The controversy and challenges of making The Undateables and the impact of Channel 4's 'difficult patch' on indies
Few television programmes can have generated such opprobrium by their title alone. Only the hypothetical (and highly unlikely) prospect of Frankie Boyle – Live at the BBC could possibly match the rush to condemn The Undateables ahead of its launch on Channel 4 last year.
A dating show for people with disabilities, The Undateables began life as a one-off documentary in 2006. Called Truly, Madly, Deeply, it followed the fortunes of three people who enrolled with a dating agency called Stars in the Skies for adults with learning disabilities.
When C4 reckoned, a few years later, that it would quite like a series, it decided a shorter, punchier title was required. The Undateables was born. "I'm not poking the finger, the title did come from Channel 4," says Liz Warner, chief executive of the production company that makes it, Betty TV. The programme was an instant hit, with nearly 3 million viewers (later peaking with 4 million).
"It did cause some problems. Even though we had an existing relationship with the dating agency, some charities before they had seen the first series were not wanting to take part purely on the title alone. It took a lot of wooing and talking to people to win them round."
Critics branded it cheap and exploitative, a "21st century descendant of the Victorian circus freak show", said the Sunday Mirror. It was not helped by a controversial advertising campaign which featured photographs of people from the programme with the strapline, "Love is blind, disfigured, autistic …".
By the time the first programme went out in April last year – it featured people with Asperger's and Tourette syndromes – many (but not all) of its detractors were won over by a warmer and more sensitive treatment of its subject than some had anticipated.
The programme treads a fine line, I suggest, between enabling and exploitation or, as one critic put it, sentimentality and ridicule. "I think it's quite a thick line," counters Warner. "It's not a freak show, it's just putting people who live on the fringe of society into the mainstream and I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with the [Sunday] Mirror's attitude but not what we are doing.
"Why shouldn't people who have learning difficulties or certain afflictions be involved in a dating programme? They have every right to be so. They are not going to be on [ITV's Saturday night dating show] Take Me Out, are they?"
One of C4's biggest hits in recent years (at a difficult time for the broadcaster, post-Big Brother), the show is in production on a third series and has been recommissioned for a fourth. But the search for people to take part – candidates who are suitable for the show but can also handle the peculiar pressures of appearing on television – is getting tougher, Warner admits.
"It's one of the most difficult programmes we've made," she says. "You have to be responsible about who you put on television. Sometimes you think you have turned every stone, visited every charity and been to every special needs disco in Britain. There was a point where one of the team said, 'can we go to Belgium?' You are literally at the point where there is nowhere else to go."
A former executive at C4 where she was responsible, along with Grand Designs, River Cottage and Location, Location Location, for the first two series of Big Brother, Warner quit to set up Betty in 2001. The company has a history of attention-grabbing titles – including The Joy of Teen Sex and Beauty and the Beast (both for C4), and Addicted to Boob Jobs and Help! I Smell of Fish (both for BBC3) – that are seemingly tailor-made to wind up the Daily Mail.
"It's good to be provocative but not for being provocative's sake," argues Warner, who stresses the "sensitive programme underneath – as long as it brings an audience to a subject that wouldn't normally come to it ... I'll take the flak along the way".
Bought by Discovery Communications, owner of the Discovery Channel, two years ago, in a deal reported to have been worth £10m, Betty spans factual entertainment (C4's Country House Rescue), specialist factual (The Food Inspectors on BBC1) and drama documentary (Sky1's Coked Up Britain).
It is also making two series for Discovery with television's toughest tough guy, Bear Grylls, less than a year after his seemingly acrimonious split from the channel over a contractual dispute. In one of them, Bear Grylls Escapes From Hell, he will recreate horrific real-life survival stories.
"It's boy's own stuff," says Warner. "Bear goes back and talks about what he did – if only he'd weed into a bag and used his own urine to keep warm. Then he sets fire to his own belly button fluff." Seriously? "I have to say I have never seen quite so much fluff in one person's belly button. It was enough tinder to get the fire going."
Along with C4's The Fabulous Baker Brothers, whose stars, Tom and Henry Herbert, have gone to the US on a two-pilot deal with Discovery-owned TLC, Betty is working with Heston Blumenthal. The superstar chef has made several series for C4, including last year's How To Cook Like Heston, but has yet to settle in a hit returnable format.
