Buyer Profile: HISTORY & Military History UK’s Rachel Job

PREMIUM: Rachel Job, the head of acquisitions and commissioning for HISTORY and Military History at AETN UK, shares her strategy for serving the demands of the channels’ niche audiences. 

TV REAL: How much are you acquiring compared to commissioning?
JOB: HISTORY is about 65-percent, pushing 70-percent acquisitions, of which the shows predominantly come from HISTORY in the U.S. The content there is fantastic; it’s suited very well for us, so we’re taking a lot from them at the moment. We have an output deal, and we’ve increased that recently. We’re buying a little bit on the open market, but that’s become slightly smaller to make room for more commissions. We’re commissioning about 15 percent.

Military History is primarily an acquisitions-only channel. We’re talking half a dozen hours a year of commissions, if that. We have a high repeat rate on the channel. There’s a lot of [A+E Networks] content on there, a lot of older A+E content, but we’re actually purchasing a lot in the open market for Military History: around 50 percent or 60 percent.

TV REAL: Where are you buying from within the international market?
JOB: It’s a mixture: there’s a lot of older BBC Worldwide content, a lot of Channel 4 content. Military History is only currently available in the U.K. and Ireland, so I have a clear U.K. focus. With Military History, the beauty of that content is it doesn’t really date. There’s a lot of very good British military content that’s been made in the past that’s available through U.K. distributors. I’m also buying content from Breakthrough Films & Television in Canada—I bought Greatest Tank Battles from them recently and I bought a series called Combat Forces from them last year, which is modern military. We don’t just do military history, we do combat stories [and more]. I’m buying a little bit from Australia and obviously a lot from Germany, through ZDF Enterprises.

For HISTORY I’m buying from companies like Cineflix and ZDF Enterprises, because they do a lot of ancient history, which I do pick up bits of. [I also buy from companies that have] slightly more factual-entertainment content, rather than straight factual suppliers, so a little bit from distributors like ALL3MEDIA International.

TV REAL: What has been your strategy for commissioning?
JOB: I’ve commissioned a lot of series in the last six months, and most of those are now in production or preproduction. We’re always looking for new series or ideas. In the past we’ve commissioned a lot of one-offs, but the drive is very much four or five series a year. Actually, the big gap I’ve got at the moment is one-off specials. I’m only looking to do two next year, but our budgets are higher than they traditionally have been and we are really looking for some noisy, big event stuff that’s a bit more core-history than perhaps some of our series may have been.

TV REAL: Are you looking to ramp up commissioning for Military History?
JOB: I think the third-party market is servicing us quite well. I do commission for big gaps. Maybe if there’s a big anniversary coming up, but at the moment I’m pretty OK. We’re obviously thinking about 2014 and [the 100th anniversary of] WWI. It’s a little ways off, we’ve got a bit of time, but that’s something we started to think about and I imagine we’ll talk about whether that will be on both channels because it’s such a big anniversary.

TV REAL: Do you look for programming that can work across both channels?
JOB: No, and actually the channels have really separated a lot over the last year. Very rarely do I go, Oh, I don’t know which channel that could go on. Maybe that would happen with an acquisition, but very rarely do I look for something that works on both. If it can play on both there’s probably something wrong for it. [Laughs] On the specials side that might not apply, but certainly none of the series that we’ve commissioned for HISTORY would ever play on Military History. It’s a slightly different approach, slightly different format and different subject matter as well.

TV REAL: What’s on your current shopping list for HISTORY?
JOB: I’m looking for something that’s quite noisy, that has PR ability and talkability. On the series front, we’re having a lot of success with the American A+E shows that are character-driven and are very much set in the present. All of our European commissions fit that mold; they’re usually quite heavily formatted, they’re either character-driven or they’re presenter-led. They’re very low on archive [materials], and often have a hint of humor. It’s actually quite entertaining. History shouldn’t be a chore. We’re still constantly re-educating our audience about what the channel’s about and we’re constantly fighting that stuffy image. Even though we have tons of brilliant, amazing, entertaining, fun programming, we’re constantly having to create more and more interesting ways to talk about history.

TV REAL: Your most successful commission to date is Mud Men. What jumped out at you about the show?
JOB: Probably the strongest thing about thing about Mud Men is that we’ve got a known name in the U.K. [Johnny Vaughan], but he’s also partnered with a larger-than-life personality [Steve Brooker], who is actually not a trained historian, he’s a self-trained history fanatic. They have a really good camaraderie, and they absolutely adore history and that comes across in really positive way. It’s basically amateur archaeology—anyone can be a historian and I think that’s really key. It’s full of energy, so it fits very well. Our budgets are smaller than the U.S. channels, but it fits really well alongside that content because it has the same energy and the same larger-than-life characters.

TV REAL: Are you well served by the U.S. content?
JOB: Oh yeah. The key for me from a commissioning point of view is anything that we make over here is a real complement to the U.S. stuff. It’s really easy to think the U.K. audience, particularly the European audience, will resist it, but actually it’s really good, it’s really entertaining. The U.S. is a big country; there are lots of very diverse people and there’s lots of very interesting things that go on and we don’t necessarily have that. It’s a real window into a different life that we can provide and we’re not apologizing for that, we’re embracing it.

TV REAL: What is the growth path for the channels?
JOB: We’re based in the U.K., but we have a big feed across EMEA and that’s a growth focus for us. That doesn’t mean we’re just going to start commissioning the history of Europe kind of stuff, but it’s about extending the brand and extending the philosophy of the way we approach history into those territories and how we make it more relevant. We [already know we] can make programs that are relevant to a U.K. audience; we’ve been doing it for a long time.

To give you an example, in the last episode of the second series of Mud Men we took our guys to Poland. They went metal detecting in a forest in Poland and found lots of WWII German artifacts and then they went to Warsaw and learned about the Warsaw Rising. Poland’s a huge country in Eastern Europe, an important territory for us in terms of expansion, and I think our Polish viewers would really appreciate seeing faces that they see on the channel regularly in their territory. It’s great to be filming locally, but it’s also great to be covering other territories in our remit in exactly the same fun, energetic, entertaining style.