Please wait...
Please wait...

CONTENT STRATEGIES: Uncovering programming opportunities worldwide

CONTENT STRATEGIES

Are ones that never knock … What the world’s channels and platforms want and how to give it to them.

ITV (factual entertainment) – UK

By Gün Akyuz 15-03-2024

ITV’s factual entertainment team is hunting for its next ‘blow-your-doors-off’ unscripted format amid a growing appetite for international coproduction partnerships.

 

Nicola Lloyd

The factual entertainment team at the UK’s largest commercial PBS, ITV, is looking for big-ticket unscripted partnerships, including ITV’s equivalent to the BBC’s hit version of mystery reality series The Traitors, to fuel growth on its streaming service ITVX and linear channels.

ITV’s latest annual results revealed advertising revenues were significantly dented, with profits more than halving in 2023, according to company figures released earlier this month. A restructuring programme is currently underway to boost profitability and growth in key areas of the business, notably digital, where the group made significant investments in 2023.

“We’re all aware that there’s a tough macroeconomic climate at the moment and ITV isn’t immune to that,” Nicola Lloyd, commissioning editor for ITV factual entertainment, said of the challenge facing the broadcaster in 2024. However, she emphasised that the launch of digital player ITVX in 2022 has created more opportunities, especially for her team.

“We do predominately big nine o’clock ‘blow-your-doors-off’ formats that can get huge audiences. But equally we do documentary boxsets and we are now a streamer as well a linear channel. So last year and this year this gave us a lot more opportunities to commission,” said Lloyd, speaking to producers at the recent Realscreen Summit.

ITV’s factual department commissions content that ranges from documentaries and authored, investigative pieces like the recent Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The Real Story, through to large returnable fact ent formats. As well as homegrown reality juggernauts like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Love Island. ITV is also the home of factual formats like Long Lost Family, its long-running local adaptation of the Dutch format Spoorlos. A four-part spin-off of Long Lost Family Born From the Same Stranger launched in January.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office attracted 13.1 million viewers

The exec also highlighting ITV’s biggest drama hit Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which attracted 13.1 million viewers, beating the launch of Downton Abbey. The four-part drama from ITV Studios and Little Gem dramatises real events involving a major coverup of a faulty IT system at the UK’s Post office that led to hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters being wrongly convicted of false accounting. “It’s a sort of David versus Goliath story,” said Lloyd, noting ITV’s related documentary on the scandal. “It really does sum up what ITV does brilliantly, which is to tell UK stories made by the UK for the UK audience, but to broad, massive audiences, which is getting harder and harder every day.”

Lloyd said the biggest change for her department since joining seven years ago was the decision to stop commissioning into pre-watershed slots and half-hour slots. “We had these really lovely half-hour slots that would go in between the soaps, Corrie [Coronation Street] and Emmerdale, and generally we would get five million viewers for those if you got the mood right. We don’t do that anymore, and it’s all soaps and entertainment viewing up to 9pm.”

With mid-range and access primetime factual slots gone, Lloyd said the priorities are now “hit international formats for 9pm. That is tougher, it’s a higher bar, it’s a bigger win: there are less opportunities on linear, but more on ITVX the streamer.”

When it comes to big formats, a key title that started within ITV’s factual department is hit gameshow The 1% Club from BBC Studios-owned Magnum Media. First launched in 2022, the quiz show tests logic and common sense rather than general knowledge among 100 audience members. It is currently in its third season and has been renewed for a further two, plus one-off specials. Several versions have also launched internationally, with Amazon Prime Video having picked up a version stateside.

The 1% Club from BBC Studios-owned Magnum Media

“It’s a quiz in a studio and at weekends,” Lloyd said. “The way our department sits against the others at ITV is that fact ent does everything outside of the studio, predominantly. The 1% Club ended up in the studio, but it came out of a tender for ideas about intelligence,” she said, explaining the delineation between ITV’s factual and ITV’s other commissioning departments.

