researcher

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.