“I’m not saying we wouldn’t cast a
26 year-old but we don’t want to fi nd
ourselves with a show featuring a
bunch of 33 year-olds, for example,
that could easily be on BBC2.”
Her refi ned strategy centres on
creating a clutch of returning BBC3
factual-entertainment brands, forged
in partnership with the BBC’s popular
factual and entertainment commis-
sioning chiefs David Brindley and Kate
Phillips. Under Kavanagh, BBC3’s
brand-defi ning genre was comedy
(Fleabag, This Country and People Just
Do Nothing were all ordered under his
watch), but Campbell is leaning into
the unscripted space by taking advan-
tage of the £10m factual-entertainment
budget boost she inherited.
As such, US indie World of Wonder
is bringing its hugely successful VH1
format RuPaul’s Drag Race to the UK.
The reworked series will kick off in
October, with a rolling cast of guest
judges that includes mainstream faces
like Graham Norton and Alan Carr.
It will be complemented with a range
of additional short-form content
rolled out on BBC3’s social platforms
in the preceding weeks.
Campbell also reveals a fresh set
of unscripted commissions that she
hopes, in time, can come to defi ne the
channel. “They refl ect the experience
of being young but are also fun and
about chilling the fuck out,” she says.
The shows have in part emerged from
‘social listening’ by Campbell’s innova-
tive digital team. Led by head of social
and 2018 Broadcast Hot Shot Navi
Lamba, it examines Instagram, Twitter
and Facebook forensically to identify
what is really on young people’s minds.
Cue Twofour’s 6 x 30-minute series Skin
and a TX pilot order for Fight Dirty
from Nice One Productions and Fizz.
The former involves the UK’s
leading dermatologists helping
people with troublesome skin condi-
tions, while the latter is a “feel-good,➤Continued from page 33
FIONA CAMPBELL BBC3
34 | Broadcast | 23 August 2019 broadcastnow.co.uk
funny” format that taps into a current
Instagram trend for cleaning, as
young people battle it out by tidying
each other’s homes for a cash prize.
“I’m constantly thinking about
the relevant topic areas for this demo-
graphic,” says Campbell. “I rank them
in my head according to the intelli-
gence we have, knowing that we can
spread pilot content on iPlayer to see
if there’s an audience, before poten-
tially scaling them up.”
She is also pinning her hopes on
Minnow Films’ The Season – Breaking
Ibiza (working title), in which young
Brits embark on a transformational
coming-of-age summer, living and
working in the Spanish party capital.
Finally, there is a pilot-to-series
order for Ricochet’s Misfi ts Salon, a run
of 6 x 10-minute short fi lms in which
host Sophia Hilton uses her hair salon
as a safe space for those breaking the
rules of image convention.Representative casting
These commissions and others like
Eating With My Ex and Hot Property
are testament to Belfast-born
Campbell’s undeniable passion for
representative casting: she believes
the entertainment space offers the
opportunity to embody the entire
country, as these series allow for
episodes to be set in different places.
She has forged ties with the BBC’s
nations’ commissioners and her team is
also advising non-BBC3 commissioners
in areas like representative casting.
Former BBC3 in-house production
lead Max Gogarty is working hard at
this on secondment in Alison
Kirkham’s factual department and
another BBC3 exec is soon set to move
in a similar direction. This, Campbell
reiterates, is where the channel can
provide true value and breakthrough in
a world of declining attention spans
and SVoD behemoths.
“There is a lot of talk these days
about the type of person who could
have been from anywhere and is really
from nowhere,” she says. “But we
want to be the opposite. We want to
be for the person that is from Belfast,
from Liverpool or from Aberdeen,
and this is how we will do it.”
Campbell will reiterate that state-
ment several times more as she takes
the BBC’s youth-skewing operation on
a nationwide tour. There’s a sense she
is taking the industry along with her –
the challenge will be translating that
to the elusive younger viewers.EXPANDING GENRES
Finding factual-entertain-
ment hits for BBC3 is a pri-
ority for Fiona Campbell but
she hasn’t turned her back
on comedy, drama or docu-
mentary, keeping in mind
the founding ‘make me
laugh’ and ‘make me
think’ editorial pillars that
were outlined ahead of
the channel’s move off
the linear schedule in 2014.
For the former, her team is
forging closer ties with Shane
Allen’s comedy division than
ever before. Forthcoming short-
form strand Threesomes, for
example, may in the past have
emerged solely from the dedi-
cated BBC3 team but the two
departments have collabo-
rated on its creation.
The drama slate is led by
the upcoming adaptation of
Sally Rooney’s high-profi le
novel Normal People and Red
Rose, a horror from Eleven
Films/eOne by His Dark
Materials writers Paul and
Michael Clarkson (see broad-
castnow.co.uk for more).In docs, viewers could soon
see less of the type of BBC3
single fi lm that launched
Stacey Dooley’s career but
this is in part because the bar
has been raised so high.
Campbell fl ags the likes of
Century Films’ Abused By
My Girlfriend, which had an
“extraordinary USP” and
emerged from BBC3 young
talent scheme director
Niamh Kennedy.
The BBC3 boss recalls a
recent commenter on the
BBC’s audience viewer log, who
urged the corporation to keep
the fi lm on iPlayer for a longer
period as it had “changed so
many” of their friends’ lives.EXPANDING GENRES
There is a
lot of talk
about the
type of person
who could have
been from
anywhere and
is really from
nowhere. We
want to be for
the person from
Belfast, Liverpool
or AberdeenAbused By My Girlfriend: the doc
has raised the bar for single fi lmsThe Season – Breaking Ibiza (w/t):
series follows young Brits on
a transformational summerINTERVIEW