After 51 years in the Scottish capital, the Edinburgh Television Festival is leaving. The 2026 edition, held this month in Edinburgh, will be the last before the event transfers to Greater Manchester in 2027 — and the person tasked with steering the farewell is Adam Hawkins, the Netflix UK Director of Documentary Series, who serves as this year's advisory chair.

Hawkins used an interview with Deadline to urge the UK television industry to embrace change and keep an open mind about the festival's future. His appointment was announced in February 2026 (Deadline), and he brings a commissioner's perspective to the role: since joining Netflix in 2022 from The Tinder Swindler producer Raw, he has greenlit documentaries including Victoria Beckham, Robbie Williams and the upcoming Being Gordon Ramsay, and worked on Netflix's first daily World Cup soccer show, Gary Lineker's The Rest is Football (Deadline).

The festival Hawkins is chairing has deep roots. He first attended in 2007, when Jeremy Paxman delivered the annual James MacTaggart Lecture — the keynote address that anchors each year's programme. In 2018, Michaela Coel delivered the same lecture. This year, Pedro Pina will give the MacTaggart, with Amelia Dimoldenberg and Gary Lineker also on the speaker line-up. Lineker is scheduled to sit down with Hawkins to discuss Goalhanger, the production company he co-founded in 2018, and its ambitions as a media business (Edinburgh TV Festival).

The move to Manchester follows growing strain on the festival's Edinburgh home. During festival month, basic hotel rooms in the city cost an average minimum of $300 per night, with pricier options nearing $700, according to Deadline. Screen Scotland has already commissioned work examining what a new Edinburgh-based festival might look like, with Rowan Woods — the festival's former creative director — leading that work as an independent consultant.

For an industry that treats Edinburgh as its annual gathering point, the relocation is more than a change of postcode. A festival is a place where deals start, writers' rooms get noticed, and commissioners meet the people they might fund. The question Hawkins is putting to the industry is whether the thing that matters is the city, or the conversations that happen there.

His answer, from the Deadline interview, is clear: keep an open mind. Edinburgh has been the backdrop for half a century of British television's most important moments. The next chapter, whatever it looks like in Manchester, will need its own.