ENTERTAINMENT
GENRE REPORT
PHIL HARRIS CHANNEL 4, HEAD OF ENTERTAINMENT
What’s the entertainment market like at the moment? There have been a lot of rolls of the dice in entertainment. What is encouraging is that there are some big new formats beyond the Got Talent or X Factors – shows like Masked Singer are really encouraging everyone. It has been a really tricky year to get new stuff going. What people managed to do incredibly well was adapt formats to audience-less environments. We did it with Taskmaster – it definitely wasn’t how we imagined launching Taskmaster on C4. We had brilliant ratings for returning brands like The Last Leg, Big Fat Quiz and Bake Off. Viewers we’re reaching for something familiar. But it has been really hard. Now we’re seeing the green shoots of shows that we’ve been preparing for the last year coming to fruition. Is C4 focusing more on entertainment? As [director of programmes] Ian [Katz] has said we want to bring the viewers some joy in a joyless age. We’re a natural place where viewers can experience that through brilliant comedy entertainment. We want stuff to be mainstream, but have an innovative twist to it and a distinctiveness. We’re not just looking at things that will perform on linear, we are looking at things that can burn brighter and longer. Taskmaster does really well in linear, but because there is a returning cast who you get to know and there’s a winner, the viewer can watch on catch up and get a satisfying narrative. Things like that feel really on brand, have great talent but can still cut through on All4. You’ve said you are looking for a 9pm reality series? It feels like there could be space for a big, broad, possibly celebrity driven show that has proper narrative, and scope for humour, and drama and character reveals. We’ve done brilliant things like The Jump and Sink or Swim. The Jump was fabulous… but it was almost more of a challenge show with VTs, as opposed to a narrative reality show that has stories threading off. We’re probably looking for a bit more of the latter.
34
televisual.com Summer 2021
finally feel like there are some new big shows landing that might be with us for a while.” His Bandicoot co-founder Daniel Nettleton adds: “We worked through a real lull period about five years ago, when all the chat was about what’s the next X Factor. Saturday night television became pretty stale…but right now entertainment TV is in a really good place.” Ed Sleeman, the co-founder of All3Media-
backed Great Scott Media and former md of Fremantle label Talkback, says there is a real thirst for entertainment. He and his colleague Leon Wilson exec produced Too Hot to Handle before leaving Fremantle to set up Great Scott last year. Sleeman says that commissioners are now
looking to take advantage of lockdown easing to create new content. “We’ve never felt more in demand,” says Sleeman. From a standing start last year, Great Scott will have about 150 people on its payroll by August working on three new shows.
THE NEW GOLD RUSH Indeed, there’s a sense that after the hiatus of 2020,
entertainment production is really gearing up this summer. Sleeman says he recently interviewed a reality producer to work on one of Great Scott’s new shows, and she had turned down eight dating reality shows in the last two weeks. “If you’re any good and you work in reality and you’re not currently on a show, you’re basically a unicorn,”
says Sleeman. “These people can take their pick.” The push by streamers into entertainment
has also spurred demand for content from entertainment focused indies. “We are having so many more chats with the streamers about what entertainment might look like – how you take the traditional studio entertainment show and put it on a service that is designed for bingeing box sets,” says Bandicoot’s Nettleton. Of the streamers, Netflix is widely seen to be
leading the entertainment charge. The streamer is rebooting BBC Three/A&E dating show Sexy Beasts, while The Circle producer Studio Lambert is making competition series Jet Set (working title) and a dance show, working titled All The Right Moves, which aims to uncover a superstar choreographer. But Amazon is pushing into entertainment too.
Amazon recently greenlit a local version of The Masked Singer in Japan, and last year played a French version of Love Island, which wrapped early because of coronavirus. HBO Max and Peacock are among other streamers that UK indies have recently been pitching entertainment ideas to. Linear channels, however, remain key players
in the market. At a time of spiralling drama budgets and when broadcaster revenues are under pressure, entertainment is the place to go for a cost effective way to win audiences. Entertainment can also appeal to a broad
TOO HOT TO HANDLE
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116
