Development Slate ITV Studios

What have been the defining shows and moments for you over the past year?

A few big things for us last year were the acquisition of Plimsoll Productions and a big step up into that natural history world; the continued success of big brands like The Voice, Love Island and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, which had the highest numbers we’ve seen for some time; and then trying to bring new shows through, like My Mum, Your Dad, which finished with great numbers in Australia and has multiple versions to come in 2023.

Has there been a push towards more reality formats, perhaps at the expense of studiobased shows?

The type of content we see being produced and developed, be it reality versus studio, is evercyclical. We saw a lot of studio during the pandemic because you could control the environment. Coming out of that there has been a big shift to location-based, travel, reality shows. It’s to do with the audience – streamers are aimed at a younger they want to watch, so tend to produce shows they enjoy, which is a lot of dating shows like Love Island, Too Hot To Handle and Love is Blind. Our goal now is to take that interest in those shows and the steps and beats in those formats and take them into different areas. the creativity, it can also come in at a lower price. It exists within a schedule or choice. It’s got to exist in an ecosystem people want to watch so you come in for a drama and find it, or vice versa. and tech-savvy audience who can find the shows seasons next one. How do three

ITV is the latest UK broadcaster to relaunch the classic Big Brother format. Where do you sit on the reboot phenomenon?

Traditional broadcasters need to get to their audience quickly and they need to understand the show very fast. In a world of lots of content, one of the ways of doing that is bringing something back they remember fondly, like Big Brother, Gladiators and Survivor. We’ve seen it when we reboot The Voice in [different] territories.

What are the main challenges you face?

The challenges in 2023 inevitably revolve around cost. We’re through the pandemic, and who knows what might happen with a European land war, but costs will sit at the top [of the agenda]. We must go into production now looking at how we produce it – the technology, traditional costs that we don’t need any more, like travel, post-producing from the Cloud, different camera technology. We also have to look at the creativity and think how we de-risk it for a buyer.

You’ve got to make sure the show is relevant to now, not just a reproduction of what it was 10 or 15 years ago. You’ve got to attract a new audience, not just people who remember it fondly. And then it’s about maintaining it, because what we’ve seen is, to some extent, they only last two or three seasons and the channel has to move on to the next one. How do you make it fresh and different without losing the charm the audience likes?

Across the board we have to look at how we produce the shows, how we create them and take them to market. If you go in to a buyer and expect the Earth, as you did two years ago, they won’t be able to deliver on that. We mustn’t lose the aspiration of the ideas, [we must] just think more carefully about how we develop them.

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Will unscripted be in a better position to cater to broadcasters’ needs during times of recession and economic will have a st don’t think it will b bac content because inco turna quickly if things

Through 2023, unscripted will have a strong presence, but I don’t think it will be at the expense of anything else. In recessions, people tend to come back to television and content because they don’t have the disposable income to go out as much.

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In a risk-averse world for broadcasters, we know how to make those shows. We won’t overspend massively and they know how to market them, so it ticks a lot of boxes very quickly. Again, it’s cyclical. In the early noughties it was about bringing back a lot of the US shows from the 80s and 90s. It will be a cyclical thing – Masked Singer will dip away and then in five or six years you’ll see that come back again.