Best and worst of Britain's subsidised film-makers revealed

In the balance ... the majority of subsidised films in the UK (James Marsh's Man on Wire excepted) haven't repaid their debts. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Who is Britain's most commercially successful film-maker of the past five years – at least among those backed by lottery money from the UK Film Council? Take a bow, James Marsh. His Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire repaid 100% of its UKFC investment, and his chimpanzee documentary Project Nim is set to follow suit.

According to figures published quietly in Hansard last week by culture minister Ed Vaizey, only two other films since 2006 – St Trinian's and The King's Speech – have so far returned their lottery cash in full. Streetdance 3D is also expected to do so.

And who must own up to being the least successful of Britain's lottery-subsidised film-makers? According to the figures, that unwanted honour goes to Stephen Frears. Two of his recent films have received some ?1.7m in funding from the UK Film Council – ?1m for Cheri and ?780,000 for Tamara Drewe – but have yet to pay back a single penny.

The information has come to light after Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt asked Vaizey to provide details on returns from all films backed by the UKFC, and he duly obliged in a written answer. Vaizey identified 33 films which recouped some or all of the lottery funding they were awarded between April 2006 and March this year, when the UKFC closed and its duties passed to the British Film Institute.

But this answer failed to mention all those movies that have paid back nothing. A trawl through the data on the UKFC website reveals a further 25 films in the same time period – between 2006 and 2009 – which received at least ?300,000 but have paid back precisely zero. (For the sake of fairness, our research excluded films from 2010 that haven't had time to earn anything, as well as experimental projects awarded less than ?300,000).

By 31 March 2011, the date of its shutdown, the UKFC had, from its investment of ?41.1m into these 58 films, earned a grand total of ?8.1m. That 20% rate of return may seem modest, but many films – particularly those from 2009 – still have a lot of earning ahead of them.

There are some obvious quirks on the list. The King's Speech has officially recouped 95% because the UKFC gave the producers a 5% share – and is likely to single-handedly double the average recoupment figures when its profits start to flow back to the BFI over the next few years.

Marsh's Project Nim is currently showing a zero return, but that will change dramatically when its recent American sale to HBO is banked. Even Tamara Drewe is expected to save some of Frears's blushes by paying 20-30%, although the expensive Cheri, with its ?23m budget, is almost certainly a lost cause.

There are some unexpected success stories, however. Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy has paid back a surprisingly robust 87% of its ?1.2m award, despite only grossing ?5m worldwide. Jane Campion's Bright Star managed an 81% payback from just ?8m in receipts. Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham has already returned 80% from a ?9m box office take. All earned their money from strong foreign sales.

By contrast, Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray grossed ?15m worldwide, but has reportedly repaid nothing, a victim of its sizable budget and an underlying deal structure which left the UKFC at the back of the queue for repayment.

Other losers include expensive flops Brideshead Revisited and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which have both returned a mere 1% of the ?1.4m they each received. The Michael Caine vigilante film Harry Brown was a notable UK box office hit in 2009, but has repaid only 2% of the ?1m it was given from lottery funds.

Films not mentioned by Vaizey, and therefore drawing a complete blank, include Stephen Poliakoff's 1939, which received ?970,000, Armando Iannucci's In the Loop (?515,000), Michael Winterbottom's Genova (?500,000), Anand Tucker's When Did You Last See Your Father? (?570,000), Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts (?800,000), and Gabor Csupo's The Secret of Moonacre (?1.23m).

By international standards, any project that pays back more than half its public subsidy is doing well. Outside the UK, it's increasingly rare for any subsidised film to recoup 100%. But the UKFC always took a more aggressive approach to getting its money back than other national film agencies. In fact, its insistence on doing so was arguably one reason for its downfall. Producers complained that the UKFC used its recoupment to pay its own overheads at the expense of film-makers.