Offering examples of what would sit well on ITV and what her department is currently looking for, Lloyd pointed to formats such as Channel 4’s Gogglebox; or ITV’s three-part doc series Tyson Fury: the Gypsy King, which landed on ITV back in 2020, well ahead of Netflix’s own blockbuster doc series At Home With the Furys. “[Tyson Fury: the Gypsy King] did really well, especially with the young so we’re looking for more in that vein,” said Lloyd.

One reason for Lloyd’s presence at the Realscreen event is the growing need for ITV to foster more international partnerships on big brands. “Clearly we’re moving into a global content market, and The Traitors [format] in the UK has been massive and monumental for our genre,” said Lloyd. Airing on BBC One at 21.00, the reality format has “allowed the ABC1 audience to enjoy a reality gameshow,” said Lloyd. “The BBC allows you to say to intelligent people, ‘This one’s for you, you are allowed to watch reality at 21.00,’ and now ITV can follow,” she explained.

“We are looking for copro deals and we’re looking for other territories. NBC and BBC did [Traitors] brilliantly with Studio Lambert, we’re in the same market, and we’re very, very open to this kind of conversation,” Lloyd added.

Meanwhile, coming down the tracks is ITV’s next gamble in the competition reality space with The Fortune Hotel, commissioned by reality commissioning editor Peter Tierney. The 8×60’ series from prodco Tuesday’s Child involves contestants at a luxury Caribbean resort engage in a series of challenges to bag the top prize and avoid being eliminated by choosing to swap or keep suitcases that could contain £250,000 in cash or an early checkout card.

Tyson Fury: the Gypsy King aired on ITV back in 2020

ITV’s factual department’s documentary commissions includes a growing range of true crime boxsets, which has expanded the crime genre to include so-called ‘cons and swindles’ themes, and prioritises “exciting unfolding narratives” that keep viewers engaged, and work very well on its streamer ITVX, said Lloyd.

ITV is keen for more true crime themes, with Lloyd highlighting greater opportunities for coproductions than a few years ago. A recent commission by Lloyd was three-part doc series TikTok: Murder Gone Viral. The first episode followed a UK story of a TikTok influencer and her mother, who killed two 21-year-old men to prevent the mother’s affair with one of them being revealed. “We kicked off with a UK story, but the following two episodes that followed on our streamer are American stories. A couple of years ago we would never have commissioned American stories, but our viewer is now completely open to stories from all over the world, especially American ones. So when it comes to true crime, if you’ve got a great story with twists and turns, we’re really interested in co-developing it,” she said.

Asked whether ITV is mostly interested in coproduction deals with other broadcasters on big brand formats the size of Traitors, Lloyd said: “Generally, at the moment because the bar is so high we need more than just a paper treatment. It would be great to have an IP and copro funding. But, ultimately, we’ve got the studio division of ITV and a huge number of production companies that we can coproduce with, and that works very well for our system.”

TikTok: Murder Gone Viral was commissioned by Nicola Lloyd

However, when it comes to pitching documentaries, Lloyd said ITV was open to many different ways of partnering. “The higher the amount of funding that comes with it, the better the documentary. We’re already looking at blockbusters and premium documentaries, and we have pretty helpful tariffs at ITV. So, if you can bring copro funding to get the budget over £400,000-500,000 per episode, that’s a healthy budget and a really great boxset,” she said.

A case in point is ITV’s success with The Other Mrs. Jordan – Catching The Ultimate Conman, a boxset commission that landed on ITV last October and was “a step away from our usual documentary,” observed Lloyd. The three-part documentary about William Allen Jordan, a CIA agent and serial bigamist, is based on the book by his victim wife, Mary Thomson, and was coproduced by October Films and BAFTA-winning filmmaker Matt Smith and his prodco Circle Circle Films.

Advising producers on the range of opportunities available to work with ITV, Lloyd said she was on the lookout for “big, broad ideas, big-name talent, whether it’s a boxset, whether it has access, is a reality series following big talent, or a big idea with interest from American networks and looking for interest from UK networks where we can co-fund. We are 100% moving into the global content market and are thinking about that back in the UK,” she said.

“If it’s a good idea it will generally find its way to us, and we’ll work with you to make it work,” Lloyd said.


More in Content Strategies