Speaking to Televisual for its Factual Genre Report in the Autumn issue, the BBC’s head of Specialist Factual, gave an extensive briefing.
At the BBC, specialist factual is an umbrella genre that incorporates four big specialist areas: science, natural history, history, and religion and ethics. So it doesn’t include arts and it doesn’t include music.
These are my key mission statements. The first mission is to spark wonder. So, I really want to make beautiful and fascinating programmes that reveal the world to people, and that encourage viewers to look at familiar things in completely new ways. A show like Secret Garden, made by Plimsoll, which showed viewers the wildlife dramas that play out unseen in their own backyards. And Hamza’s Hidden Wild Isles.Those shows have been the two highest-rated new formats on the BBC in the last 12 months.
The second mission is to deepen understanding. I want to take complicated ideas and make them accessible without making them simplistic. That’s important right now because we live in an environment in which people are absolutely drowning in misinformation. And one of the things a BBC can do is to be a beacon of truth. A series called Clickbait Clinic with Stacey Dooley, which is a new format from Nutopia, in which Stacey Dooley and a team of doctors investigate online health fads to work out are they just clickbait or could they change your life?
The third mission is to build communities. This is becoming increasingly important. We don’t just want viewers to watch a programme and disappear. We want to bring together permanent communities of people who are passionate about about nature, history, science, archeology, astronomy, whatever it might be. In other words, we want to create fandoms around our programmes. We already do this. If you look at Springwatch, it has one of the most engaged, passionate fandoms on British TV. But we want to be doing it much more.
My fourth mission is to shape national conversations. Specialist factual can shine a light on issues that matter, and sometimes it can actually change attitudes. Blue Planet Two kickstarted a public conversation about plastic pollution. Or a doc called Fighting Endometriosis, with Emma Barnett, a really personal film, a really angry film, in which Emma, who has endometriosis, looked at the limited options available to women with the condition in in the UK. Following that film, the government announced plans to create a new NHS pathway for women from the moment they’re diagnosed with a condition.
Those are those are my four missions: spark wonder, deepen understanding, build communities, shape national conversations. And when we do those four things really well, I believe we make the BBC truly distinctive, and I would actually argue we make the BBC more distinctive than any other genre.
Specialist factual is at the heart of the BBC’s identity. We are what makes the BBC truly distinctive in an increasingly consolidated TV ecosystem…When you look at the streamers, they’re just not really interested in a lot of this stuff. There are some exceptions. Nat Geo makes good natural history; ou get a bit of special faction on Channel Four, on Sky, on ITV, but not much.
Huge swathes of programming are being left orphaned by the marketplace. Things like ambitious science, authored history, British history that goes beyond the classic subjects – World War Two; the Tudors, grown-up, unDisneyfied natural history, British wildlife, religion in almost any form. Those are almost nowhere to be seen. And that is where the BBC can step in.
Four examples of recent specialist actual shows that I believe you would only find on the BBC. So these are shows which have all been on in the last 12 months, and they were all big success stories. Either they rated really well, or they were critically very well received. Sometimes they were both. I think every single one of them is a show that you would struggle to imagine being commissioned anywhere other than the BBC.
The first one is my big hit of the year, Wild London. It has reached 8.6 million people so far. It’s the highest-rated documentary on British television this year on any platform. It’s a film which David Attenborough shows us the wildlife of the city that he’s called home for the last 70 years. David really wants to keep working, but at point of commission he was 99, and clearly I couldn’t ask him to go on a plane to Borneo for 14 hours. The answer was sitting there right in front of us. David spent his life traveling the world, showing us extraordinary things, but he’s also spent most of his life living in in London. He’s a Londoner, so let’s have him show us the wildlife of his own city, and it became perfect New Year’s Day television. You might think the streamers would be queuing up to to co-commission it or to commission it, but they weren’t. I know that because I tried to persuade a lot of them to co-produce. They all said it’s too local.
The second is a series called Evolution, which is a big authored blue chip series fronted by Chris Packham, and it tries to answer the question: How did life develop on Earth? And he tries to make the answer accessible without stripping away its complexity. It’s not the highest rating show we’ve ever made. We never expected it to be. Some of the science is quite chewy. But the critical response has been really fantastic – five-star reviews across the board. People saying this is exactly what the BBC is designed to do. That show exists because the BBC believes that serious science belongs in mainstream broadcasting, and that is that’s something that’s really precious.
Well, the third example I was going to talk about is a film by Simon Schama called The Road to Auschwitz. Again, not the biggest audience on earth, but about 1.4 million, but perfectly respectable. But the critical response was the critical response was exceptional. It won the BAFTA this year for best specialist factual, the first BAFTA Simon Shom has ever won. When you look at the modern TV landscape, it’s an unusual piece of television. You know, it’s thoughtful, it’s personal, it’s intellectual. It’s a TV essay.
