Bill Hobbins is the commissioning editor at Sky Factual. His commissions include Sky 1’s Freddie Flintoff fries again and Wild Things, which won Best Entertainment Programme in the Broadcast Digital Awards 2015.
Here he explains how to grab his attention when pitching an idea.
A trailblazing four-part documentary series on the history of women will air on BBC Two this autumn.
Charting the role of women in society over 10,000 years, The Ascent Of Woman is the first ever documentary to explore the history of women from the birth of civilisation to the contemporary era.
Focusing on the themes of freedom, oppression, inclusion and exclusion, the series aims to study the status of women and women’s rights.
The series is written and presented by Dr Amanda Foreman, the author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
The BBC will be paying tribute to the Queen as the longest-reigning monarch in British history in a new documentary.
The Queen’s Longest Reign: Elizabeth & Victoria will air on 9 September to mark the milestone.
Queen Elizabeth II has surpassed her great-great grandmother Queen Victoria who reigned for 63 years and seven months.
The programme is part of BBC Three’s Defying the Label season, which aims to explore disability, poverty, hate crime, sex and romance in 15 specialist programmes over four weeks.
Yet Pearson, a former BBC and Channel 4 researcher who also starred in Channel 4’s Beauty and the Beast, argues that the BBC season is a ‘double-edged sword’. While there’s been progress in discussing disability on primetime TV, Pearson hopes to get to a stage where disabled people can appear on screen without “the need for a special season or with such a big song and dance”.
Without competent researchers, TV would be riddled with half-truths and even outright lies, the butt of viewers’ derision and the recipient of libel lawyers’ writs.
Helpfully, the latest RTS Futures event, "How to be the best... researcher", explained how the job should be done.
"Research is the life blood of the TV industry. Without research, we’d have no Big Brother, Gogglebox or Panorama," argued broadcaster and writer Rick Edwards, who chaired the June event.