That's why the UKFC changed its terms in its final year to share its position with producers and reinvest its recoupment into production. But by then it was too late. Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt decided the UKFC was paying its staff too much, and required elimination.

But there was a reason why the UKFC execs were paid so well. Getting money back from tricksy distributors isn't a job for amateurs. Without the sleuthing skills of the UKFC's debt collectors, perhaps only half of that ?8m would have been found.

There are already whispers that the BFI isn't quite so hot on the trail. But it needs to be. The acid test will be how much of the King's Speech income it can claw back from the Weinstein Company. It's unlikely to be a mission for the fainthearted.

• Read the full figures regarding recoupment of UK Film Council awards between April 1 2006 and March 31 2011

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BFI celebrates Britain's eccentric talents

Grenoside sword dancers in 1965.

When you've seen a teenage boy running through a village with a flaming barrel of tar on his head, you might think you've seen everything. But then you indulge yourself further in Here's a Health to the Barley Mow – the BFI's DVD celebrating British folk customs and rural games – and an even stranger Britain comes to light. Here are men swinging fireballs in Aberdeenshire. Here's a boy dressed up as a horse for a Mummers' play in Derby, in sheepskin, with lightbulbs for eyes. Here are the dwile flonkers of Suffolk, led by a man the spitting image of Vic Reeves, who explains, with some glee, what their tradition demands. "A capacity to take beer, I should think – and to be an idiot."

This DVD may showcase national eccentricity gloriously, but it's not a simple, silly trek through ye olde Merry Britain. Instead, the disc reveals the peculiar rituals that have persisted here. In Ottery St Mary in Devon, tar barrel rolling was still going strong in 2000, for instance, as is sword dancing in Grenoside, Sheffield, and horn dancing in Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire.

BFI curators Vic Pratt and Will Fowler began this project in 2009, wanting to reveal to the world this rich, other Britain. That year, they showed three folk films, successfully, at London's Cecil Sharp House; Pratt is convinced the recent increased interest in folk music helped it succeed. "I think the technological, capitalist bubble just went to the nth degree, and burst," he says. "Then you had people embracing arts and crafts, making stuff themselves, going back to simpler things, because everything else is so dazzling and busy." Fowler adds that uncertainty in international politics has perhaps led to people exploring their roots again. "I think people are craving something authentic, even spiritual from that." He also thinks the internet's capacity to store and share the past helped this collective desire – but knew he and Pratt could go further, given their resources.

The Barley Mow DVD compiles dances and songs, extreme sports, and strange customs, in the form of news reports from regional TV, amateur footage, and experimental cinema. So alongside raw 1927 footage of the Llandudno May Queens, there is Leslie Daiken's 1957 Free Cinema award-winner about children's games, One Potato, Two Potato, and a fascinating spool of the English Folk, Dance and Song Society founder, Cecil Sharp, dancing in a garden with friends in 1912. This early "film" was made from photographs printed on card and mounted on a wheel, and is brought to musical life with a new fiddle-led soundtrack.

Some films explore how customs can change. The 1953 documentary Oss Oss Wee Oss shows the people of Padstow in Cornwall wearing red and white for the cameras of folklorist Alan Lomax – brilliantly, Pratt says, they have done the same ever since. Recent films such as 2005's Hare Pie and Bottle Kicking, Hallaton show how customs often operate on the fringes of health and safety rules – it shows one rugby-shirted youngster knocked out in a field, rather than emerging from the ruck with the winner's meaty prize. "It's just as important to include those details," Pratt says. "They are part of our world, rather than something that's gone."

More than anything, however, the curators didn't want to judge any of their 43 films on moral grounds "We just wanted to present this stuff as it was," Pratt says, "with respect. There's no point in patronising people when all this stuff is still emerging from ancient traditions. And no one really knows what they're for, do they? Or why they're still here."

Here's a Health to the Barley Mow: A Century of Folk Customs and Ancient Rural Games is out on 18 July on BFI DVD.

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