Sometimes there’s a fear of words like intellectual and essay. There should be somewhere on British television where an extraordinarily clever person is allowed to think deeply about something important and take an audience with them. It’s really important that we still have a place for that, and that place is still the BBC,
Finally, to give you my fourth example, and this is something completely different, we made a film that went out last year called Eid Live, in which we broadcast live worship from a mosque in Bradford during Eid. It went out in a daytime slot on a Monday morning during Eid. I’m not going to pretend it did huge numbers. It didn’t, but that is not how I judge the success of that show. Its impact among parts of the British Muslim audience was really significant, and our work with religious stakeholders suggests that something as apparently simple as seeing Eid celebrated on the BBC really shifted perceptions amongst some Muslim viewers, amongst the people who watched it, and it made the BBC feel a little bit more like a ‘for me’ destination. Not everything we commission exists to get five million viewers. Sometimes the job is to tell a particular group of license -fee payers “this is also for you.”
The three categories of content are reputation drivers, volume drivers, and multi-platform drivers,
Reputation drivers tend to be singles and short series, and they are there to make a noise. They’re there to win awards. They’re there to grow talent. They’re there to make a statement about what the BBC is. They’re not there primarily to drive volume. If they get lots of lovely viewers, fantastic, I’m delighted. But that isn’t their key job. Their key job is to burnish the BBC’s reputation. Titles like Buried ,with Michael Sheen, a series in which the actor Michael Sheen investigates a hidden toxic waste scandal. It’s a story that Michael has a really deep personal connection to and since it went out questions have been raised in Parliament.
And then Hostage, a gripping series about John Cantlie, a war photographer who was kidnapped by ISIS. An historical thriller that got you into the war in Syria. That’s been nominated for multiple awards this year, including a Grierson.
The second category of content is volume drivers, shows designed to drive viewership, to create brands that can aggregate viewer hours. Here, I’m really looking at returning shows, programmes that people can develop a long-term relationship with. Like Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club, the highest rating new series on BBC Two this year. That show I think can run and run.
And Wilderness with Simon Reeve, which was one of the highest-rated series on BBC Two a couple of years ago. It’s returning for series two this month.
The third category of content is multi-platform drivers. This is probably where my brief has changed most significantly. I’m not just commissioning for linear and iPlayer anymore. I’m also commissioning for YouTube, TikTok, and Sounds. So the specialist factual story is spreading out across multiple platforms. It gives the BBC a chance to speak to even more specialist factual fans.
Multi-platform drivers are ultra low-cost, high-volume series that are designed to sit on iPlayer and on other platforms, such as Sounds, YouTube, and TikTok, and they they tend to be inspired by digital native form – video podcasts or creator-driven content. They’re there to reach young users where they are, and to build communities of fans.
Sometimes I co-commission with BBC YouTube channels such as Deepwatch, and sometimes I co-commission them with Sounds, which is our podcast platform, and sometimes I just commission them solo, with no investment from other parts of the BBC.
One example is a series called Naturewatch, an expansion of Springwatch. Springwatch has an army of fans. When Springwatch is not on air they disappear, they don’t have a show to congregate around. That feels like a real missed opportunity. So, we have commissioned an always-on video podcast, which is going to publish as a half-hour show every week of the year, on iPlayer, on BBC Two and it will also go out as a purely audio experience on Sounds. Alongside that video podcast, there will be a 10-minute Q and A each week, which is audio only, and that will be exclusive to Sounds.
It’s a weekly place to talk about all the latest goings on in the natural world in the UK. What are people seeing? What’s migrating through the country? What’s breeding? What’s changing? What should I be looking for outside my window? It’s topical, it’s communal and it’s taking that relationship that exists between Springwatch and its fan base and making that relationship even deeper. That is going to launch in late October.
Clickbait Clinic will get a Q and A spin-off for a new BBC YouTube channel called Motion, launching later this year. Stacey Dooley and Dr. Alex George [who featured on Love Island] will answer questions about health. We hope that it will drive people to watch it on YouTube and they will then come through to iPlayers to watch the traditional series. We’re also very happy to see a distinct audience forming around that show on YouTube.
The message I would give to producers: think more broadly about what a specialist actual idea is. I’m definitely still looking for a brilliant BBC One idea, for an extraordinary, authored film on BBC Two, for a big natural history proposition. None of that’s gone away. But I think the thing that’s changed is perhaps your idea doesn’t need to be three hours of traditional television. Maybe there’s a different form which is better for that idea. Maybe it’s a weekly video podcast. Maybe it’s 10 x 15-minute films to sit on iPlayer and YouTube. Maybe it’s working with a creator that we’ve never worked before. But don’t assume that low cost means low ambition, because the opposite can be true. When financial risk is lower, our creative risk can be higher.”
Pippa Considine
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