"I see him more as a magician with food rather than a chef, closer to Derren Brown than Gordon Ramsay," reasons Warner. "If you put him in a kitchen in a T-shirt chopping veg he is just the same as everyone else, whereas he's not. He is a chemist, an ideas genius, and that needs to be brought more to screen. We want to draw on his knowledge of food history, which is like a whole section of the British Library. It's fantastic."
Based in a building behind the Heal's department store on Tottenham Court Road in central London, Betty employs 30 full-time staff and around 150 freelancers. It has a turnover of about £14m, with 13 series currently in production. Betty does not have an output deal with Discovery, which accounts for around 30% of its business, with similar amounts for BBC and C4 (and 10% "other"). Having consolidated in the UK over the past 18 months, next year the company will target the US.
A mother of three (she met her husband, now a media consultant, when he worked at Film4), Warner began her career as a magazine feature writer before moving to television as a guest booker on BBC1's morning talkshow Kilroy, later becoming a producer on ITV's This Morning.
Various roles followed, at Granada, the independent sector and the BBC (where she was deputy series editor on reality show forerunner, The Living Soap), before joining C4 in 1997. She oversaw Big Brother's launch in 2000 and its follow-up series in 2001. Unlike C4, which axed the reality show in 2010, Warner would have held onto it. "I would have kept it and put it on E4 and put Celebrity [Big Brother] on Channel 4. It would have been a nice driver for the youth audience on E4, but they said enough was enough."
Despite its much talked-about, and ongoing, "creative renewal", C4 has struggled to fill the gap in its schedule, and earlier this month lost out to Channel 5 across an entire week's share of viewing for the first time in its history.
"Channel 4 is having a difficult patch and no one celebrates that, particularly those of us who have worked there and are key suppliers," says Warner. "When Channel 4 is at its edgiest and strongest it keeps everyone else on their game. It's not good for the ecology of telly when it has a dip."
While C4 is doing some "interesting stuff around the edges"– Warner picks out Gogglebox and Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror – it lacks the "big architecture that brings the ratings in and lets them experiment – it needs a vision, the map needs to be laid out. It's really hard when the indie suppliers can't quite see the map. They are playing into slots or a genre rather than being able to see the Channel 4 map. If we can't see it, then it's quite hard for the audience to see it."
A masterclass about The Undateables will take place at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival which runs from August 22-24. Visit www.geitf.co.uk to register. Follow on Twitter via @edinburghtvfest Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
Few television programmes can have generated such opprobrium by their title alone. Only the hypothetical (and highly unlikely) prospect of Frankie Boyle – Live at the BBC could possibly match the rush to condemn The Undateables ahead of its launch on Channel 4 last year.
A dating show for people with disabilities, The Undateables began life as a one-off documentary in 2006. Called Truly, Madly, Deeply, it followed the fortunes of three people who enrolled with a dating agency called Stars in the Skies for adults with learning disabilities.
When C4 reckoned, a few years later, that it would quite like a series, it decided a shorter, punchier title was required. The Undateables was born. "I'm not poking the finger, the title did come from Channel 4," says Liz Warner, chief executive of the production company that makes it, Betty TV. The programme was an instant hit, with nearly 3 million viewers (later peaking with 4 million).
"It did cause some problems. Even though we had an existing relationship with the dating agency, some charities before they had seen the first series were not wanting to take part purely on the title alone. It took a lot of wooing and talking to people to win them round."
Critics branded it cheap and exploitative, a "21st century descendant of the Victorian circus freak show", said the Sunday Mirror. It was not helped by a controversial advertising campaign which featured photographs of people from the programme with the strapline, "Love is blind, disfigured, autistic …".
By the time the first programme went out in April last year – it featured people with Asperger's and Tourette syndromes – many (but not all) of its detractors were won over by a warmer and more sensitive treatment of its subject than some had anticipated.
The programme treads a fine line, I suggest, between enabling and exploitation or, as one critic put it, sentimentality and ridicule. "I think it's quite a thick line," counters Warner. "It's not a freak show, it's just putting people who live on the fringe of society into the mainstream and I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with the [Sunday] Mirror's attitude but not what we are doing.
"Why shouldn't people who have learning difficulties or certain afflictions be involved in a dating programme? They have every right to be so. They are not going to be on [ITV's Saturday night dating show] Take Me Out, are they?"
One of C4's biggest hits in recent years (at a difficult time for the broadcaster, post-Big Brother), the show is in production on a third series and has been recommissioned for a fourth. But the search for people to take part – candidates who are suitable for the show but can also handle the peculiar pressures of appearing on television – is getting tougher, Warner admits.
