Sky Real Lives

World Screen Weekly, November 08, 2007

COUNTRY: United Kingdom

LAUNCH DATE: November 7, 2007

OWNERSHIP: British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB)

DISTRIBUTION: The channel is available as part of the “Style and Culture” package on the Sky satellite platform, which reaches more than 8 million homes.

DESCRIPTION: With the tag line “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories,” the channel is promising to tell compelling real-life tales through a mix of observational documentaries and factual-entertainment series and specials.

HEAD, SKY REAL LIVES: Barbara Gibbon

GENERAL MANAGER: Alexa Weselby

HEAD, ACQUISITIONS: Philip Barnsdall-Thompson

PROGRAMMING STRATEGY: Sky’s newest channel bills itself as the only destination in the U.K. 100-percent dedicated to human-interest stories. On the Sky platform it has taken the place of the Sky Travel channel. According to Barbara Gibbon, the head of Sky Real Lives, the decision to rebrand followed extensive research into the viewing patterns on the Sky Travel service. “We saw certain kinds of observational documentaries, particularly the serial ones, like Luton Airport, Airline, The Tube, Holiday Reps, were doing very well, disproportionately well [compared to] old-fashioned travel documentaries.”

The broad aim of the channel is to “address a need for well-made, strong, narrative-driven real-life stories,” primarily targeting women aged 35 to 55, Gibbon says. “It aligns with the U.K. mid-market women’s magazines. While we won’t be female as in girly, we will be female in our tone of voice and in our offering.”

The slate will encompass hard-hitting documentary specials, observational docs and factual entertainment; “these are not reality shows,” Gibbon stresses. Among the primary themes will be physical transformations, Gibbon says, especially in the early-morning schedule, with series like X-Weighted and Fat Man Slim.

The afternoon and access prime-time slate features observational serials like Airline and Luton Airport, which follow the same set of characters from episode to episode. Also on offer during the day are series like Beat the Bailiff, with real-life stories about how people are coping with financial debt, and The Baby Race, following a group of single 30-something women in their attempts to conceive. Another key theme on the channel is “the way we live with animals,” Gibbon says, citing the series Zoo Vet at Large.

As Sky Real Lives hits its prime-time and post-watershed schedule, “we get progressively harder,” Gibbon says. “Some of the programs we’ll be showing will deal with the grittier issues. Some will have a shock value to them.” Gibbon says she is looking for “hard-hitting” documentaries to fill that daily 10 p.m. slot, which launched this week with Dying to be Apart, documenting Iranian conjoined twins in the run-up to the surgery to separate them.

The majority of Sky Real Lives’ content is being acquired from the U.K. “We did a lot of research before we came up with Sky Real Lives and once we started talking to women in focus groups it became apparent that they prefer programming with a British take,” Gibbon explains. However, she notes, she is not ruling out international acquisitions, which can be re-voiced and rewritten to appeal to local tastes.

Original productions currently constitute a “very small percentage” of the channel’s slate, but Gibbon expects that will change over time. “We have ambitions to do more in house. We also have ambitions to do more co-productions.”

WHAT’S NEW: Gibbon says the channel will have seasonal strands like “New Year, New You” for the end of this year. “We’ll be looking quite heavily at people who’ve gone to huge lengths to transform their physical shape,” including stories of dramatic weight loss and cosmetic surgery. Gibbon is actively seeking programs that will tie into those themes.

As part of her acquisitions strategy, Gibbon says she’s looking for content that can be deployed on a variety of platforms, in particular on the Internet. “The web gives us the opportunity to talk to many more people than we will reach with the channel. We’ll have a fully integrated website on which we will have additional material from the shows. And a lot of the issues that are raised in the shows are ideal for communities and forums to discuss online afterwards. We have ambitious plans. I’d like to launch a show online that then made it to the TV channel, rather than it being the other way around. I want the website to be a really resonant magazine that will have a voice.”

WEBSITE: sky.com/reallives/

—By Mansha Daswani