BBC Three Quickies
The sketch group Muriel: Sally O’Leary, Meg Salter and Janine Harouni.
Almost half a billion views on social platforms
Biggest sketch is BBC Three’s most viewed video ever (92m views)
Winner of two Writers Guild Awards
I was hired by BBC Comedy to create a digital strategy to help them leave the public sector and eventually merge with BBC Worldwide to become BBC Studios, Comedy. A key plank to my strategy was to seek opportunities for an output deal to fund comedy sketches to distribute on social, super-charging talent relations with up-and-comers, and monetising a development slate all in one go. The result was Quickies, an 18 month commission for BBC Three, covering 140 individual sketches published largely on the channel’s Facebook page, where the total view count for the entire strand now stands at more than five hundred million. We helped advance the careers of many great comics now finding success on TV and radio including Rosie Jones, Sophie Duker, and Chris Washington.
We made all of these sketches for a shockingly low price. We did this by creating tariffs for ‘commissioned’ sketches, and sketches we produced in-house. The Quickies team was small but multi-skilled - just four of us, yet between us we produced half of the total sketches, and I commissioned and executive produced the other half. It helped that our creators threw absolutely everything into the opportunity to get a sketch onto BBC Three - they are really the heroes of the commission.
We also created an iPlayer special made up of six Quickies sketches - you can view it here - that managed to attract the same amount of views as an average episode of Famalam (around 250k). Not bad for no budget and no marketing.
Here are a few noteworthy entries with some context:
She’s Asking For It by Muriel
At the time of writing, this video is the most viewed online BBC Three video of all time, with over 93,000,000 views on Facebook alone. It was the last of a run of five sketches we made with Muriel, who are Janine Harouni, Meg Salter and Sally O’Leary, and was directed by the multi-talented Andrew Nolan.
When You’re Too Scared To Say Black by Tai Campbell
The Quickies production was actually divided into three 6 month cycles, and after the first one, I set the team quite strict targets for gender balance behind and in-front of the camera, and better representation of BAME, LGBTQ+ and disabled talent. I’m very proud to say we met these targets, and enjoyed great success with many of the resulting sketches, including this great one from writer/director Tai Campbell.
Life After Brexit by the Quickies Team
This sketch - which gave us our first really big hit - caused a bit of a stir in pro-leave publications and directly led to the production of two further sketches, one in favour of Brexit, and one that didn’t care either way (because, you know… balance). In each case, the small Quickies team had to invent, script, film and edit these from scratch. It’s a testament to how well we worked together, and how well we understood the rules of Facebook video, that they strongly resonated with audiences.
First Time At The Gym by Chris Washington
Chris Washington was already an Edinburgh Best Newcomer nominee by the time he sent us his first sketch script in 2018. We ended up making a further three, featuring the Chris and Jim characters, all of which proved wildly popular. Chris is now appearing more and more on TV in shows like House of Games, but his writing is hilarious and hopefully it won’t be too long before we see a Chris sitcom.