Liz Gibbons, Executive Editor, BBC World Service Long Form Documentaries, will sit alongside fellow Beeb commissioners Sarah Waldron (Executive Producer) and Simon Young (Head Of History) in La Rochelle on a June 25 panel named Meet the Execs (16.00).
The BBC toppers will give Sunny Side delegates an insight into just how and why they greenlight films and programmes, as well give their perspectives on co-production and acquisitions. The moderator is Louise Rosen.
Gibbons is a former Newsnight (late-night flagship news programme, BBC2) deputy editor, and was editor of the hard-hitting Victoria Derbyshire weekday current affairs programme. So what drew Gibbons to her current role?
“It is the combination of global interest – I ran the BBC World News channel from 2020 to 2022 – and original journalism, which has always been a passion of mine. It [the job running long form docs] brings the two together in a way that really suits me,” she tells Business Doc Europe. “I have had a very varied BBC journey, but it’s a great place to end up.”
Gibbons was executive editor on the recent hit three-part television documentary, Disciples: The Cult of TB Joshua, made through BBC Africa Eye and which explored abuse and torture allegations against the founder of one of the world’s biggest evangelical churches.
That series ran on multiple African public TV networks. It is also available on the BBC’s Africa YouTube channel where it has attracted close to 5 million views.
While she points out that “the key person for help with financing and then executive-producing of documentaries from the BBC perspective is still Storyville,” Gibbons confirms that BBC World Service “sometimes works with freelance filmmakers who have the germ of an idea.”
“At the World Service, we have quite a specific remit and quite a specific need. We operate in 42 language services around the world. We have two TV news channels, Arabic and Persian. They do limited acquisitions in those languages and for those markets, where there might be audience interest,” the BBC exec explains. “Our huge priority is working with local filmmakers in the places where we have language service to ensure we are telling stories that feel like they are genuine and that they speak to the populations we try to reach in those countries.”
BBC Africa Eye, the investigate branch of the World Service, has produced dozens of investigative documentaries. It also “occasionally acquires…two to three acquisitions a year from African filmmakers.”
Recent Africa Eye pick-ups include Eat Bitter, looking at the plight of local sand diver Thomas Boa and Chinese construction manager Jianmin Luan in the Central African Republic as they strive to build themselves a better life. (The film goes out this week).
“[But] we have a network of freelancers as well as our staff across Africa that generate the stories. We work with them to make them into documentaries. They’re between half an hour and an hour – we don’t tend to do feature documentaries for that slot.”
Another relatively new Beeb initiative under Gibbons is the recently launched Global China Unit. This focuses more on short-from content looking at China’s role in the world globally – and isn’t focused on feature docs.
The BBC Persian channels occasionally take arts documentaries.
“Occasionally, we run historical documentaries as well but we are largely focusing on current affairs-driven and investigative projects – things that will make a huge impact.”
Gibbons and the World Service team sometimes work together with Sarah Waldron, Executive Producer at the BBC and who will also be on the Sunny Side panel. “Sarah [though] has a slightly different remit. She is thinking about UK audiences on our main network channels in the UK…[but] we do work together.”
There are also occasional collaborations with Storyville, for example on last year’s Inside Russia: Traitors and Heroes, produced by Mikhail Kozyrev and Daria Olevskaya and looking at the impact of the invasion of Ukraine in Russia itself. This was Bafta-nominated.
When Sunny Side invited the various BBC execs to speak on the panel this year, Gibbons and the others were keen to accept. “This is what I hope will come up in the panel – that there is opportunity for the right projects for us to take material. We do acquire material for our TV channels. I think it [the panel] is also a useful communication tool because people don’t always know quite what we are doing or what we are looking for. We can save people time if they know what we do want – and what we don’t want!”
And, no, BBC World Service isn’t just looking for completed documentaries.
“Sometimes, we work with other broadcasters or independent production companies and we get more involved in the making of things…”
Gibbons and her team work also with World Service English Audio Commissioning on “audio” docs.
“And more often than not, we will try to do multiplatform versions of the [film] projects because they are often just brilliant stories that deserve to be told in multiple formats,” she underlines.
Disciples: The Cult of TB Joshua is an example of a project that spawned a narrative podcast as well as a three-part series. “You get very different things out of the two different styles and they really complement each other,” Gibbons says of the companion versions of the same story.
Gibbons and her team will seek to establish long-standing relationships with producers and reporters and to work with them across a slate of projects. “A large part of our role is helping to build that freelance network,” she comments.
But getting docs into cinemas isn’t high on the agenda. The films BBC World Services gets behind tend to be topical and will need to run quickly – so giving a project a theatrical window may risk slowing down the process.
“It’s not something we have done yet. I wouldn’t rule out that we would do it for the right project. [But] the key thing for us is maximising audience reach on our own platforms. That is the core of what the World Service is trying to do. We will always prioritise our own platforms for the vast majority of projects that we so,” Gibbons emphasises.
