BBC Innovation Lab (Part 3)

At the end of Part 2, I asked a question which I failed to answer. "Could these self-conscious innovation processes ever take hold in the television world?" To address it we need to know a little more about the people involved in the Lab. Frank Boyd has been masterminding the Lab at the BBC for some years. He’s now working independently and creating initiatives like the Crossover Lab which will bring this iterative pitch/development process to documentary makers interested in exploring new media. Thus the gospel spreads.

Matt Locke has been the champion of the Lab at the BBC for the last few years, and has also focused on using it as a platform to bring independent developers and new media production houses into the BBC fold. This is more than altruism: the BBC’s obligation to source 25% of its programming from independent production companies extends to new media work. It was interesting to see the mix of people and companies at the open briefings for the Lab – on one side web developers muttering excitedly about Digg, and on the other TV exec producers looking pale, as if they had hoped to retire by now. And bridging this divide was a motley collection of makers, experimentalists and entrepeneurs – many of whom made it through to the Lab workshops proper. The BBC ecosystem is changing. And with Matt having recently moved to Channel 4 there’s a real chance that this best practice could gain traction in the industry.

The commissioners were crucial to the Lab. They arrived on Wednesday and stayed until Friday, when they listened to the pitches and decided whether to part with their money. Their involvement made the Lab more than an exercise. It was not only a sign of commitment – it was a commitment, and they too had an interest in getting something out of it. That made for a real dialogue with the teams about how to wrestle a clear great idea out of the haze of possibilities.

This is not how TV commissioning generally works. A TV commission starts with a pitch (either over the fax or a lunch) which tries to address the commissioner’s stated desire for "something new and fresh" with their fearful need to replicate the current successes. The result is a shared act of duplicity, where the producer cooks up promises for the commissioner to trot out to their bosses at meetings.

A good, recent example was Edwardian Supersize Me. I could almost see the pitch document floating in front of the screen: "The Edwardian House meets Masterchef meets Supersize Me! Two minor celebrities stuff themselves on Edwardian food. We learn about the period (ever heard of the eating fad called Fletcherism?) and watch our duo suffer a week of boiled meat breakfasts. One for the oldies, the foodies, and the kids!"

It was a dog’s dinner of a programme, appropriately enough. It gluttonously chewed through three shows worth of stunts in under an hour, including asking the Savoy head chef to cook a nine-course royal meal which our presenters tried to be wittily rude about while getting drunk on vintage champagne. It was a very 21C decadence – anything is permissible as long as you’re filming it. But with neither the measured pace of The Edwardian House, the gourmand expertise of Masterchef, nor the social relevance of Supersize Me, it just left me thinking about the many hoops programme makers have to jump through to cover a subject they find interesting.

But what does this have to do with the Innovation Lab? Well, the Lab points towards a different way of commissioning. Firstly, the intitial ideas have to address the NABC format. This helps steer producers away from pure rhetorical flourish. Secondly, the basic pitch is explored from the users’ (viewers’) perspective. Who are the viewers? Describe them. As individuals. Why would they enjoy this? This is a focusing exercise, and as you engage in it you throw away any aspirations beyond satisfying this core viewer. It’s like line fishing compared to trawling. The makers of Edwardian Supersize Me would have had to ask themselves: who are we really aiming this at? Which presenters are right for this viewer? What tone? What do we want this viewer to leave the programme feeling?

A key aspect of the Lab was repeated pitching of the project. Oneliners would be written, 50 word summaries constructed, the overall aims of each project would be spelled out in a minute. The effect of this is more focusing, more throwing away of secondary aims. For Edwardian Supersize Me, I think this would have forced the commissioners to ask themselves – are we really trying to do an equivalent of Supersize Me? If so, we have to feed our presenters bread and dripping for a week. But they didn’t, because they didn’t really want to make Supersize Me, they wanted us to ogle at aristocratic cuisine. So it’s Masterchef. Except it’s not. And so on. In a Lab, this indecision would be shredded.

The same evening I saw ESM I saw a programme that was the exact opposite: clear, focused, confident. And it’s also globally the most successful British TV show: Top Gear. Top Gear is amazing partly because it shows you what can be done when you have masses of money and confidence, but also because that confidence comes from aiming squarely at one type of viewer, and actively excluding everyone else. Top Gear could be a programme that gives you useful consumer advice about motoring, while throwing in some aspirational eye-candy. Instead, it’s all eye-candy; it even mocks viewers who want it to be the programme they lack – a sensible show about motoring. By excluding viewers, by focusing on one person – the bloke who wishes he could have Adventures – they have a global audience of 100 million people.

As commissioning becomes ‘360°, and commissioners are obliged to think in cross-platform terms, the more traditional among them might feel obliged to rethink their assumptions about how ideas are developed. They might see their colleagues coming back from workshops with a fistful of projects ready to go, and reflect on those proposals they haven’t got around to reading yet, after six weeks. They might realise that it can’t all be done in the edit, and that you start a journey by making a map. They might start getting confident enough to stop second-guessing their bosses, who are second-guessing the viewer. They might start realising that confident commissioners make for confident programmes, and that confident programmes are a joy to watch. I hope so.

• I actually quite enjoyed it, and watched the whole thing. I’m sure many other people did the same. My point is not that it was a bad programme, but that it was clear evidence of a bad process.