"It's one of the most difficult programmes we've made," she says. "You have to be responsible about who you put on television. Sometimes you think you have turned every stone, visited every charity and been to every special needs disco in Britain. There was a point where one of the team said, 'can we go to Belgium?' You are literally at the point where there is nowhere else to go."
A former executive at C4 where she was responsible, along with Grand Designs, River Cottage and Location, Location Location, for the first two series of Big Brother, Warner quit to set up Betty in 2001. The company has a history of attention-grabbing titles – including The Joy of Teen Sex and Beauty and the Beast (both for C4), and Addicted to Boob Jobs and Help! I Smell of Fish (both for BBC3) – that are seemingly tailor-made to wind up the Daily Mail.
"It's good to be provocative but not for being provocative's sake," argues Warner, who stresses the "sensitive programme underneath – as long as it brings an audience to a subject that wouldn't normally come to it ... I'll take the flak along the way".
Bought by Discovery Communications, owner of the Discovery Channel, two years ago, in a deal reported to have been worth £10m, Betty spans factual entertainment (C4's Country House Rescue), specialist factual (The Food Inspectors on BBC1) and drama documentary (Sky1's Coked Up Britain).
It is also making two series for Discovery with television's toughest tough guy, Bear Grylls, less than a year after his seemingly acrimonious split from the channel over a contractual dispute. In one of them, Bear Grylls Escapes From Hell, he will recreate horrific real-life survival stories.
"It's boy's own stuff," says Warner. "Bear goes back and talks about what he did – if only he'd weed into a bag and used his own urine to keep warm. Then he sets fire to his own belly button fluff." Seriously? "I have to say I have never seen quite so much fluff in one person's belly button. It was enough tinder to get the fire going."
Along with C4's The Fabulous Baker Brothers, whose stars, Tom and Henry Herbert, have gone to the US on a two-pilot deal with Discovery-owned TLC, Betty is working with Heston Blumenthal. The superstar chef has made several series for C4, including last year's How To Cook Like Heston, but has yet to settle in a hit returnable format.
"I see him more as a magician with food rather than a chef, closer to Derren Brown than Gordon Ramsay," reasons Warner. "If you put him in a kitchen in a T-shirt chopping veg he is just the same as everyone else, whereas he's not. He is a chemist, an ideas genius, and that needs to be brought more to screen. We want to draw on his knowledge of food history, which is like a whole section of the British Library. It's fantastic."
Based in a building behind the Heal's department store on Tottenham Court Road in central London, Betty employs 30 full-time staff and around 150 freelancers. It has a turnover of about £14m, with 13 series currently in production. Betty does not have an output deal with Discovery, which accounts for around 30% of its business, with similar amounts for BBC and C4 (and 10% "other"). Having consolidated in the UK over the past 18 months, next year the company will target the US.
A mother of three (she met her husband, now a media consultant, when he worked at Film4), Warner began her career as a magazine feature writer before moving to television as a guest booker on BBC1's morning talkshow Kilroy, later becoming a producer on ITV's This Morning.
Various roles followed, at Granada, the independent sector and the BBC (where she was deputy series editor on reality show forerunner, The Living Soap), before joining C4 in 1997. She oversaw Big Brother's launch in 2000 and its follow-up series in 2001. Unlike C4, which axed the reality show in 2010, Warner would have held onto it. "I would have kept it and put it on E4 and put Celebrity [Big Brother] on Channel 4. It would have been a nice driver for the youth audience on E4, but they said enough was enough."
Despite its much talked-about, and ongoing, "creative renewal", C4 has struggled to fill the gap in its schedule, and earlier this month lost out to Channel 5 across an entire week's share of viewing for the first time in its history.
"Channel 4 is having a difficult patch and no one celebrates that, particularly those of us who have worked there and are key suppliers," says Warner. "When Channel 4 is at its edgiest and strongest it keeps everyone else on their game. It's not good for the ecology of telly when it has a dip."
While C4 is doing some "interesting stuff around the edges"– Warner picks out Gogglebox and Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror – it lacks the "big architecture that brings the ratings in and lets them experiment – it needs a vision, the map needs to be laid out. It's really hard when the indie suppliers can't quite see the map. They are playing into slots or a genre rather than being able to see the Channel 4 map. If we can't see it, then it's quite hard for the audience to see it."
A masterclass about The Undateables will take place at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival which runs from August 22-24. Visit www.geitf.co.uk to register. Follow on Twitter via @edinburghtvfest Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.