researcher

How to make the jump from Runner to Researcher in TV

One of the hardest parts of starting your TV career is the jump from Runner to Researcher.

What are the hacks needed to be spotted and earmarked for promotion to the next step? What are the soft skills and hard skills that will make Producers want you to stay on their teams? How have the roles of Runner and Researcher changed over the years? Which skills do you need to level up on in 2024, the year A.I will do basic Runner tasks like transcribing and spreadsheet analysis?

Have you met Miss Jones?

“When I meet someone their first emotion is to shit themselves because they’re like ‘Is she drunk? Is she mental? What is she saying?’ I love that because I can think, right, I am going to prove you wrong!” she says.

Rosie has recently come back from the Funny Women awards where she reached the final with the support of her mentor, stand-up comedian Sara Pascoe. “It was only my tenth ever gig” she recalls. “I performed to about 800 people. That’s my biggest audience by about 780 people…”

So you want to be a TV researcher?

There are many different types of researcher job. Some of the titles you might see include:

  • Junior researcher
  • Casting researcher
  • Archive researcher
  • Shooting researcher
  • Audience researcher
  • Development researcher

But, confusingly, these are not fixed terms used by every company. “Every production has a different requirement or different take,” says Helen Thompson, a talent manager at BBC Northern Ireland.

How to be the best researcher

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.