nor do they see why they should, when they have the high levels of corporate business skill and training that will make their companies thrive. In some cases, company MDs are stepping aside, although keeping their shares, so that dedicated executives can run their company, while the former MD retires to make the programmes that they still care about.

One of best competitive aspects of these companies is that they can keep their overheads very low. They can rent space, equipment and people as they need them. They have few members of staff, but rely on a huge resource of available freelance production skills and knowledge, which you know all about.

Meantime, it turns out that the last bastion of the cultural importance of television is you! The indies are not cultural organisations, any more than Macdonalds is the guardian of North American traditional cookery.

Any indies which continue to thrive from now on are in the business of making money through television production. You are the one who knew what kind of television programmes you wanted to make when you started in this profession, and you will decide what the cultural impact of TV will be in the future. Television as a cultural medium? It’s your call, not theirs.