KI Sells Raft of Unscripted Series Around the World

Keshet International (KI) has signed a number of licensing deals for factual series originally commissioned by broadcasters in the U.K., including Prison Girls: Life Inside and Around the World by Train.

Flicker Productions’ Prison Girls: Life Inside is a raw and in-depth look into the extreme lives of women incarcerated in an American jail. It has been picked up by BNN Vara (the Netherlands), Nine Network (Australia), TVNZ (New Zealand) and A+E Networks (the U.S.), which will retitle the series locally as Behind Bars: Women Inside.

TVNZ has also acquired Around the World by Train, which sees Sir Tony Robinson take a whirlwind journey around the globe, as have SBS (Australia) and Foxtel, which has bought second window broadcast rights for both Australia and New Zealand. In addition, BBC Earth has licensed both the first and the second 6×60-minute seasons, produced by Rumpus Media and Motion Content Group, in which Robinson circumvents the planet in the opposite direction, for Poland and Africa.

ProSieben (Germany), Foxtel (Australia) and Sky (New Zealand) have all picked up both seasons of Crackit Productions’ Trucking Hell, which follows the drivers of heavy-rescue company Crouch Recovery as they keep Britain’s roads moving. Viasat World has recently licensed the first series for the Nordics, CIS and CEE.

Foxtel and Sky have also both picked up two seasons of Casualty 24/7, along with TV4 (Sweden). This factual-entertainment series, also from Crackit Productions, follows the medical team in a busy British ER to discover what’s its really like to care for over 2,000 patients every week.

Discovery Latin America has picked up Keshet Productions’ Speed Freaks for Latin America and Brazil. The series sees entrepreneur and daredevil Zef Eisenberg and his team of mechanics attempt to break the British land speed record,

Other Crackit Productions titles sold by KI include My Extreme…Life, a series of standalone documentaries following extraordinary young people as they navigate their challenging paths to adulthood, which was taken by Docs De Cologne (Germany), SBS and HOT8 (Israel); My Sexual Fantasy, which went to SBS; and the one-off My Dad the Paedophile, which has been picked up by HOT8.

Owl Power’s Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, a celebrity-led cross-country fishing trip around the U.K.’s most stunning beauty spots, has been licensed by SVT (Sweden).

Hello Halo’s River Hunters, which follows two hosts on their quest to uncover historical hidden treasure lying beneath rivers across the U.K., has also been sold to Foxtel.

Finally, Pi Productions’ four-parter Secrets of the Factories, which looks at how companies like Heinz and Kellogg’s reach their immense quotas and product demands, has been licensed to TRL (the Netherlands).

Keren Shahar, KI’s COO and president of distribution, said, “We’ve really invested in building our factual finished tape slate over the last few years in response to increased demand. We’re excited to have signed so many deals for these shows on our slate and have high hopes for new titles like Animal Ambulance, Deadliest Kids and Dom Does America too.”