Cat Lewis and team once again pulled out all the stops to bring value to North West indies and freelancers in the first of its Indie Club dates for 2011. The newly opened Holiday Inn at MediaCityUK hosted the event on Wednesday 12th January.
Creators of a new collaborative video platform A Frame demonstrated their new technical solutions as well as sponsoring drinks which they ensured flowed generously all evening! Lisa and Andy from Peel were on hand to offer delegates a tour of MediaCityUK, now available without a hard hat! It's impressive.
Stephen addressed a packed audience (over 80) as he talked about his career highlights, through the BBC years and into RDF media. The audience were reminded of gems such as Dogs of War and Stephen reminisced about early BBC days (pre multi channel) when there was a great deal of freedom to get your documentary idea commissioned on the basis of a short verbal pitch.
Today, there is so much emphasis on the ‘repeatability’ of a project – so exploitation of programmes, formats etc. is key. So he’s gone from single documentary maker to indie having to ensure commercial viability (he called it repeatability).
He credited his other half with coming up with the inspiration for Faking It (essentially Pygmalion revisited) and we viewed clips from the different shows including the very entertaining episode involving the budding orchestra conductor.
He is currently working on Undercover Boss for CBS and talked about the US experience. Rewarding and frustrating at the same time – he noted that it seems to take a far bigger crew to pull together a show in the US than it does in the UK, and talked about Scrapheap Challenge becoming Junk Yard Wars, and cited Supernanny and Wife Swap as examples of break throughs into this genre. The commission from ABC for 120 episodes of Wife Swap enabled the company’s flotation and acquisition. With Undercover Boss, he has avoided working with a US company and taken the risk in order to retain freedom/avoid creative dilution.
American Idol is the most popular non-scripted show in the US and does twice as well as any other US programme. The challenge is to continue to draw in audiences and find shows that don’t always rely on audience participation (the vote off).
He also talked briefly about some career highlights he’d rather forget like the furore around the documentary about the Queen.
He talked about his All3 experience – in a sense part of a family of 18 companies, but all of them different and the consolidation that has gone on in the indie sector in the last 10 years.
He referred to the UK system of broadcasters now embracing pitch tapes (there is no US equivalent system, though US broadcasters such as CBS can also commit straight to pilot). The popular factual genre however is still relatively new to the US and UK broadcasters tend to be more creative; they often readily ‘get’ the ideas whereas in the US they tend to want to have a fully formed idea.
Beat the Boss had its first outing immediately after The Superbowl, so benefitted from a legacy audience 106 million-strong. It held onto between 37-45 million viewers and although this dropped in subsequent weeks when not tagged onto events as popular as The Superbowl, it still attracted an audience of around 12 million.
He commented that although US budgets tend to be larger, the costs are higher (US crew etc.) and so the margin is more or less the same. In the case of Beat the Boss, there is a back end share for CBS alongside All3 distribution opportunities.
It seems that Fairy Jobmother, although having potential in the US, raised views around US audiences not understanding northern UK accents – seems even Ant and Dec struggle there.
For Stephen – he has reached a stage in his career where, because of the bankers, he can also afford to take some risks on a few projects that he feels passionate about and this is something that’s very important to him. The audience were invited to ask questions, and one was asked around the strike rate and size of development team. He still works with a very small development team: 2 full time in the UK and 2 full time in the US because the strike rate is difficult to speculate.
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