Cathy Payne

World Screen Weekly, August 17, 2006

Chief Executive

Southern Star International

As chief executive of Southern Star International, Cathy Payne oversees the exploitation of a program catalogue consisting of some 14,500 hours of programming. And while Southern Star is one of the largest independent distributors, Payne was recently traveling through the U.S. and Canada on the lookout for even more product.

“Our distribution operation is doing very well,” she says. “We have the capacity to take on more. While we have great product coming from Australia and our U.K. production businesses, we want to complement our library and enhance it with great product from North America. We are a large distributor and we have to focus on volume.”

Payne says Southern Star will continue to concentrate on its core genres, which are drama, children’s and family, reality and factual. There is a lot of product from North America that can feed Southern Star’s need for tween and teen programming, two niches that have worked quite well for international broadcasters. “If you’ve got a good twist on a strong tween concept, it’s a very strong market,” says Payne. “We can’t believe how well we’ve sold Blue Water High and The Sleepover Club. Those series are very successful.”

Another strong genre for Southern Star has been what Payne calls broad audience factual. “The audience wants as much story in their factual programs as what they see in drama,” she says. She cites the series Meerkat Manor, produced for Animal Planet by Oxford Scientific Films, a Southern Star company. Meerkat Manor is one of Animal Planet’s most successful programs, and Payne credits the series’ success to its soap-opera-like quality.

Drama, of course is a mainstay of Southern Star’s offering. Recent successful titles have been Two Twisted, a series of thrillers, mysteries and dramas all with a twist. It follows Twisted Tales, which was produced in 1996. Actor Bryan Brown stars and serves as executive producer for both.

The company is also selling a fourth season of Wire in the Blood, the hit drama on ITV starring Robson Green in the role of Dr. Tony Hill, the clinical psychologist who helps solve some of the worst murder cases.

And recently, Southern Star announced it will be distributing the action series Dangerous, an eight-part, one-hour series featuring a “Romeo and Juliet” story of forbidden love, set against the culturally diverse, have versus have not backgrounds of Sydney’s suburbs. Dangerous has been commissioned by the pay service FOXTEL in Australia.

Regardless of how large her catalogue becomes, or whether she and her team are selling new titles or library programs, Payne is very firm about what buyers should always expect from Southern Star. “We pay close attention to the relationship we have with our clients. They can expect a quick response from us as well as detailed information about how a given show has performed in other territories. We will be there to help the broadcaster launch a show; we do a lot of after sales service. For our new shows, we do generic on-air promos. We try to embrace what we think will add value for the buyers.”